How to Outperform a 10x Developer

First awareness. Then productivity.

From a software developer’s perspective, the complexity of a production system makes it abstract and distant, so we tend to shut it out and focus on the immediate work of writing code.

Jeff Foster wrote a great story on the origins of the expression “10x developer,” contrasting the value of outsized code-writing skills against the ability to focus on the product.

The Leader’s Journal: Become an Inspiring Leader in Ten Minutes a Day

If you’ve ever finished a busy week of work wondering what you’ve accomplished, you’re not alone.

As software engineering leaders, we spend every day racing between numerous tasks on our to-do lists and rushing from one meeting to the next. But do we ever stop before picking up the next task to reflect on what we just did, or simply process what was said at the last meeting? Do we ever give extra thought to the insights raised, or contemplate the actions taken?

Little’s law – Wikipedia

In mathematical queueing theory, Little’s result, theorem, lemma, law, or formula is a theorem by John Little which states that the long-term average number L of customers in a stationary system is equal to the long-term average effective arrival rate λ multiplied by the average time W that a customer spends in the system. Expressed algebraically the law is

L

=

λ

W

.

{\displaystyle L=\lambda W.}

Although it looks intuitively easy, it is quite a remarkable result, as the relationship is “not influenced by the arrival process distribution, the service distribution, the service order, or practically anything else.”

Useful engineering metrics and why velocity is not one of them

Here’s my horoscope for today:

Things should improve for you as the day progresses, Taurus. You shouldn’t depend on something that may not pan out the way you want.

As you can see, it’s useless, just like your team’s velocity metrics and burndown charts.

Velocity metrics are as loathsome as the horoscope because neither provides any insight on why something went wrong or how to fix it. Moreover, if only you squint your eyes hard enough, both burndown charts and the horoscope will show you whatever you want to see.

Block-Based Template Parts: A Happy Medium Between Classic and Block Themes – Gutenberg Times

I was one of the early adopters of the block editor as a developer. Despite the flak that the Gutenberg plugin was catching before it was merged into core WordPress, I could see the potential. Yes, I could see the bugs, the inconsistent UI, and every other thing that was “wrong” about it around four or five years ago.

The Platform and Program Split at Uber: A Milestone Special

👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. The publication just crossed 100,000 newsletter subscribers, only ten months after it was started. Thank you for being a newsletter subscriber! 🙌

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz

Wow, what a milestone for The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter: crossed 100,000 subscribers to the email list almost exactly 10 months after starting it. Never thought it could get here this fast.

An End to Doomerism: Or Why I’m Coming Out as an Impatient Optimist

Related

Personal Growth

5 Reasons for Technological Optimism

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who ought to know, says that the future won’t be anything like The Terminator. “I live in the real world, and in the real world that’s simply […]

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Being Optimistic Is Good. Knowing about Optimism Bias Is Better.

The belief that things will be better in the future is called optimism bias. Being overly optimistic can lead you to miss an important health check up or make bad financial decisions.

Excuse Me but Why Are You Eating So Many Frogs

Photo cred: my dad

I think the devil is real and he wants you to be more productive. He’s everywhere, spreading wickedness disguised as wisdom. Here he is in

Stop confusing productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity.

And in Harvard Business Review:

Every evening, [Marshall Goldsmith, the “well-known CEO coach”] reviews a 40-item spreadsheet consisting of every important behavior he hopes to achieve. Among the items: the number of words he wrote, the distance he walked, and the number of nice things he said to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

(more…)

How to Run Strategic Planning in an Outcome-Focused Product Organization

You heard it right – effective strategic planning is essential to outcome-focused product teams. But how do you conduct annual strategic planning and integrate it with agile product management? In this post, we’ll walk through how to run strategic planning in 4 steps. We’ll also cover how to connect strategic planning with responsive re/alignment and re/allocation to achieve portfolio outcomes.

Your 101 Guide to Dispersed Camping

Last summer, camper vans and RVs arrived en masse in the town of Mammoth Lakes, California, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were looking to get outdoors. But with campgrounds either closed or fully booked, many of those aspiring campers chose to pitch their tents or park their rigs outside of designated campgrounds, a growing trend known as dispersed camping. The problem was, they didn’t always know where they could legally camp.

