Growing with your company’s complexity.
When finishing up a difficult project, I sometimes pause to dream
about how it’ll nudge my career forward. My thinking advances
down the storyline of “If I bundle this project with a few others, mix in good team health,
add a dash of time for the flavor to deepen, and undoubtedly this
will get me to the coveted next level.”
Then I’ll take a few minutes to savor the future.
(more…)How Real Product Teams Make OKRs work: Survey Results – Mind the Product
In collaboration with NEO Culture, Mind the Product conducted a short survey on OKRs investigating their use in product teams in real companies. Now, the results are in.
In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the survey results and, if you’re a Mind the Product member you can access an extended report including analysis of all the areas covered below – go to the extended report.
(more…)Assign Problems (Not Work) to Your Teams to Build Extraordinary Products
To leverage the huge unused potential, we need to define the primary role of product managers and their collaboration with development teams quite differently. Product managers should be assigning their teams problems to solve instead of predefined work to get done. We need product managers and team leads to become experts in facilitating inclusive participatory problem-solving in their teams to build innovative products long-term, and to solve the hard problems of their businesses.
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A successful framework distills the complex, and in that synthesis, gets to a timeless insight. That’s always my aspiration, to varying degrees of success.
Here’s a running list of frameworks I’ve written on a range of topics.
Recipes to build enduring, mass-market businesses:
Product / Strategy
(more…)3 Keys to Career Success: The Pieces of PIE – Mondo Frank
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How well you do your job has very little to do with how successful you are in your professional career. Or, more precisely, how well you do your prescribed work will account for about 10% of your overall success. That’s according to Harvey Coleman in his book Empowering Yourself, The Organizational Game Revealed. Briefly stated, Coleman asserts that career success is based on the 3 key elements of Performance, Image and Exposure (a.k.a. PIE):
(more…)Keith Adams worked on kernels at VM Ware. Then virtual machines. Then search performance at Facebook. Then the HHVM implementation of PHP. Then machine
Keith Adams worked on kernels at VM Ware. Then virtual machines. Then search performance at Facebook. Then the HHVM implementation of PHP. Then machine learning. Now he’s Chief Architect at Slack. In between he worked on hundreds of little projects that lasted hours or days or weeks. Keith is a Paint Drip Person.
(more…)The Pyramid of Clarity: A Way to Achieve Strategic Alignment
By
How do you get your company to produce great results? This can be hard, even if your company is comprised of smart, well-intentioned people. It’s hard to get everyone aligned in the same direction, and it’s even harder to get everyone to continue running in the same direction.
Part of the challenge is keeping sight of the forest for the trees. Most people spend the majority of their time executing on day-to-day work, so it’s easy to get caught up in daily details and lose sight of the bigger picture. This is a dangerous mistake because it can lead to inadvertently optimizing for the wrong goal.
(more…)Jeffrey Paul: Your Computer Isn’t Yours
It’s here. It happened. Did you notice?
I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about.
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.
(more…)Checked in at Costco.
Nothing stops us from visiting this place. Apparently. — with erika
39.7898409-105.0825361
Checked in at Denver Botanic Gardens.
Things are looking a bit dead, but still love this place — with erika
39.7317459-104.960289
How to Structure Teams for Building Better Software Products
Matt Lane
Jun 25, 2020 · 8 min read
Book by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton
The team topology approach treats humans and technology as a single sociotechnical ecosystem, and thus it takes a team-sized architecture approach (people first) rather than a technology-first approach, e.g., the monolith vs microservices debate. NOTE: If you have microservices but are still waiting to do…
Good Decision-Making Depends on an ‘Archer’s Mindset’
Photo: hobo_018/Getty Images
Most decisions are ultimately a guess. You can’t be certain that anything you do will lead to a specific outcome, and you can’t know the exact likelihood of any outcome at all. Part of becoming a better decision-maker is shifting your mindset about guessing.
Checked in at Zoka’s.
Been a while since I dropped in here. Felt like I should celebrate Biden/Harris.
