Michael Lopp's Blog, page 36
April 12, 2015
Seven Plus or Minus Three
A common question I am asked, “How big should the team be?” My immediate response: Seven plus or minus three. There is a not a lot of hard theory behind this guideline, just common sense.
To understand my reasoning, let’s do a little math. Let’s first assume you have seven folks on your team and that you spend time every week investing in each individual. At least 30 minutes for each person who reports to you via a 1:1 meeting. That’s three and a half hours – almost a half a day per week that is now properly invested in the team.
We’re going to need add a buffer for the inevitable random shit that emerges from a team on a weekly basis. I’m not talking about scheduled investment, I’m talking about the unexpected dispute that erupts between two teams, I’m talking about when Frank just quits, I’m talking about the unexpected work where you have to drop everything and immediately react. It doesn’t happen on every team every week, but when it does develop, it requires your full and immediate attention. How about 15 minutes per team member? That takes us to to guaranteed five hours and fifteen minutes now devoted to the team. This doesn’t include your staff meeting, design reviews, or other essential meetings, this is direct weekly investment in your direct reports.
Seven feels about right to me. Three quarters of one day a week to make sure folks are being heard, where you are sharing valuable context, and you are getting ahead of emerging issues. Thing is: you are kicking ass as a lead. More importantly, you’ve got seven directs and they, too, are kicking ass. You are fully and competently delegating to them and the velocity of the team is recognized as increasing. This is called success and success is always rewarded with additional responsibility and in that delightful haze of success you suddenly inherit three more teams which brings your directs to 10. Congratulations.
If we stick with our weekly investment of 45 minutes per team member, you’d jump to seven hours and thirty minutes of weekly proactive team investment, but here’s where it becomes harder. Our 15 minute random shit buffer does not scale linearly with team size, it grow more exponentially. Yes, these estimates are more art than science, but as your team grows, so does it’s complexity. Each individual and team added to your portfolio brings with it their products, personalities, and politics and that means more random shit. At 10 direct reports, I’m upping our random shit buffer to 30 minutes per person.
We’re now at 10 hours per week on team investment.
You might be able to absorb this time in your schedule. Many do. An equal amount take a look at their increasingly complicated calendar and think, you know, I could meet with my team every other week. BAM. You’re back down to five 1:1s per week at 30 minutes a pop. Two and a half hours. No problem.
Incorrect. You still have to account for the random shit buffer. Remember, this is time to react to the random shenanigans that emerge out of a team of people and not only is it guaranteed to occur, it’s your responsibility to aggressively handle these shenanigans. So two and a half hours plus another five for random shit. You’re still basically at a full day of team investment each week.
It is somewhere around this team size where leaders, especially new leaders, screw it up and to understand how they screw it up, you have to understand the relative value of the two buckets of time we’ve be allocating. You’ve got 1:1 time and you’ve got random shit time. Which of the two investments are a better investment of your time?
Your gut instinct might be that random shit time is more important because it has this sense of urgency about it. Frank is quitting. Two teams are fighting. Something urgently needs to happen and you appear to be the best person to handle this situation, so you do. Immediately. What could be a better use of your time? I’ll tell you: not letting the random shit situation occur in the first place.
High tech is in an incredible fucking hurry because we’re deathly afraid of becoming irrelevant, of being replaced, or being perceived as mediocre. As everyone is rushing around making sure that irrelevance is effectively avoided, we learn to react quickly… to everything. Here’s that response to your email at 11pm! I’ll be the first to speak at the meeting! Look at me, I am walking quickly every which way that I walk!
It is this hurry-based reactive mindset that might give you the illusion that random shit time is more important than 1:1 time, but I would argue that properly and consistently deployed 1:1 time eliminates future random shit time. Because you met three weeks ago and discussed what appeared to be a listless Frank, you moved him to a new team and he didn’t quit. Those teams are not fighting because you met with each of their leads last month and made sure each team felt heard. The proactive minutes you spend each week with your team might not contain as much energy, but they are far healthier minutes than unexpected, unhealthy, and avoidable high fructose random shit minutes.
My rules around 1:1s for direct reports are:
30 minutes (at least).
Every week.
No matter what.
While it is not the only lens to look through when designing an optimal team size, it’s my belief the moment that when it becomes a struggle to spend 30 minutes a week with each of the folks on your team, it’s time to consider your team might be too big. New managers can handle less people, experienced managers more.
