Sophia Vicent shared observations from DoorDash's Technical Program Manager organization that I related to as we consider how to build ours. This one is critical: "The team should be incentivized to operate with openness and honesty and to create clarity. They need to work with engineering to set aggressive goals and milestones, without padding, and report accurately on where the program is against those goals, particularly if there are key work streams that are yellow or red against plans. [...] TPMs need to bridge these gaps between teams, and neutrality paves the path for that to happen in a blameless way."
This post by Marty Cagan is more relevant than ever given the current situation where many teams work remotely, even if they used to work co-located before. The dynamics shift, and it happens quickly unless you pay attention and look for ways to compensate.
Pádraig O'Brien opens up an interesting discussion with great suggestions to ask on your next interview. I think that asking multiple people, "How do they handle conflict within teams?" is incredibly useful. I also liked Erin's suggestions: "What’s the average tenure? What’s the process to take product decisions? Can you give me an example of a recent disagreement and how it was solved? Is blunt feedback good?"
Building feedback loops, such as the framework Joseph Jude suggests, is incredibly useful for learning faster and appreciating your progress. It's so easy to let inertia lead the way for us. Be mindful of how you use your energy and time. It goes by fast.
Writing is such an important skill to develop if you want to increase your impact. Do you want to get some strong buy-in from others to promote your idea in the company? What about working on a new project and finding early beta-users to give it a try? I added "The Single Line mentality" Ali Mese suggests to my Anki Notes (iPhone app I use) to remind me of its power.
The philosophies different between Phil Jackson and Doug Collins that Shai Mendel points to is important: it needs to be sustainable, and talent needs to compound. Senior ICs can rarely make themselves X2 better every year. They can, however, influence others, help them, and sponsor them every year. Your team's talent will compound better over time.
"Focus on what you know about yourself, what skills you have or might get, what serendipitous options might be available to you, and how you can make the most of them." -- Understanding that using Inversion as a mental model for career planning is the wrong approach is something I agree strongly about now (at the age of 37). I like Pam's approach: "Focus on what you know about yourself, what skills you have or might get, what serendipitous options might be available to you, and how you can make the most of them." -- This will help you figure out the type of people you want to surround yourself with.
Writing can help deal with our anxiety, fears, worries, and our Monkey Mind. I hope you'll take Daniel Schauenberg's story as an inspiration to find some medium to share your inner world, and find some peace. I try to enjoy the moments (not always successfully) I have with my family and friends and at work. I don't judge situations too harshly or over-analyze them. I measure my progress and satisfaction in months and years rather than days and weeks to avoid Recency Bias and quiet down my mind. Writing has been helpful. Talking about it with others has been helpful.
Mathilde Collin with practical tips on energy management, structuring your days to maximize the areas you enjoy (high energy) and excellent at (provide high impact and value few can do): "There’s a very practical exercise you can do to figure out what activities fall within your zone of genius: the Energy Audit. You can do it on your own, but it’s best to have someone to hold you accountable."
"If team members are bought in, they bring their A-game. They contribute their ideas to the improvement effort and deliver solutions of the highest craftspersonship, because they want the effort to succeed. [...] A well-aligned product team is worth much more than a prioritization that's slightly more optimal in theory according to some framework." -- Critical element here is to involve your Go To Market team (sales, BizDev, marketing, product marketing) in this discussion.
Reid Hoffman - ex-CEO and co-founder of LinkedIn and now an investor at Greylock - shares his insights on how COVID-19 will impact our industry. I wonder how much of our behaviors will return to previous habits once the pandemic will over: How much will it affect the way we live and where we choose to work? How much will it affect employee retention (becoming less personal)? Which software (and hardware!) we'll need to invest in to get a x10 better experience (e.g. AR for Zoom)?
"if you are not “killing it” at home, doing so at work is nothing to brag about" -- this sentence made me stop for a few minutes and opened my eyes to how I deploy my mental and physical energy. Josh Sloat shares how he thinks and structure his time and energy to find a better balance.
Bartek Ciszkowski will help you make some order in how you run brainstorming session. Considering more in-writing preparation (e.g. sharing a doc with goals, pains, KPIs, etc. a few days before the meeting) and the roles you'd like to see people take can help boost the effectiveness and inclusiveness of your team.
I thought this framing by Andrew Wilkinson, of the "Berkshire Hathaway's way" for making (acquisition) decisions, is relevant in many things we do at work: can we make painful processes today easier for people, so they'll do it more? One area I can think of is suggesting new ideas for the product or technology stack. So while becoming a buyer of businesses is less relevant for most of us, there is plenty to learn in this post and the mindset Andrew is using to build Tiny. Can you think of any? What is painfully slow for you and your teammates now?
This post by Ryan Djurovich will be the one I recommend for people who ask me about dealing with their Tech Debt, while aligning it with the business needs and stakeholders. Consider what to measure and make visible, as it would help you deal with anxiety and frustration caused by our natural Recency Bias as humans. Let the data shows if things are better or worse, and use that data to show it over a 6-12 months graph so the last 2-3 weeks won't give you the wrong impression.