39.4075594-105.3158132
Memento mori (Latin ‘remember that you [have to] die’) is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. – Wikipedia
When you’re young and healthy, it’s understandable to feel invincible and for death to be an abstract concept, either happening to those belonging to earlier generations or the unlucky. At some point, we all come to realize that we are actually mortal; when people close to us die we are reminded of mortality, but I didn’t realize how differently it would feel when faced with my own. Surviving a heart attack, having surgery, and making the necessary adjustments to my life has made an already unusual 2020 even more poignant.
(more…)Checked in at North Table Mountain Park.
Needed a ride today, so cut out early.
39.7815012-105.2245574
Managers: what do you do when your teammate shares their grief? | Lara Hogan
Originally posted Oct 29, 2020
Most of us aren’t taught how to respond when someone shares with us a really heavy piece of information.
My mom is a pastor, so growing up, I watched her model how to have tough conversations about grief, loneliness, and despair. Though I haven’t always gotten it right, this informal education helped me navigate conversations with direct reports as they shared tough news (e.g. a parent dying, miscarriage, divorce, or needing to leave the country). These days it’s helped me more and more with friends who are processing old trauma, and new grief.
(more…)Checked in at West Mag Trailhead.
39.9473132-105.5169941
Checked in at Summer White House.
39.6403391-105.2184838
The Myth Of the Grand Unified UX Metric
In 2003, The Harvard Business Review published an article by a consultant named Fred Reichheld, called The One Number You Need to Grow. In this article, Fred described how asking a single question, on a numeric scale, could predict customer loyalty and, subsequently, business success. He called his measure the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Though lots of businesses still use it, it turns out that the Net Promoter Score doesn’t predict either loyalty or business success. By itself, the score proves to not be any more useful than following the horoscope in the daily newspaper.
(more…)A Navy SEAL, a Quadcopter, and a Quest to Save Lives in Combat
On the battlefield, any doorway can be a death trap. A special ops vet, and his businessman brother, have built an AI to solve that problem.
Fifteen years ago, when I returned home after fighting in Iraq, a friend asked me to describe the bravest thing I saw anyone do. I had led a Marine platoon in the Second Battle of Fallujah, in 2004, and had seen plenty of heroism—Marines dragging their wounded off machine-gun-swept streets, or fighting room to room to recover a comrade’s body. But none of these compared to the cumulative heroism of the 19- and 20-year-old infantrymen who placed their bodies across that fatal funnel—a doorway with a potential enemy inside—every day. Clearing the enemy from the city, house by house, was a game of Russian roulette played on a grand scale. You never knew who might be waiting on the other side of the door.
(more…)Netflix’s ‘Keeper Test’ and Why You Need It | Lorne Rubis
Key Point: I was revisiting the now famous set of slides developed by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and then (2012) Netflix chief talent officer, Patty McCord. The Netflix “people philosophy” was posted on the web for anyone to read. Over five million people have now viewed the principles behind Netflix culture and HR strategy. The PowerPoint itself is without any “whiz bang.” In fact, by presentation standards, it’s lousy. It went viral primarily based on the merits of the slide content and challenge to much conventional thinking regarding people and culture.
(more…)Collaborative Single Player Mode
The Product Hunt engineering team has always been remote and it’s surprisingly small for all the features and products we are shipping. One of our “secret” weapon for this is what we call “collaborative single-player mode”.
The single-player mode was something I heard for the first time from Andreas Klinger, the previous CTO of Product Hunt. He often talks about it.
The core of the idea is simple – everyone should be able to execute without depending on other people. Especially in a remote environment, when people work at different times, this is essential.
(more…)Early Work
October 2020
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work
is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an
irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on
where they don’t seem very impressive, even to their creators. You
have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies
beyond. But many people don’t. Most people don’t even reach the
(more…)How a one line change decreased our build times by 99%
Pinterest Engineering
Oct 23 · 3 min read
Urvashi Reddy | Software Engineer, Engineering Productivity Team
Adam Berry | Tech Lead, Engineering Productivity Team
Rui Li | Software Engineer, Engineering Productivity Team
The Engineering Productivity team at Pinterest came across a small change that had a large impact in reducing build times across pipelines. We found that setting the refspec option during git fetch reduced our build times by 99%.