Seven plus or minus three.
April 2, 2015
Introverts as Leaders (Briefly)
Introverts have two unique strengths that, I believe, can lead towards opportunities to be stronger leaders:
Introverts are professional listeners. Their natural state is to observe and gather data from the world around them as opposed to their extroverts counterparts who enjoying spending their time talking about the state of the world and all the fascinating data in the world… endlessly. This listening skill is amplified by the fact that introverts don’t much want to talk about themselves, so out of necessity they’ve developed a good conversation toolkit to get others to talk about themselves thus lessening their talking burden.
All of this listening results in the acquisition of data and all of this data results in better situational awareness. This awareness of what is going on in the immediate vicinity is amplified by the introverts deep desire to avoid interpersonal conflict. They have developed a strong early warning system around conflict amongst humans which means introverts are often aware of developing conflict well ahead of the actual conflict.
Both strengths result in a better picture of the social state amongst a group of humans. The trick for the introvert as leader is the proactive usage of that information. These strengths have been developed over years as a necessity to avoid human interaction, but in order to lead, we must ignore our instincts to run and hide from emerging conflict and rather use our well developed listening skills to not only understand what is developing, but how we’re going to lead through that distinctly uncomfortable situation.
March 29, 2015
Confidence is a feeling
It’s a state of mind. It’s the perception that you lack nothing. That you are equipped with everything you need, both now and for the future. A person confident in their social life will feel as though they lack nothing in their social life. A person with no confidence in their social life believes that they lack the prerequisite coolness to be invited to everyone’s pizza party. It’s this perception of lacking something that drives their needy, clingy, and/or bitchy behavior.
(Via Mark Manson)
March 23, 2015
Medium as Frozen Pizza
Compelling piece by Matthew Butterick on the business and design of Medium.
On Medium’s use of minimalism:
As a fan of minimalism, however, I think that term is misapplied here. Minimalism doesn’t foreclose either expressive breadth or conceptual depth. On the contrary, the minimalist program—as it initially emerged in fine art of the 20th century—has been about diverting the viewer’s attention from overt signs of authorship to the deeper purity of the ingredients.
He continues:
Still, I wouldn’t say that Medium’s homogeneous design is bad ex ante. Among web-publishing tools, I see Medium as the equivalent of a frozen pizza: not as wholesome as a meal you could make yourself, but for those without the time or motivation to cook, a potentially better option than just eating peanut butter straight from the jar.
The piece is less about typography and more about Medium’s business motivations, but the entire article is worth your time.
March 22, 2015
March 18, 2015
The Psychology of ‘No’
The sad truth is, we can be absolutely awful at making decisions that affect our long-term happiness. Recent work by psychologists has charted a set of predictable cognitive errors that lead us to mistakes like eating too much junk food, or saving too little for retirement. These quirks lead us to make similarly predictable errors when deciding where to live, how to live, how to move, and even how to build our cities.
(By Charles Montgomery via National Post)
March 16, 2015
Job interviews are hostile experiences
Those candidates got a study guide, free books, and an open invitation to proceed with the process whenever they were ready. The $80 in books we sent candidates had one of the best ROIs of any investment we made anywhere in the business. Some of our best hires couldn’t have happened without us bringing the candidate up to speed, first.
(By Thomas H. Ptacek via Quartz)
March 11, 2015
Being Data-Driven
Of course it isn’t. Almost everything changes all the time. A statistic or data point is a tiny speck floating in a sea of ever changing context. People change, attitudes and behaviors change, tastes change, the economy changes, our minds, bodies, relationships and priorities change. The Observer Effect describes how something can change just by the process of measuring it.
(By Dan Zambonini via Medium)
March 8, 2015
Things I know about a watch
Because it’s attached to you, it’s harder to drop and harder to lose.
It’s touching your skin. All the time.
Many watches are purely fashion.
Interaction with a watch is measured in seconds and rarely minutes.
Your longest interaction with your watch is during daylight savings time.
After a couple days of wearing a watch, I forget that I’m wearing it.
Some folks never take their watches off.
Watch battery life is measured in years.
We’re intrigued by watches that have complications, but mostly we use it for date and time.
A good watch is passed on from generation to generation.
Watches have never been about communication, but we’ve kind’a always wanted them to be, but I won’t be talking to my wrist. Maybe.
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