Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.

Disasterpiece Theater: Slack’s process for approachable Chaos Engineering

Richard Crowley Aug 1 · 8 min read

Slack is a large and complex piece of software that’s been added to and changed many times over the last five years. We added features, grew to 10,000,000 DAUs, and made major architectural changes. We made assumptions and tested them with processes that often resembled science.

Whenever we launch features or make changes, we test the fault tolerance of that new code. Unfortunately, we seldom get to repeat these tests as the environment continues to change around that no-longer-new code. As the sands shift, those initial test results lose value. We remain confident in the resilience and robustness of our most critical systems but that confidence is less well-founded as time progresses. And luck is not an availability strategy, so something must be done.

The workplace is a lonely place, but it doesn’t have to be

In early 2017, Shelly Schneider accepted a new job at a large insurance company. With a desk surrounded by hundreds of coworkers, she expected to have a robust social experience at work.

Filed under

• Work Culture

But after two years, Schneider found herself isolated, unhappy, and unproductive.

Schneider excelled in her role as an underwriter, working across all of the company’s service lines and receiving consistently positive feedback from her director. But her role required very little contact with her colleagues, and she found herself falling out of touch with her office neighbors and team members.

The Bullseye Framework for Getting Traction

With nineteen traction channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s why we’ve created a simple framework called Bullseye that will help you find the channel that will get you traction. As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it:

[You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral marketing — everything but the kitchen sink.

(more…)

All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people

Marianne Bellotti Aug 5 · 13 min read

Vector created by rawpixel

As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my abilities at that same stage. More often than not the best advice, the things that stuck with me, came from people who had no background at all in software.

The Complete Guide to Deep Work

Illustration by @margaridamouta

Let’s get right to the point: bouncing between your inbox, pointless meetings, and group chat notifications is no way to get ahead in today’s information economy.

These are markers of busyness not productivity. They won’t help you to deepen your writing practice, master a programming language, or grow your business. In fact, these activities won’t aid you in any number of the ambitious goals you’ve set for yourself.

AARRR Framework- Metrics That Let Your StartUp Sound Like A Pirate Ship

Nov 25, 2017 · 11 min read

AARRR Metric Framework- Pirate Metrics for Startups

​Today, September 19th, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and thus, the perfect excuse to chat about one of the most important metric frameworks to live by as a startup marketer or Growth Hacker: The AARRR framework.

10 years ago… wow, that’s a long time ago.

Getting Real About Managing Up

From QCon NYC, 2019

Tweet

Follow @kellan

Hi!

Most engineers, as hyper rationale beings above the fray of emotional persuasion are kind of “Ugh, do we have to” when the topic of managing up comes up, so thank you for coming!

My name is Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Cards on the table. I’m the person you manage up to. (experience: Etsy, Flickr, various startups)
But I also advise and coach. (30+ companies)
This talk is drawn from all of that experience.
When Jean asked me…

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you’re sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive.

Book Summary – The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

The first 90 days of any career transition—be it a promotion, a new job or a lateral transfer—are critical and can determine if you succeed or fail in the new role. In this book, Michael Watkins presents critical success strategies for new leaders at all levels. In this summary, we’ll give an overview of the proven strategies to shorten your learning curve and build momentum within the first 90 days of any new management role. The impact is multiplied when the approach is applied organization-wide. For the full details, examples and tips, do or get a detailed overview with our complete book summary bundle.

Google’s HEART Framework for Measuring UX

If you’ve been struggling to adopt useful metrics in your user experience team – you might want to consider the HEART framework designed by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu, from Google’s research team.

The idea is a simple one; to deliver a series of user-centred metrics that allow you to measure the user experience on a large scale. These metrics can then be used for decision making in the product development process.

Developing a management philosophy

Developing a management philosophy

June 21 2019

A management philosophy is not something I thought I needed, but once I finally landed on it, it felt like a puzzle had been completed. My philosophy—Take care of your people—is the truth for me. I meditate on it and tell the story to anyone who will listen.