(more…)The Days Are Long but the Decades Are Short
I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I’d figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I’m somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of my answer:
Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances. Don’t lose touch with old friends. Occasionally stay up until the sun rises talking to people. Have parties.
(more…)The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters
The decisions we spend the most time on are rarely the most important ones. Not all decisions need the same process. Sometimes, trying to impose the same process on all decisions leads to difficulty identifying which ones are most important, bogging us down and stressing us out.
I remember once struggling at the intelligence agency shortly after I received a promotion. I was being asked to make too many decisions. I had no way to sort through them to figure out which ones mattered, and which ones were inconsequential.
(more…)A Framework for Making Smarter Decisions and Fewer Errors
Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make effective decisions.
The decision-making principles in this article aren’t pulled out of thin air. They’re the result of many years of experience and experimentation. They draw upon the combined expertise of some of history’s deepest thinkers. They summarize the core insights and skills from influential books on decision-making.
(more…)11 Essential Communication Skills for the Workplace
You probably believe you’re a decent communicator. You know how to fire off an email or a Slack message; you smile and nod when your colleague is talking; you have a firm handshake (remember those?).
Then again, similar to how 73% of people think they’re above-average drivers (which is, of course, a mathematical impossibility), many of us are likely over-estimating our abilities when it comes to communicating.
(more…)In many organizations today there is one thing that almost always is true: there
are too many things done in parallel, there is too much work-in-progress,
everyone is busy but nothing gets done. If this is so ubiquitous why is no one
doing anything about it? Are people not aware or do they not know how to fix it?
This is so predominant, that it almost is too easy to just claim:
(more…)A Manifesto for Small Teams Doing Important Work
We are always under tight deadlines, because time is our most valuable asset.
If you make a promise, set a date. No date, no promise.
If you set a date, meet it.
If you can’t make a date, tell us early and often. Plan B well prepared is a better strategy than hope.
Clean up your own mess.
Clean up other people’s messes.
(more…)Groups Search for Consensus, Individuals Search for Truth
Naval: What’s considered to be true is fought over. Individuals search for truth but groups search for consensus—and society is the largest group. So the biggest problem we run into is this: What society wants for you is not always what’s good for you.
Even smart people go along with society’s lies
Even smart, critical thinkers go along with many of society’s truths, knowing deep down they are lies.
(more…)Working With Cross Functional Teams: Master Effective Collaboration in the Workplace
As I played multiple roles in cross functional teams over years – developer on a small part of the product to leading engineering teams to guidance in a leadership role, I experienced feelings of frustration, anger, disappointment and at times even helplessness. With continued focus on cross functional team collaboration in every organisation, I failed to understand why there’s so little investment in setting up these teams for success.
(more…)This essay was co-authored by Rob Litterst and Nathan Baschez
“What do we do with Apple,” Jim Cramer barked, sleeves rolled above his elbows, “now that it’s become one of the most hated stocks around?”
It was January 2019, and AAPL was in free fall. The main concern was the iPhone. Growth seemed to be slowing, and investors were panicked.
Shares cost just $150 — 35% down from the all-time high they hit a few months prior. Things were so bad that Ben Thompson published an article that week titled “Apple’s Errors” and led with this chart:
(more…)Four Vital Signs of SaaS | Scale Venture Partners
SaaS metrics should be to a management team what patient vital signs are to an emergency room doctor: a simple set of universally understood numbers that allow a doctor to quickly know how ill a patient is and what needs fixing first.
Heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature are the big four vital signs in the ER. Everyone knows what they are, what they mean, and what good and bad looks like. When a patient is wheeled in, the doctor does not start by asking the EMT, “How exactly are we defining heart rate?” This shared understanding allows for rapid evaluation then fast, focused action.