"If you don’t think a feature is worth the time it takes to make it great, then it is not rational to ship a crappier version simply because you have sunk time into it." -- Julie Zhuo covers the importance of acknowledging Sunk Cost fallacy and making sure you decide based on long term needs.
"Some aspects of the impact generation process are in your control, and some aren’t. The world (i.e. the environment) isn’t in your control. Neither are the outcomes you get from trying things – remember the intention/impact gap. However, generating ideas, making things, taking risks, and the people you choose to work with are." -- This observation is also true when developing internal tools in the company. The ecosystem you develop will change the behaviors of people who use it (and who you'll hire to leverage that), which will change the desired ecosystem and so forth, and so on. Vishal Kapur encourages us all to ask "Answerable questions" and experiment.
"Work exceptionally long hours when you need to or want to, but do so consciously, for specified time periods, and to achieve specific goals. Don’t let it become a habit because you have forgotten how to work or live any other way." -- Having constraints on your time should help you better prioritize and utilize your energy levels during the day to boost your productivity.
I love this mindset by Jonny Burch: "On the upside, a company of that size and reputation would make an incredible partner for us as we grow, especially if the problems we’re solving are adjacent, not the same." -- most times, people and companies could open up opportunities where it's not a zero-sum game. This is true at work - in a big company, where multiple departments might develop the same infra just to find out the use cases are not identical - and in business.
"A firebreak in daily life are pre-built areas that stop you from acting stupidly on autopilot and give you a shot to reboot the behaviors you want." -- I've shared this notion with you before, but I think it's worthy of rereading it at our new environment. Take 15 minutes every week to see which areas or behaviors you want to fix to readjust your body and mind.
Jonnie Hallman shares a very personal story I think all of us can relate to at some point in our career. Finding sustainability in our career and personal life is something I wish more people would talk about. I've been thinking about it a lot in the past few years, figuring out decision frameworks for myself at work and home.
Kyle Tibbitts reminds us that Rate-Of-Learning should become an unfair advantage your company has to offer to current and future employees. This is true if you're working in a small startup or a bigger company (I don't think that ROL is something only startups have to offer). Think about it: how can you get your teammates to learn more with you in the next 6 months? Do you know enough for which type of learning they're looking for? How can you increase their velocity?
There are parts in me who find comfort in reading the section about "The dark side of always-on productivity." but I like this framing: "By letting us re-experience past events, simulate how others feel, explore our values, and engage in learning, maybe the Default Mode Network goes to those places because it needs to." -- in the past, I was optimizing for a false sense of productivity, investing every minute I had in learning and doing. Most of the time, it led to me burning out. Nowadays, I'm trying to optimize for sustainability, looking to grow while being happy as I set my expectations (with my self, my wife, and my teammates at work) early.
"Good businesses have margin. Profit margin? Yes. But also margin for your time, your emotional and physical health, your relationships, your sanity, and your integrity. You're a human, and humans need breathing room." -- Justin Jackson with a beautiful reminder that sustainability is a big part of building a healthy business.
"You could always leave, but how many times will you leave a good paying job, an awesome team or a role that could jumpstart your career when things become uncomfortable with one person? (This isn’t to say that you should suffer toxic behavior at work, there’s no excuse for that.)" -- Karen Cohen with practices that can help you improve your relationships with your teammates. When I feel upset, one thing I've started to do is asking the other side "What am I missing here? Can you share your concerns with me? What would convince you we are the right track here regardless of how we approach it?"
Rina Artstain with a post I recommend sharing with every senior individual contributor and manager in your company. They should get back to it and re-read it every few months, as changing our default behaviors is hard. This will increase the depth of conversations and (radically) impact the team's velocity over time.
Julian Shapiro inspires me with his visuals (the design of his website is beautiful) and words. I like the notion of "Challenging our Defaults", and to counter that with learning about "Good Enough" as a mental model to avoid analysis-paralysis. I like this quote by Channing Allen that Julian added: "When you view the world as a series of outputs, you form opinions. But when you view the world as a series of systems, you form strategies." -- This can help you deal with complicated situations at work and in life. Look at the incentives the system created that led people acting in a certain way.
Learning to improve your inquiry and observation skills is critical to increasing your impact on the organization. It will impact how you build tools and products (internal and external): "The simplest way to define product thinking is that it is the skill of knowing what makes a product useful — and loved — by people. As with all skills, it can be nurtured and developed; it’s not just an instinct one does or doesn’t have (and even instincts are trained, after all)."
This is such an excellent take on how to write an incident report: "good incident writeup is a sociological story about our system. Yes, there are individual engineers who were involved in the incident, but their role in the writeup is to serve as a narrative vehicle for telling that larger story. We care about those engineers (they are our colleagues!), but it’s the system that the story is about."
So many gems in this post by Subbu Allamaraju, I found myself marking and taking notes on almost every paragraph. I'd add Subbu's post to the recommended reading list for managers and technical leads. Interesting idea to try out: Pair managers and tech leads together and ask them to discuss their observations on "Watching for excuses" and "Using your leverage."