Developing my management philosophy was a long process and was sparked by my management coach, Lara Hogan. 1 She said this philosophy was going to become my North Star, so I felt a lot of pressure to get it right. Two months and 11 versions later ​“Take care of your people” came into focus and for the last 18 months it has guided everything I do.

Currents Research on DigitalOcean

• Droplets

• Kubernetes

• Managed Databases

• Spaces

• Load Balancers

• Block Storage

• Marketplace

• API Documentation

• Community

• Tutorials

• Customers

• Partners

• Hatch

• Pricing

• Docs

• Support

• Sales

• Login

Sign Up

• Compute

  • Droplets
  • Kubernetes

  Storage

  • Spaces Object Storage
  • Volumes Block Storage

  Databases

  • Managed Databases

  Networking

  • Cloud Firewalls
  • Load Balancers
  • Floating IPs
  • Domain Name System

  Developer Tools

  • API
  • CLI
  • Monitoring
  • Teams

  See all products

• Marketplace

• Customers

• Partners

• Get Involved

  • Write for DOnations
  • Meetups
  • Hatch Startup Program
  • Open Source Sponsorships
  • Hacktoberfest

• Pricing

  (more…)

Expert Program Management

report this ad

Buy the Book

Follow Us

• http://pinterest.com/https://www.pinterest.co.uk/expertpm/

RAPID Decision Making Model

The RAPID Decision Making Model is a framework that can help organizations make better decisions. Making high-quality decisions is critical to organizational success.

Every success an organization achieves. Every failure. Every missed opportunity. They can all be traced back to a decision or series of decisions made by the organization.

When an organization’s decision-making process is poor or nonexistent it can lead to wasted time, confusion and frustration. Let’s take a look two examples of a poor decision process:

Career narratives.

A peculiar challenge of management is trying to invest in someone’s career development when they themselves are uncertain about their goals. As a manager, you may have more experience and more access to opportunities within the company, but that represents a small slice of someone’s career possibilities. Our schooling often rewards us for being methodical, linear thinkers, but that approach is less effective outside the intentionally constrained possibility spaces.

An introduction to Wardley ‘Value Chain’ Mapping

This is about my journey, from a newly-minted yet confused CEO caught like a rabbit staring helpless into the oncoming headlights of change – to being voted one of the most influential people in IT within the UK. It took me a decade to first develop the techniques that I’m going to describe and a further 10 years to gain confidence with them through practice.

A Tale Of Two WordPress Hosts

68

Shares

The WordPress hosting space may just simultaneously be one of the most lucrative, yet underfunded, industries out there.

There’s no question that the use of WordPress, the open source content management system (CMS) that enables the publishing of blogs and e-books (among other things), is growing exponentially. The WordPress CMS has grown to 30 percent of the Internet, up from 13 percent in 2010, according to W3Techs.

How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg

Say your startup has an on-call rotation that follows the sun. Someone’s always on. One day, a member of your team gets an alert that disk space will run out on the primary PostgreSQL server in two hours. An hour later, he gets another page. Then thirty minutes later, disk space runs out and your entire site goes down. For 18 hours. The silver lining is that your two-tier architecture can keep your site and app online, but the backend of your business has come to a halt. Your CTO is furious. He says you must fire the engineer who was on call to make a point.

Going Indie. Step 2: Reclaiming Content · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

We have lost control over our content. To change this, we need to reconsider the way we create and consume content online. We need to create a new set of tools that enable an independent, open web for everyone.

This is the second article of a two-part series on digital citizenship. Part one was all about online privacy and how to protect it, this second part focuses on how we can build and promote tools that enable an open, independent, and resilient web.

Humans First: Strategies for Leading Remote Design Teams

Cassie McDaniel in The Startup Jul 1 · 12 min read

Earlier this week Alexis Lloyd, Head of Design Innovation at Automattic (she’s moving on to Medium, congrats!), shared on Twitter some insightful best practices for leading design teams remotely and she asked others to chime in. As in a community, sharing ideas. Not just complaining! Be still my heart. I don’t know Alexis personally but her receptiveness inspires me.

