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):

Paint Drip People

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.

The Pyramid of Clarity: A Way to Achieve Strategic Alignment

Leading with clarity

By

& Jennifer Nan

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.

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.

How to Structure Teams for Building Better Software Products

Team Topologies Book Summary

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’

A professional poker player’s advice for optimizing outcomes

#### Annie Duke

Oct 16·4 min read

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.

Memento Mori — i4design

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.

Managers: what do you do when your teammate shares their grief? | Lara Hogan

Managers: what do you do when your teammate shares their grief?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Early Work

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

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%.

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:

1. 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.

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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.

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.

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.

Limiting Work in Progress

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:

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.

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.

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.

healthOS

This essay was co-authored by Rob Litterst and Nathan Baschez

1

“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:

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.

Asking Better Questions

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.

Dropbox goes Virtual First

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.

What’s Luck Got to Do With It? (Postmortems)

October 6, 2020

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.

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.

Post-Commit Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Planning a remote offsite. The team I support has traditionally… | by Uma Chingunde | Oct, 2020 | Medium

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.

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.

Coinbase is a mission focused company

Brian Armstrong Follow

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.

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.

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.

How to Prioritize Your Company’s Projects

Leer en español

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.

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.

The Management Flywheel

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.

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.

Thoughts on Managerial Practices. Preface | by Toby Murdock | Aug, 2020 | Medium

Photo by Brian Scott on Unsplash

Toby Murdock Aug 28 · 14 min read

Preface

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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Options, Not Roadmaps

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.

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.