(more…)At Amplitude, I facilitate lots of workshops. Many of these workshops center around deciding what to measure. This starts, of course, with asking good questions. Good questions help teams focus their measurement/telemetry efforts, and increase the likelihood that what they measure will enable valuable insights. A couple of well chosen events and event properties beat out a firehose of data and/or an autotrack solution any day.
In this post, I’d like to share some helpful approaches to eliciting impactful questions so that your team can make better decisions about what to measure. This takes practice, but better question asking is within any team’s reach.
(more…)Dropbox has always prioritized creativity and collaboration as key to building a thriving business, and our office spaces were designed for it. Though we make software that helps people work from anywhere, most of our employees came to an office every day.
This year’s abrupt shift to remote work was jarring for us, along with everyone else. But we’re fortunate that our product helped us transition pretty seamlessly, and that it helped others too—we’ve seen increased adoption and usage this year. As virtually all work becomes digital, organizing all your team’s content in one place has never felt so important.
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Checked in at Yum Yum Spice.
Fooooood. Not doing dine-in at all. Take out only. — with erika
39.6795024-104.9597084
What’s Luck Got to Do With It? (Postmortems)
One element I’ve seen repeatedly is reference to “How did we get lucky in this incident?” It’s an aspect of incidents some like to discuss, because I also hear it in conversations and stories about incidents: “Oh man, we were so lucky that Beth happened to be on-call that particular night!”
But I’ve always wondered: why do people bother asking this question? What’s the goal of discussing what amounts to the finer points of randomness and “noise” in a complex socio-technical system? Unless you happen to be in possession of one of those probability-altering devices from the second season of Deep Space Nine, it seems like a pretty pointless digression.
(more…)How narcissistic leaders infect their organizations’ cultures | Haas News | Berkeley Haas
Image credit: Olivier Le Moal for iStock
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? The answer: not the organizations led by narcissists.
A new paper by Berkeley Haas Prof. Jennifer Chatman and colleagues shows not only the profound impact narcissistic leaders have on their organizations, but also the long-lasting damage they inflict. Like carriers of a virus, narcissistic leaders “infect” the very cultures of their organizations, the researchers found, leading to dramatically lower levels of collaboration and integrity at all levels—even after they are gone.
(more…)Checked in at 11 Mile Reservoir.
38.9478044-105.5008087
Cindy Sridharan
Jul 12 · 9 min read
I recently read an excellent article in the Amazon Builder’s Library by Clare Liguori which goes into great detail about AWS’s CI/CD architecture. It’s a truly brilliant post and I recommend everyone interested in CI/CD infrastructures read the article. The article covers the gamut from unit testing to integration testing (in production) to staged rollouts in “waves” to automated rollbacks. I guarantee there’s something valuable you’ll learn from the article even if you’re not building the largest distributed systems in the world like AWS does.
(more…)What Working At Stripe Has Been Like | Kalzumeus Software
I joined Stripe four years ago to make starting an Internet business easier, mostly by work on Stripe Atlas. This has been a series of adjustments for me: to working as an employee, to experiencing hypergrowth, to being closer to the Silicon Valley culture, and to some of the challenges in balancing career and other commitments during my life stage and the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
(more…)Checked in at A.F. Williams University Physicians.
39.7603891-104.9009681
How to take meeting notes – Beyond Bare Hands
Hi friend,
Long time no chat. I’ve spent August figuring out how learning works and how we can apply spatial cognition and computers to improve how we learn. And I’ve got some pretty exciting stuff coming out in the next few weeks. Spoiler: if you’ve ever tried learning how to program but failed miserably, you’ll appreciate this even more.
But today I want to talk memory.
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Uma Chingunde
Oct 3 · 5 min read
The team I support has traditionally done offsites twice a year. We are very distributed and find it useful to spend time together in the same location as a team at a planned cadence. This is important to get to know each other socially, plan work, and have some planning and strategy conversations. We usually do them in the summer as a team and the entire company does a large gathering in the winter. Due to Covid this year’s plan was delayed but after some thought we decided to do a “remote offsite”. I shared our experience via a Twitter thread and got questions around logistics so I’m sharing notes on what worked for us. A lot of these ideas came from the entire team, particularly my stellar staff team which is the managers and engineers who report directly to me.