What I’ve Learned from Users

September 2022

I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I

could give for getting in, per word, was

Explain what you’ve learned from users.

That tests a lot of things: whether you’re paying attention to

users, how well you understand them, and even how much they need

what you’re making.

Afterward I asked myself the same question. What have I learned

from YC’s users, the startups we’ve funded?

How to Build Products Quickly – Department of Product

Stripe’s self described operating cadence is ‘run’.

The CEO of Stripe even has a collection of short stories about projects that were built ahead of time, despite naysayers saying it wasn’t possible.

These wonderful little anecdotes include:

• The construction of the Eiffel Tower which took two years and two months
• The first iteration of Disneyland which was built in just 366 days
• The Empire State building which was started and finished within 410 days

Former White House data scientist DJ Patil’s principles of execution include the question “What’s required to cut the timeline in ½?”.

Techniques for Managing Your Time and Cognitive Load as a Senior Leader | by Mite Mitreski | Sep, 2022 | Better Programming | Better Programming

Techniques for Managing Your Time and Cognitive Load as a Senior Leader

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

Most of the senior leaders in any sizable company jump around slots of 30 min to few-hour meetings on a good day. That can range from meeting with customers, team reviews, re-occurring tactical meetings, 1:1s, or tech architecture. In my experience, this gets increased and more split-focused the bigger the organization you manage or you are navigating in.

Tom Lingham (Toml)

**Disclaimer: Details of this story have been altered slightly to protect the

identities of individuals.**

“I’m just too busy. I barely have time to breathe, let alone lead the threat

modelling exercise with my team”. This was something that one of my peers said

to me at the end of a long day after I asked him how he was doing. I believed

him—he was much too busy. He would send slack messages and emails at ungodly

How I Interview Engineers to Assess Ability to Deliver Impact

Up until recently, I have personally been responsible for running all of our Deep-dive Interviews in our Product Engineer interview loop at Metaview. Our deep-dive focuses on the candidate’s ability to deliver impact. So we let the candidate choose the topic. All we care about in this interview is how they think about impact, and how capable they are at achieving it (relative to tenure). The objective of the interview is to find out as much as we can about the impact they are most proud of in their professional life, and what role they played in making that impact occur.

Be Critical or Be Corrupted

What does a 2002 HBO crime drama have to do with software engineering?

On the surface, “The Wire” is about homicide detectives and the Baltimore drug trade. But on a deeper level, these motifs are just stage dressing for the show’s exploration of the city’s institutions and how corruption inevitably sprouts like weeds within them. I recently rewatched this series and, aside from hours of entertainment and a deeper butt-impression on my couch, I also had an epiphany about how I’ve observed this theme first-hand.

Reduce Friction – Ceejbot’s notes

The topic of reducing friction exhausts me: Do people still need to be persuaded to help their developers go faster? Really? In this, the year 2022? But yes, in this, the year 2022, many teams require persuasion on this topic. Or rather, their leaders require persuasion that they have to do more than give lip service to this principle, and that they must invest resources in making it so, and that those resources will not be “wasted” resources, not even for that person, you know the one, the official VP of Feature Factory.

How Management by Metrics Leads Us Astray

Let’s say my goal this year is to get to 10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

MRR first, everything else second. I would ruthlessly cut out all activities that don’t lead to a measurable MRR increase. For example, I would stop writing blog posts like the one you’re currently reading. I certainly wouldn’t create fun projects like What to Tweet or take the time for non-transactional Zoom calls.

KPIs, Velocity, and Other Destructive Metrics

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“It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it—a costly myth.”

The Deming quote at the top of this post is often twisted into something worthy of Frederick Taylor: “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Deming would disagree. You can—in fact, must—manage things you can’t measure, because in software, there are virtually no measurements that have any value. Wasting time collecting measurements that don’t lead to improvement is not only costly, it’s actively destructive.

