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May 3 - August 3, 2022
In information theory, information is defined as, roughly, the degree to which one’s uncertainty is reduced when they receive it.
As your team places more trust in you, you’ll find yourself cc’d on more emails and drawn into more conversations.
Managers level up when they successfully widen their sphere of influence, so you need to learn how to lead more when you can’t simply do more.
Share openly what your responsibilities and goals are, the outcomes that you are choosing to prioritize, and the changes that you’ll make. Tell your stakeholders clearly what has been delegated, deprioritized, or simply won’t get done.
Engineers aren’t measured on the number of lines they write, it’s all about the business value. Providing the context in which they are operating is the most effective way to help them increase their value to the business and support their personal development.
By being a context provider, you can enable your team to show you their expertise. I’m a firm believer that the best people to make decisions are those closest to the problem. By giving context to the engineers on your team, you’re setting them up for success and future development.
In the absence of an actual business problem we’re trying to solve, it’s hard to actually measure the value of what we’ve done.
Values are a person’s principles or standards of behavior.
Abilities are the things that come easy to people. Their inherent talents.
Breaking down the scope of projects to help your team ship frequently. An eye for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), for sequencing work, and for predicting likely risks and bottlenecks for project completion
Balancing product delivery with sustainable engineering so that you don’t end up with code that can’t be maintained in the future.
to figure out what is important and prioritize it.
inputs to our funnel (yes, ultimately recruiting is a sales effort)
If we want people straight out of college, we should have an internship program with a local university. If we want Java programmers, we need to be involved in the Java community. Conferences and meetups are great for this. We want to build the relationships ahead of time, not at the very last moment when they are called for.
When your effort enables and amplifies other people’s work, you can be described as a multiplier, and your work exerts leverage.
Develop a tool, process, or method that makes your colleagues’, as well as your own, work more efficient.
Generalize the root cause of an issue not only to prevent recurrence of the same problem, but an entire class of related problems,
When you learn, share your insight with others,
the ability to speak at any level and for any length of time (with planning) requires both mastery of the material and the communication mode.
Be ready to dive deep because some leaders like asking chained sequences of questions.
following an executive summary–first style, with a Highlights and Actions structure, permit the rapid digestion of the most salient points while at the same time allowing the reader an easy decision of whether to read on.
As a manager, one of your many responsibilities is to not allow SPOFs (single points of failure) to exist in the system or on the team. Long before you need to ask someone to leave or someone decides that they want to leave, you should be thinking about succession plans.
Here’s the thing about the “vision” problem: it’s a comfortable one. No one on the team feels threatened by it, because it’s largely someone else’s problem.
Are teams delivering? Are projects drifting on and on with no end in sight? Are we doing things because they are interesting or because they are valuable?
Take stock of all ongoing projects as well as the purpose and timeline for each of those projects. Clearly define the scope of upcoming milestones in every current (and new) project. Articulate the current priorities of the team, the purposes of those priorities, and the rationale behind making them priorities. Determine timeframes that you can predict (e.g., we are focused on X through the end of Q4) and highlight parallel work that will determine what comes next. Make sure project status is visible and that teams have visibility into each other’s work (e.g., standup meetings).
Perhaps you have teams that are working on too many disparate things
How do you stop checking off requests one by one and take a more strategic approach instead? What kind of help do you need to do that?
Perhaps you need to give some people clear feedback about where they’re falling short, and if that doesn’t work, start the process of letting them go.
“What do I do first?” Answering this question is a balance between impact and time. The highest impact things you can do will likely take longer, but there are usually several relatively impactful things that won’t take too much time. If you’re new, you’ll also have to balance building trust and demonstrating impact.
Managers often miss one of their employees’ core intrinsic motivators: clearly identifying their growth paths.
What do you like or hate doing? What are you good at? How do you measure up to your job level, and where could you improve to meet or exceed expectations?
What motivates you?/What are your values?
What demotivates you?/What don’t you want to do?
What are your strengths? Be generous with yourself; tell me all of the awesome qualities you bring to work. Start by thinking of the things that you like (from above) that you’re good at.
What are your goals? What are the results you want to see by this time next year? Are there specific technical or business skills that you want to learn?
What’s our concrete action plan for getting you there? These are concrete specifics of how to reach those goals. They can include education/training opportunities, projects you’re interested in leading or working on, relationships you want to build, etc.
every leader in an organization is following someone,
two axes: the degree of support a follower gives a leader and the degree to which the follower is willing to question or challenge the leader’s behavior or policies. These axes give rise to four distinct follower styles: Resources display low support and low challenge. They do what is requested of them, but little more. They’re just trying to get by and do just enough to retain their position. Implementers demonstrate high support but low challenge. They take orders and don’t ask questions. It’s easy to love this type of follower because they just get things done. The downside is that they
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When we think probabilistically, we have real power
The result of a Monte Carlo simulation is a range of outcomes, with a percentage confidence at each. This allows us planning flexibility based on risk tolerance: for a very conservative, risk-averse need, we would use the 95th percentile,
Execution: how individuals work Tactics: how teams work and what enables them to work together Strategy: how a part of the organization delivers Mission: what the entire organization is setting out to do Or: Execution: today/this week Tactics: this month/this quarter Strategy: next quarter/this year Mission: indefinite
I finally realized that professionals aren’t content with generalities or vague requirements. They stop and ask for specifics, even at the risk of looking dumb.
Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture.
Learning-oriented cultures look forward to and eagerly participate in reviews.
If shipping is one of your values, center it in in your rituals. Do not present work at wins that’s almost done, almost done waiting for a PR, will be merged to master next, is merged to master but hasn’t been deployed. Wins need to align with your values.
Invite the CEO to wins.
Have an alternative method for playing; for example, show a win or answer a weekly “icebreaker”-like question.
The system that gets your code from your engineers to the customer is the most crucial piece of engineering tooling you’ll build — ever. The capabilities, quality, and performance of your deployment system directly correlate to the speed to market of your product, both in generating value and addressing user feedback and issues. Not only this, your deployment frequency and outcomes represent one of the (rare) early measurements of engineering velocity and quality.
What’s a bit scary to contemplate is that they’re overwhelmed by work generated from processes that they themselves were heavily involved in designing.
Almost every bad process I’ve encountered has had the same problem: the problem statement is wrong. At best this leads to inert processes that solve scenarios that don’t exist; at worst they’re overactive, causing