(more…)Unlock Your Productivity by Taking Better Notes
As managers, we have to multitask a lot. Switching between meetings, random conversations, one on ones, status updates, planning, presentations all the time. It feels overwhelming and exhausting. Keeping everything organized is the key to be productive and supporting your team. Context switching is draining your energy and focus. It gets even worse if you don’t have a system that helps you arrange everything in order, prioritized with clear action items.
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Checked in at Elevation Hotel & Spa.
Take out banquet and cocktails back on my room. Could be a lot worse.
38.899347-106.9663892
Checked in at The Dogwood Cocktail Cabin.
I absolutely love this place. Only just caught it before their off season!
38.8702125-106.9860392
Coinbase is a mission focused company
Sep 27 · 8 min read
There have been a lot of difficult events in the world this year: a global pandemic, shelter in place, social unrest, widespread protests and riots, and west coast wildfires. On top of that we have a contentious U.S. election on the horizon.
Everyone is asking the question about how companies should engage in broader societal issues during these difficult times, while keeping their teams united and focused on the mission. Coinbase has had its own challenges here, including employee walkouts. I decided to share publicly how I’m addressing this in case it helps others navigate a path through these challenging times.
(more…)A Primer on Engineering Delivery Metrics
Before joining Stripe, I had the opportunity to build, grow, and lead the Splice engineering organization for almost four years (yes, still I mix up the names). The most challenging engineering problem I’ve had to tackle so far has been working on accelerating software delivery in an organization that grew from 5 to 55+ engineers in my first 18 months. As the Splice team expanded, our ability to deliver software ground to a halt. The processes that worked when the company was small couldn’t support the explosive growth, and we needed to find a way to get back on track. By focusing on delivery metrics, we were able to increase the rate of software delivery drastically, and you don’t have to take my word for it, let’s look at a graph of cycle time (or delivery lead time) from May 2018 to April 2019.
(more…)How exclusion and trauma impact workforces
As an epigenetic and executive coach to some of the world’s largest technology companies, I have dedicated my career to understanding the biology of belonging and the toxic, pervasive effects of exclusion in the workplace.
In the past five years, there has been a significant push for inclusion in the workplace, encouraging leaders to absorb an abundance of programming on how to build inclusive cultures, teams, and brands. But to build anything “inclusively,” we must first saliently understand where we are excluding. We need to focus on the insidious ways in which we permit exclusion in our corporate culture and commit to behaving and thinking differently.
(more…)How to Prioritize Your Company’s Projects
Every organization needs what I call a “hierarchy of purpose.” Without one, it is almost impossible to prioritize effectively.
When I first joined BNP Paribas Fortis, for example, two younger and more dynamic banks had just overtaken us. Although we had been a market leader for many years, our new products had been launched several months later than the competition — in fact, our time to market had doubled over the previous three years. Behind that problem was a deeper one: We had more than 100 large projects (each worth over 500,000 euros) under way. No one had a clear view of the status of those investments, or even the anticipated benefits. The bank was using a project management tool, but the lack of discipline in keeping it up to date made it largely fruitless. Capacity, not strategy, was determining which projects launched and when. If people were available, the project was launched. If not, it stalled or was killed.
(more…)Building Great Engineering Teams
If you have ever come across The Pragmatic Engineer, you probably know the man behind it, Gergely Orosz. More than a simple blog, or newsletter, it is a treasure trove of knowledge on the ins and outs of Engineering, Engineering Management and, in general, all things leadership in tech. As the website name implies, Gergely is all about pragmatism and helping engineering leaders develop themselves, while delivering massive value to their companies and those around them.
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Camille Fournier
Sep 22 · 5 min read
Have you ever worked on a team that felt like it was just stuck in a rut? Somehow things were always just one fix away from improving: the next project, the next quarter, the next hire, this would turn the situation around. And yet these projects came, the quarters went by, new people were hired and joined and left and nothing ever really improved. It’s a sadly common situation, and one of the few that I believe can be laid squarely at the feet of the team’s manager.