Use One Big Server

A lot of ink is spent on the “monoliths vs. microservices” debate, but the real issue behind

this debate is about whether distributed system architecture is worth the developer time and

cost overheads. By thinking about the real operational considerations of our systems, we can

get some insight into whether we actually need distributed systems for most things.

We have all gotten so familiar with virtualization and abstractions between our software

Rituals for Engineering Teams

Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read, more comic book than textbook, but I liked it.

It got me thinking about the many rituals I have initiated and/or participated in over the course of my career. Of course, I never thought of them as such — I thought of them as “having fun at work” 🙃 — but now I realize these rituals disproportionately contribute to my favorite moments and the most precious memories of my career.

Tidying Versus Sooner – by Kent Beck

I promised I would put together the posts on Better/Sooner/Cheaper/More with the actual topic of this mailing list, Tidy First? And here I am delivering.

To reiterate, software product development should mostly be managed through scope, not deadlines or budget. That doesn’t mean time & budget don’t matter, just that you aren’t generally going to get more of what you want by tightening the screws on time or money.

The Metaverse Is Not a Place – O’Reilly

The metaphors we use to describe new technology constrain how we think about it, and, like an out-of-date map, often lead us astray. So it is with the metaverse. Some people seem to think of it as a kind of real estate, complete with land grabs and the attempt to bring traffic to whatever bit of virtual property they’ve created.

Seen through the lens of the real estate metaphor, the metaverse becomes a natural successor not just to Second Life but to the World Wide Web and to social media feeds, which can be thought of as a set of places (sites) to visit. Virtual Reality headsets will make these places more immersive, we imagine.

Getting Big Things Done

Getting Big Things Done

In one particular context.

A while back, a colleague wanted to make a major change in the design of a system, the sort of change that was going to take a year or more, and many tens of person-years of effort. They asked me how to justify the project. This post is part of the email reply I sent. The advice is in context of technical leadership work at a big company, but perhaps it may apply elsewhere.

Better/Sooner/Cheaper/More

Better/Sooner/Cheaper/More—I began talking this week about a fundamental Extreme Programming technique for managing resources & immediately remembered why I stopped talking about it. Here are the basics.

Back in the day folks would say, “Sooner, cheaper, better—your choice of any two.” That made good sense in that you as a customer can’t dictate all three. At some point something is going to give. You keep demanding sooner, sooner, sooner, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper & what you get is going to get worse. Complaining about this makes no sense—the degradation was the result of your decisions.

The Best Wilderness Survival Strategies, Based on 103 Successful Rescue Stories

Harrowing survival stories can feel like the lifeblood of outdoor culture, with the image of the gnarled outdoors person spinning tales over a campfire about “that time I almost died” serving as a kind of social currency in the backcountry. It’s a tricky line to tow, as we intermittently validate and admonish adventurers who get lost, and hopefully learn from the past mistakes of others and how to avoid them.

Back to the trend line? — Benedict Evans

Back in 2020, as we were all locked down and forced to do everything online, we got very excited about ecommerce penetration. All sorts of charts went viral showing that we’d jumped forward anything from three to five years in a couple of months. This was a big part of the ‘Covid Rotation’, and now we’re on the other side of that rotation – people went back to the office, and back to stores, and back on planes. And for retail and ecommerce, it looks like a lot of that growth was temporary, and we’re reverting to the trend line.

Write Better Docs With a Product Thinking Mindset

I’ve frequently seen product thinking discussed in product management and user experience design contexts, but haven’t seen it applied to technical writing and documentation. And yet, by applying product thinking to documentation, we can write more useful, relevant, high quality documentation.

What is product thinking?

Product management thought leader Shreyas Doshi defines product thinking as follows in a Twitter thread:

“Product Thinking is about understanding motivations, conceiving solutions, simulating their effects, and picking a path based on the effects you want to create.”

(more…)

How to connect strategy with OKRs – Mind the Product

Every three months the dreaded OKR setting process begins. People at different levels in the organization (especially large ones) start working around the clock to find the best opportunities for the next quarter, find the right ambition levels, deal with dependencies, balance top-down vs bottom-up requests, and a myriad of activities that turns this goal-setting period in a stressful moment for everyone.