Resilience Assessment Grid

Ph.D., Professor, Professor Emeritus

Resilience Assessment Grid (RAG)

(This page provides a brief overview of the RAG. A more detailed description can be found here.)

Introduction

A system is said to perform in a manner that is resilient when it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions by adjusting its functioning prior to, during, or following events (changes, disturbances, and opportunities). Whereas current safety management (Safety-I) focuses on reducing the number of adverse outcomes by preventing adverse events, Resilience Engineering (RE) looks for ways to enhance the ability of systems to succeed under varying conditions (Safety-II). It is therefore necessary to understand what this ability really means, since it clearly is not satisfactory just to call it ‘resilience’.

The Paradox of Ambition

In Silicon Valley, ambition matters more than financial success.

The interestingness of your ideas matters more than the size of your bank account. The culture is built to support companies and entrepreneurs who want to pursue moonshot ideas.

Silicon Valley culture is a perspective shift. In school, it helps to fit in. In the Valley, it helps to stand out. The sooner you can stand out, the better. Where school teaches you to pursue guaranteed success, the Valley teaches you to pursue projects with exponential upside; where school teaches you to follow the rules, the Valley teaches you to ignore them carefully; and where school teaches you to pursue well-defined targets, the Valley teaches you to pursue lucrative goals that others can’t see.

‘Oldest remains’ outside Africa reset human migration clock

July 10, 2019

The Apidima 2 cranium (right) and its reconstruction (left). Apidima 2 shows a suite of features characteristic of Neanderthals, indicating that it belongs to the Neanderthal lineage. Credit: Copyright Katerina Harvati, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

A 210,000-year-old skull has been identified as the earliest modern human remains found outside Africa, putting the clock back on mankind’s arrival in Europe by more than 150,000 years, researchers said Wednesday.

No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?

Illustration by Yin Weihung

This article started out as an internal conversation on a thread around how our team could learn to ask and give feedback more mindfully. It explores how we can balance making decisions quickly while maintaining our openness to feedback to ensure our decisions are good ones.

At Doist we believe that open and sincere communication improves our decision-making process. That’s why we’ve built a culture that encourages feedback at all levels of decision-making: from purely technical solutions to team and product management. We built our team communication app, Twist, around public threads to make that level of transparency and engagement possible for both ourselves and other remote workplaces.

Resilience Engineering

Resilience Engineering

Origins

‘Resilience’ is a term that has been used for a long time and in several different ways. It was first used in to describe a property of timber, and to explain why some types of wood were able to accommodate sudden and severe loads without breaking. Almost four decades later, a report to the Admiralty referred to a measure called the modulus of resilience as a means of assessing the ability of materials to withstand severe conditions.

Rethinking the Triple Constraint: Five Project Dimensions

Karl Wiegers in The Startup Jun 14 · 11 min read

Perhaps you’ve seen a sign at an auto repair shop that asked, “What do you want: good, fast, or cheap? Pick two.” While humorous, the sign is also wise: it acknowledges the reality of trade-offs. You generally cannot optimize every desired outcome of a given situation.

The notion of such a “triple constraint” or “iron triangle” appears throughout project management. The problem is that I have seen numerous representations of the triangle with various parameters on the triangle’s vertices — size, cost, time, or scope — and various assumptions made about what is being held constant, such as quality or functionality. I’ve also seen diagrams that show four project dimensions. So, in my view, the traditional “triple constraint” is wrong, although the concept of constraints and trade-offs is certainly valid.

Squad Health Check model – visualizing what to improve

*(Download the cards & instructions as PDF or PPTX)

(Translations of this article: Chinese, French)*

What is a squad health check model?

A lot of companies experiment with ways of measuring and visualizing how their teams are doing. They’re usually called “maturity models”, and involve some sort of progression through different levels.

The intent of these types of models is usually benign – for example managers or coaches in larger organizations who want to get a sense of where they should focus their improvement efforts, spot systemic problems, and help teams become more self-aware so they can focus their improvement efforts too.