(more…)Checked in at Alderfer/Three Sisters Park.
39.6233801-105.3464171
10 tips for growing a globally distributed engineering team
Jason Smale
Dec 27, 2019 · 14 min read
Zendesk has built out a global engineering team spread across four continents, nine countries and 10 cities around the world. We started the journey relatively early in our company’s life, it’s been difficult, and we’ve learned lessons along the way. Many of the things we got right, came from key people who had run global teams before (and knew the mistakes they didn’t want to repeat). Many of the things we got wrong, were based on assumptions that Zendesk would work as another business did. We’ve learned there’s no perfect strategy for expanding beyond head office, but we have been able to refine down some of the core beliefs that anchor us. These seem applicable beyond Zendesk, so I wanted to share. To do that, it’s worth spending a little time talking about how Zendesk grew up, so you can understand the incremental decisions we made to get to where we are today.
(more…)Thoughts on Managerial Practices. Preface | by Toby Murdock | Aug, 2020 | Medium
Photo by Brian Scott on Unsplash
Toby Murdock
Aug 28 · 14 min read
This document expresses my thoughts on best managerial practices to drive business success based upon my experience in many organizations and in particular upon my tenure as CEO of Kapost. There are many drivers of business success — function-specific practices, external strategy decisions, culture, organizational health, etc. By managerial practices I refer to internal practices that are applicable across functions. In defining success I include the various perspectives of the many stakeholders involved: customers, shareholders and colleagues. Many of these concepts I learned the hard way, i.e. by doing the opposite. My own practice of the concepts is a work in progress.
(more…)Written Communication Is Remote Work Super Power
Update: An interesting discussion around this started in hacker news
The remote work environment is different from the office. Different environments call for different communication systems. A communication system that is adapted to the remote work reality can unlock amazing benefits: (even) better productivity, a competitive advantage in the long run and much a better work-life balance on top of it all.
Asynchronous written communication is the tool best suited for remote work. We are so used to talking to each other in the office, expecting immediate responses in work chat, and having meetings all day, that we tried to replicate that at home with zoom and slack.
(more…)The traits of good remote leaders · Intense Minimalism
A study based on 770 people over six months analyzed which sets of traits are more effective at different levels of remoteness, thus helping us answering the question of what are the differences between remote leads and in-person leads that make them successful? I’ve distilled two sets of traits from the paper.
In-person leads are defined by matching and projecting the idea of leadership to the people in the team (projecting “being”).
These are their traits:
A Quick Primer on the Rule of 40 | Scale Venture Partners
There is an expansive universe of SaaS metrics out there. Which is great for tracking performance internally, as it allows a company to customize metrics to reflect its operating realities. But what if you want to compare performance between companies? That’s when the lack of standard definitions becomes a problem. Just look at how many ways customer retention is calculated.
(more…)The Passion Economy and the Future of Work
The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month. And teachers across the US are bringing in thousands of dollars a month teaching live, virtual classes on Outschool and Juni Learning.
These stories are indicative of a larger trend: call it the “creator stack” or the “enterprization of consumer.” Whereas previously, the biggest online labor marketplaces flattened the individuality of workers, new platforms allow anyone to monetize unique skills. Gig work isn’t going anywhere—but there are now more ways to capitalize on creativity. Users can now build audiences at scale and turn their passions into livelihoods, whether that’s playing video games or producing video content. This has huge implications for entrepreneurship and what we’ll think of as a “job” in the future.
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Checked in at Creekside Mountain Bike Loop.
Looking forward to what promises to be a beautiful ride!
39.9259592-105.8588833
Things to Know About Engineering Levels
This twitter thread seemed to strike a chord with people, rather astonishingly so. I am transcribing parts of it for the sake of longevity and findability.