Announcing DORA 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps report | Google Cloud Blog

Over the past seven years, more than 32,000 professionals worldwide have taken part in the Accelerate State of DevOps reports, making it the largest and longest-running research of its kind. Year over year, the Accelerate State of DevOps reports provide data-driven industry insights that examine the capabilities and practices that drive software delivery as well as operational and organizational performance. That is why Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team is very excited to announce our 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report.

How to Present to Executives

Have you presented to company executives about a key engineering initiative, walking into the room excited and leaving defeated? Maybe you only made it to your second slide before unrelated questions derailed the discussion. Maybe you worked through your entire presentation only to have folks say, “Great job,” and leave without any useful debate. Afterward, you’re not quite sure what happened, but you know it didn’t go well.

Binaries Over Priorities

Low, medium, high.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Must have, should have, could have, don’t need.

These are various forms of priorities. People seem to love them.

I’ve always hated them. Especially when it comes to product development.

When it comes to choosing what to do, it’s always binary for me.

Yes or no.

Now or not now.

Do or don’t.

What about maybe? Maybe is no (for now).

The Practical Application of “Rocks, Pebbles, Sand”

You know the geology-in-a-jar lesson from Stephen Covey: Schedule big things first, otherwise you run out of time:

(source)

If you schedule little things first, you run out of time for the big things.

(source)

If you schedule the big things first, then you can fill in with smaller things.

A common mistake is to think this applies only to the size of the work. That is, “Rocks” means “stuff that takes a few quarters,” “Pebbles” means “a few sprints,” and “Sand” means “less than a sprint.”

A Readme for Staff Engineers

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

During my career, I’ve switched several times between individual contributor (IC) and management roles. I enjoy both. With years passing by, I realize that even though roles are different, past the “staff” level there is a common ground of mindset and soft skills that enables you to make progress on both tracks : communication, positivity, teamplay, openness, influence and impact. To develop these skills, you need to take a step back and question yourself. This. Is. Hard. Having examples, resources and even mentors is a huge help to guide you in this journey.

Investing in the future of agriculture | Investing ideas | Fidelity

Key takeaways

• War-related disruptions have led to elevated grain prices. While that’s been bad for some food producers it’s generally been good for grain farmers.
• With more cash on hand, many farmers may be looking to upgrade equipment, which could benefit agricultural machinery producers.
• Companies making “precision agriculture” equipment could see short- and long-term benefits as farmers look to plant and maintain their crops with more efficiency.
• Seed producers could also see a potential benefit over both the near and longer term, as food producers increasingly seek to plant higher-yielding crops.

Chances are that, as little as a few years ago, most of us didn’t give much thought to where our food staples came from. Grocery store shelves were reliably stocked with an abundance of choice and supply, with basic items selling for reasonable prices.

Hiring a VP of Engineering? Use This Framework from Shopify’s VPE to Get it Right | First Round Review

Introduction

Farhan Thawar is VP of Engineering at Shopify**. He joined the company after the acquisition of Helpful.com, where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously, he was the VP of Engineering at Pivotal and Xtreme Labs.

When advising fast-growing startups, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is “How do I hire a VP of Engineering?” After more than 20 years, eight companies, and thousands of hires, I’m starting to suspect this may be the wrong question. A better one is, “What is a VP of Engineering?”

Reduce Friction

The topic of reducing friction exhausts me: Do people still need to be persuaded to help their developers go faster? Really? In this, the year 2022? But yes, in this, the year 2022, many teams require persuasion on this topic. Or rather, their leaders require persuasion that they have to do more than give lip service to this principle, and that they must invest resources in making it so, and that those resources will not be “wasted” resources, not even for that person, you know the one, the official VP of Feature Factory.

The World Economy Is Imperiled by a Force Hiding in Plain Sight

Well more than two years into the worst pandemic in a century, the accompanying economic shock continues to assault global fortunes.

• Send any friend a story

  As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

This article is part of our Coronavirus Updates

Credit…Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

The Structure and Process Fallacy

“If our teams were just organized in the right way, and we adopted the agile process, we’d be so much more efficient.”