Seven to Ten Years – AVC

I have worked in three venture capital firms over the last thirty-three years and am intimately familiar with the performance of the fifteen (ish) venture funds raised and invested by these three firms. Much of what I have written about fund management and investment performance here at AVC over the last sixteen years comes from my observations of these funds and firms.

Starting in the mid-00s, The Gotham Gal and I started investing in other venture capital funds, always limiting these investments to firms where we knew the partners well and had sat on boards with them.

How to invest in technical infrastructure

4 Reasons Good Employees Lose Their Motivation

Paul Taylor/Getty Images

Motivation — the willingness to get the job done by starting rather than procrastinating, persisting in the face of distractions, and investing enough mental effort to succeed — accounts for 40% of the success of team projects. Yet managers are often at a loss as to how to effectively motivate uninspired employees. Our review of research on motivation indicates that the key is for managers to first accurately identify the reason for an employee’s lack of motivation and then apply a targeted strategy.

The Difference Between Open-Minded and Closed-Minded People

Why is it that some people seem to make constant progress in their professional and personal lives, while others appear to be doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over?

While the answer isn’t cut and dry, I’ve noticed an interesting mindset difference between these two groups: they approach obstacles and challenges very differently. It comes down to mindset.

Successful people tend to approach life with an open mindset — an eagerness to learn and a willingness to be wrong. The other group digs their heels in at the first sign of disagreement and would rather die than be wrong.

What does a VP of Engineering do, again? – Raffi Krikorian – Medium

Photo by Oleg Sidorenko

Raffi Krikorian Jul 27, 2015

Co-authored by Raffi Krikorian & Dave Loftesness

“You mean he’s like an engineer-whisperer?”

Sorta.

Who is asking?

This question shows up over and over. And from all sides:

• the CEO who thinks her company is at the size that she should be “thinking” about hiring a VPE — the company is getting too big, and all of engineering still reports to her;
• the CTO who doesn’t want to manage people directly and is trying to figure out whether he needs a VPE to pair with — he feels that the best use of his time is to be the “chief architect”, “lead developer”, or “head prototyper”. The CTO often complains that he isn’t good at managing people, he isn’t scaling as a people manager as the team grows, that he finds people management is stressful, or he has no interest in doing it, and it’s a distraction;
• the first time VPE that is trying to figure out what she should be doing with her time — one-on-ones have already been scheduled, the current sprint has been planned, but what else should she be doing?; and, finally
• engineers who are concerned that the company wants to bring in “another level of management” — what does this do to their day to day? They often wonder what they’ve done wrong, or, whether they should be concerned that the company is getting “too large”.

Let’s pull this apart.

Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well

I have been coaching several experienced software engineers to further grow professionally, since transitioning to being an engineering manager. I have noticed a few skills that people often underestimate the importance of developing. Skills that add a significant boost to the impact of any developer. One of these is writing.

Most software engineers primarily focus on becoming great at writing code. And this makes perfect sense. This is an essential step to become a great engineer within a reasonably sized team.

How to Hold Your Team Accountable – The Founder Coach

Dave Bailey Apr 9

Do you wish your team took more ownership? Here’s how to get your team to the point where you trust them to get the job done without you.

As a CEO coach I’ve heard statements like these many times:

“My VP just isn’t pulling his/her weight”

“I don’t trust him/her to do the work properly”

“My team don’t act like owners”

(more…)

We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death – Buy Yourself – Medium

Top highlight

pro·cel·er·a·tion

/prōˌseləˈrāSH(ə)n/
noun 1. The acceleration of acceleration

—excerpt from The Age of Earthquakes by Shannon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist

There’s a famous thought experiment in economics known as the “prisoner’s dilemma.” In it, two men have been caught committing a crime. Each of them is placed in a separate interrogation room and effectively has two options: confess or lie. There are three possible outcomes (the payoffs of which are illustrated in the payoff matrix below):