I keep talking to engineers who are antsy to get to senior and beyond, frustrated that it is taking so long. And I’ve encountered one very, very widespread blind spot around leveling
Which is …✨not every opportunity exists✨at every company✨at every time.✨
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Since Shape Up came out, many people asked some version of this question:
I understand you make bets six weeks at a time. But how do you plan in the longer term? Don’t you have some kind of a roadmap?
The short answer is: no. We don’t have roadmaps. We think about what to do at the timescale larger than single bets, but we do it in a different way.
(more…)Using Drones to Disrupt the Status Quo
From Standing Rock to Syria, drones are being used to hold the powerful to account. Let’s keep it that way.
Drone-based digital imagery can be used to better estimate the size of large crowds. Source: author image
By: Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
The civil rights movement and Moore’s law are colliding to transform politics. On the street, smartphone technology is being used to document social life as never before, putting power into the hands of the public and making eyewitnesses of us all.
(more…)An Open Letter to Matt Mullenweg: What folks often get wrong about Jamstack
Richard MacManus had an interesting email exchange with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress and co-founder/CEO of Automattic, about the Jamstack. It resulted in an Aug 31, 2020, writeup in TheNewStack. I have a deep appreciation for Matt’s role in shaping web publishing but also feel that his points (e.g. “JAMstack is a regression for the vast majority of the people adopting it”) are a bit misleading. Matt chooses to compare a modern architecture like the Jamstack to a monolithic product like WordPress. I don’t expect a recently popularized architecture to provide the tailored features that a 15-year-old product has. We should be asking whether Jamstack is a better architecture than LAMP and what gaps currently exist with products and solutions built on top of the Jamstack.
(more…)When a Jump Down to a Smaller Scope is a Jump up in Maturity and Wisdom – Plato
In 2016 I was leading supply growth with four subteams totaling 35 people, which was a pretty large scope. As a part of a reorganization, I was asked to join a much smaller team of only a PM and one and a half engineer (one person being part-time). It was a humbling moment — I went down in scope in terms of reports but that helped me understand what really matters and allowed me to work in a high leverage area of the company. Eventually, the scope increased and the team became larger, but learning what I did was far more important.
(more…)Can Engineering Productivity Be Measured?
I follow you on Twitter and read your blog. I particularly enjoy this post: https://charity.wtf/2019/05/01/friday-deploy-freezes-are-exactly-like-murdering-puppies/ I’m reaching out looking for some guidance.
I work as an engineering manager for a company whose non-technology leadership insists there has to be a way to measure the individual productivity of a software engineer. I have the opposite belief. I don’t believe you can measure the productivity of “professional” careers, or thought workers (ex: how do measure productivity of a doctor, lawyer, or chemist?).
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When Your Coworker Does Great Work, Tell Their Manager
I’ve been thinking recently about anti-racism and what it looks like to support
colleagues from underrepresented groups at work. The other day someone in a
Slack group made an offhand comment that they’d sent a message to an engineer’s
manager to say that the engineer was doing exceptional work.
I think telling someone’s manager they’re doing great work is a pretty common
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Stephen Olmstead is the Chief of Staff at the fully remote company inVision, the well-known digital product design platform. As the right-hand to the inVision CEO he takes part in a lot of parts of a well-working fully distributed remote-first company. What it took to grow a fully distributed business over almost a decade and how this all changes in the times of COVID-19 in our interview.
(more…)I used to have Wink set up, managing some smart home devices throughout our house. I liked it because the app UI was quite nicely done, and it seemed to be compatible with “everything”. I had even upgraded from their version 1 hub, to the version 2. But then a few months ago they decided (somewhat out of the blue) that they were going to start charging a subscription fee. Coupled with some recent outages and frequent command delays, and it was the “motivation” I needed to invest in a Home Assistant system, and move away from Wink entirely.
(more…)The surprising traits of good remote leaders – BBC Worklife
Strong in-person leadership skills don’t necessarily translate to being a good virtual leader. Instead, organisation and competency reign supreme. F
Fifteen years ago, Steven Charlier, chair of management at Georgia Southern University in the US, had a hunch that in-person charisma and leadership skills don’t translate virtually. “Before I became an academic, I worked for IBM for a number of years on a lot of virtual teams,” he says. “I had a boss who was a wonderful guy and great manager, and he drove me crazy trying to communicate. He was incredibly slow and unresponsive.”