What’s your feeling when reading that quote? Are you strongly in agreement, generally in agreement, or perhaps you’re shaking your head in disagreement?

The quote reflects a sentiment I notice from leaders in top-down, hierarchical organizations. A belief that if teams are organized in the optimal way and the right process is followed, the company will be high-performing, regardless of other factors. This is the structure and process fallacy.

“Be calm. But be urgent.” Eight takeaways from AMA sessions with Brad Feld.

Written by Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet.

I recently had the pleasure of hosting Techstars’ co-founder, VC, entrepreneur, author and blogger Brad Feld in two Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on how to respond to the financial crisis from both a founder and investor perspective. Drawing on his decades-long experience in tech (he’s been an entrepreneur and early stage investor since 1987), Brad addressed topics ranging from fundraising in a downturn to why chasing valuations is wrong, and why founders shouldn’t fixate on when the crisis will be over. Here are a few of the highlights.

Three Part Solution to Leaders Burnout: Fundamental Principles Don’t Change

Burnout is a term introduced to the common language in 1974. With everyone working from home after COVID, there is more discussion around occupational burnout, now than ever before.

Did you know that burnout as well as its potential solutions for leaders were discussed many millennia ago?

As I was meditating, I found a reference to burnout in the second book of the Bible – Exodus.

Low Context – Software’s Silent Killer | Stay SaaSy

As companies grow, context can become a scarce resource. As more variables, people, teams, products, customers, and coworkers create an increasingly infinite combination of possible ways to move forward, deep context on what to do and how to do it should be thought of explicitly, because its thoughtful allocation can make, or, notably, break, a company’s productivity.

What Is Context?

For the purposes of this post, let’s scope context to the following: the unique information inside a software company that is necessary to make good decisions while delivering a product.

Equity in your tech job offer: everything you need to know

“Your employment will be on an at-will basis. Either you and the company may terminate your employment at any time, with or without cause or prior notice. My employment-at-will status cannot be changed except in writing signed by the president of the company…”

“Yada, yada, yada…”

Reading offer letter legalese can feel like someone explaining the rules of a board game before you start playing. When it’s Saturday night and you’re sitting around the table with a group of friends, typically someone will say:

The Time Value of Shipping. Unpacking “Shipping as a Feature” | by Brandon Chu | The Black Box of Product Management

Shipping is a Featureis a core principle for product managers. It proposes that you’ll never be able to build a perfect product, so you need to learn how and when to ship your imperfect one, because customer use of the product is what really matters.

I’ve used this principle as a guide in my own endeavours as a PM, but I’ve always felt it lacked a tangible framework, both for managing and rationalizing the minimum viable product (MVP) to stakeholders.

How I share information with my team

As an engineering manager at Netflix, I spend most of my time in meetings and one-on-ones. During these meetings, I collect a lot of information that’s valuable to the members of my engineering team. When my team was only four people, disseminating information was easy. It usually involved a quick hallway chat or was covered during a regular one-on-one. But late last year my team doubled in size. With the larger team, I struggled to keep everybody informed in a timely way. It became obvious that I wasn’t effectively scaling team communication and I needed to make a change.

A domain-based structure for software engineering teams | by Ryan Fox | Snapcommerce | May, 2022 | Medium

How we’re structuring squads to grow individual contributors into tech leads

In early 2021 at Snapcommerce, we had 25 engineers working in squads. Each squad had an engineering manager (EM) acting as the people and tech lead (TL) for all projects, a product manager (PM), a designer, a QA team member, and up to 7 individual contributor (IC) engineers. For engineers, growing as an IC into a TL could be a challenging or unclear path. Having one TL per squad wasn’t creating a natural growth opportunity for ICs to develop their technical leadership and ownership skills.

‘It’s really a mess’: The growing split between workers and bosses on returning to the office – The Boston Globe

There’s a new turf war shaping up at work: managers who want everyone back in the “real” office vs. employees who prefer the one at home. And that standoff is leading to some irreconcilable conflicts.

Naomi Baruch and her coworkers were required to return to their downtown Boston office two days a week starting Jan. 1, despite the crippling Omicron surgeat the time. There was no explanation given, she said, no attempt to make their presence more purposeful.

Stop Overcomplicating It: The Simple Guidebook to Upping Your Management Game | First Round Review

Introduction

Pick up Russ Laraway’s new book, titled “When They Win, You Win” and the first sentence is sure to grab your attention: “Managers are failing everywhere, and no one is helping.”

With that framing in mind, when we sat down with Laraway to find out more about the lessons inside his book, his next sentence was just as unexpected: “I think the world has conspired to confuse the average manager and I believe that we don’t need another person’s opinion about what it takes to be a great manager,” he says.

Operating Well: What I Learned at Stripe – Every

Hello, Every readers! We’re excited to share this post from Sam Gerstenzang. Most recently, he worked in Product at Stripe, where he led the 75-person payment UI group. Sam’s experience runs the gamut from investing to working in startups to building and selling a company of his own. In this essay, he unpacks what his time at Stripe taught him about being a good operator. There’s a ton of actionable insight from the ground packed into this piece—we hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Limiting Work In Progress as a Manager

The demands on a manager’s time are endless and sometimes it feels like you’re being pulled in every direction at once. These demands can make it hard to focus, they make it hard to move from reacting to problems to anticipating them. In this article, I’d like to talk about how I’ve limited demands on my time, counterintuitively doing more with less.

The story

The very first thing I learned as a new manager was that if I didn’t put a block on my calendar at lunchtime, there was no guarantee that I would eat lunch that day. As an engineer, I thought I knew what it meant to take a lot of meetings, but my promotion brought with it a torrent of people who wanted to talk to me and had no consideration for how hungry I was getting.

A Neuroscience-Backed Approach to Team Building – The Async Review

A Neuroscience-Backed Approach to Team Building

For remote teams, there are more and more effective alternatives to Zoom happy hour than ever.

By Darryn King

Dec 14, 2021

neuroscience

team bonding

team building

zoom happy hour

Your Zoom happy hour is making everyone miserable…

When it comes to lazily replicating pre-pandemic work traditions, the Zoom happy hour might be the laziest.

10 Principles to Improve Decision-Making – The Async Review

10 Principles to Improve Decision-Making

An Insider’s View of how Netflix Makes Hard Decisions

By Gibson Biddle

Jun 23, 2022

An Insider’s View of how Netflix Makes Hard Decisions

In recent years, I’ve given a talk called “Wicked Hard Decisions” which has five “What would you do?” cases that provide an insider’s view of how Netflix made tough product and business decisions. I learned a lot while at Netflix and even more teaching these cases.

The 7 Roles of a CTO

This post is about me figuring out what a CTO does. I tried to be methodical and deep about it, and broke it down to a few different aspects.

It gave me some structure and helped talking about my responsibility, I hope it will be useful for more people

Why I started thinking about it?

On July 1st 2021, I started to work on building a startup with my partner Noam Bernstein. We both were 100% committed and made the expectation settings ahead of time, but didn’t decide what we will build.

“Sharing Interesting Stuff”: A simple yet powerful management tool

Today, I’d like to talk about a practice I introduced to the people I managed just a few weeks after joining Shipup. I didn’t know it would turn out to be something so useful.

The idea is pretty simple actually: Your direct report sends you something they consider worth sharing with you (can be a blog post, book chapter, video, podcast, …) and a few related questions they have in mind a few days before you meet together. On the D day, you share your opinion about it and try to answer the questions that go with it.

Stop Telling Employees to Be Resilient

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Lately, it feels like “resilience” has popped up as the answer to just about everything. Having a hard time because of a toxic environment? Just be resilient. Struggling to home-school your kids while working 50-hour weeks during a global pandemic? Try some resilience.

Resilience, or the ability to withstand hardship and bounce back from difficult events, is useful when it comes to work. But, too often, it’s presented in a way that overlooks structural issues and instead encourages employees to grin and bear whatever tough stuff comes their way — and to do so on their own, without disturbing their colleagues.