(more…)If Management Isn’t a Promotion, the Engineering Isn’t a Demotion
I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:
(I originally titled this article “Julian Dunn and the Case of the Bad Manager”, lol)
God, YES. This is something that has been on my queue of “topics to write about” for so long, and I haven’t because it’s just too big (and sometimes I tell myself, optimistically, it’s just too obvious?).
(more…)Checked in at REI.
39.755622-105.009853
Checked in at Centennial Cone Park.
39.7497555-105.383095
Useful randomness & how we play
This week we uncovered an assorted collection of signals that focus on how randomness can be used to Useful randomness & how we play
By Ethical Futures Lab • Issue #30 • View online
This week we uncovered an assorted collection of signals that focus on how randomness can be used to obscure and inspire, and how tech breakthroughs are changing how we play with machines. Save some time to poke around at beautiful devices from Soviet history and to draw lots of very wrong cats. —Alexis & Matt
(more…)Photography is a hobby for me. As a novice photographer, I believed the camera makes the photo. Whenever I met a fellow hobby photographer, I would discuss things related to photography, but mostly would gravitate to cameras. That was until I stumbled on Sephi. He shoots exquisite photos on an iPhone, debunking the myth that the “camera makes the photo.”
Camera, lenses, bags, and filters are the visible parts of photography, and they are easy to debate, discuss, and dissect. Learning the fundamentals of lighting, composition, and creativity is the hardest, so many photographers are not interested in them.
(more…)Checked in at Spangalang Brewery.
Picking up our monthly beer club… and some extra — with erika
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Checked in at Little Scraggy TH.
39.3449083-105.2574834
Independence, Autonomy, and Too Many Small Teams
“The two pizza team” paradigm has become really popular in the context of organizing software teams. The idea is to have small, self-reliant teams working independently to solve problems. The “two-pizza” refers to the guidance to keep the team small enough that we need not order more than two pizzas to feed them.
These teams are all around us today, but we are not seeing the kind of productivity or shipping velocity that we expected to see. Most developers, especially in larger organizations, complain about meetings, the burden of communication, the slow pace of change etc. Startups often sell themselves to potential candidates by touting their agility. But why should larger companies be slow if everyone is using the same “empowered team”/”autonomous team” model for organizing themselves?
(more…)How to Spot and Magnify the Powers of Your Engineering Superheroes
It may not be instinctual to link director Christopher Nolan and Looker founder Lloyd Tabb, but the two might view the world through a shared lens. A serial entrepreneur, Tabb has assembled development teams for his startups by classifying engineers by their superhero personas, rather than by standard roles. As Nolan created a reality that hinges on the counterbalance of heroes and antiheroes in The Dark Knight Trilogy, so does Tabb with his engineering team.
(more…)Why Johnny Won’t Upgrade · Jacques Mattheij
Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or so they thought) re-configuration of computing hardware to adapt it to different problems. This was soon followed by papertape, then the punched card deck, a stack of paper cards that contained the program code in a series of holes punched into the paper. Special readers and writers took care of reading, ordering and punching the cards. Woe to you if you dropped a deck of such cards or if your reader jammed or you spilled coffee all over a deck. (From personal experience: if you don’t immediately copy such a deck; within 10 minutes or so the cards will swell to the point that the reader will jam, this will not make your boss happy.) That principle plus miniaturization caused a quick succession of hardware based software distribution models culminating in ROM cartriges, a physical device that you buy which contains the program.
(more…)Skydio Engagement and Responsible Use Principles
Our mission is to make the world more productive, creative, and safe with autonomous flight.
We consider the holistic impact our products have on communities and countries. Our focus is on advancing our mission to make the world more productive, creative, and safe. We are shaped by core values of accountability, transparency, and the protection of privacy and civil liberties. Informed by these values, we seek positive impact. This also requires us to proactively understand and mitigate potential misuse.
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