Prioritization Is a Political Problem as Much as an Analytical Problem

Product and engineering leaders tend to be analytical, and we think of prioritization as an algorithmic problem. Unfortunately, other execs see a different kind of problem…

Most of our tools and processes around product/feature prioritization are heads-down analytical: RICE, opportunity trees, Kano, count-the-digits, weighted 16-column spreadsheets, WSJF, Eisenhower, whatever. Our (hidden) assumption is that choosing the objectively best work is hard, but getting organizational buy-in is not so hard. That .

The Weekly CEO E-Mail

I got this email recently from a CEO:

“Hey Gokul, I want to start a biweekly newsletter to the entire co. I read your blog post on all hands. Was super helpful. Do you have any guidance or examples on how to best structure a regular written update?”

In a previous post, I talked about a company’s communication architecture being the CEO’s most important operational responsibility.

Spurred by the CEO’s request and following up on the earlier post, I’d like to deep dive into a specific element of a company’s communication architecture: a weekly or fortnightly email from the CEO to the entire organization. Most CEOs send emails to their organization on a one-off basis — for instance, to announce an acquisition. However, relatively few CEOs use emails to communicate many-to-one on a regular cadence.

The Product Manifesto | Silicon Valley Product Group

The Product Manifesto

The New Year always gets me thinking bigger picture. For some that means reviewing the company mission statement. For others, it means coming up with your annual or quarterly objectives. For me, I’m partial to the Manifesto.

A Manifesto is a public declaration of principles, beliefs and intentions. I like them because if they’re done well, they can serve as a concise complement to the product vision and strategy.

Ensuring Excellence – Silicon Valley Product Group : Silicon Valley Product Group

Ensuring Excellence

This has been a difficult article to write. That’s because there’s a very real risk of undermining what I would consider the most important message I try to advocate, which is the power and potential of empowered product teams.

But nevertheless, I think this topic has largely been missing from my writing, and it’s too important not to address.

How to Disagree

March 2008

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago,

writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and

increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their

own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be

expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing.

And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something

User Stories | Examples and Template | Atlassian

Summary: A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user. Its purpose is to articulate how a software feature will provide value to the customer.

It’s tempting to think that user stories are, simply put, software system requirements. But they’re not.

A key component of agile software development is putting people first, and a user story puts end users at the center of the conversation. These stories use non-technical language to provide context for the development team and their efforts. After reading a user story, the team knows why they are building, what they’re building, and what value it creates.

How to manage up in your team: Six steps for success

Maybe you felt awkward if you’re in a team with a hierarchical structure. Maybe you didn’t want to get ‘out of your lane’.

But what if you started thinking of managing up as support rather than control?

The team can be a great source of support and knowledge for leadership. They can provide the all-important context and direction that the manager can then bring to the rest of the team and project. We call this managing up, and it’s an effective way to boost your team, as long as you’re acting with transparency, empathy, and respect.

Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15

As American cities struggle to recover from the pandemic, Denver’s problems spill over onto its buses

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June 6, 2022 at 7:59 a.m. EDT

DENVER — Suna Karabay touched up her eye makeup in the rearview mirror and leaned against the steering wheel of the bus to say her morning prayers. “Please, let me be patient,” she said. “Let me be generous and kind.” She walked through the bus to make her final inspection: floor swept, seats cleaned, handrails disinfected, gas tank full for another 10-hour shift on the city’s busiest commercial road. She drove to her first stop, waited until exactly 5:32 a.m., and opened the doors.

Cargo Culting Software Engineering Practices

Three months into my first Big Tech gig I was talking to a mentor about the overhead involved with the way the organisation worked. Meetings for standups, tech huddles, refinements, retros and product reviews; Processes such as limiting work in progress, desk checks, spikes, stories, and tasks. Coming from a startup we delivered high quality software without all of that labelled process. The mentor lent me his copy of Extreme Programming by Kent Beck, and that book gave me a framework to develop my own philosophy on software delivery and engineering practices. Since then I’ve followed Beck’s writings and talks.