I’ve been thinking a lot about team velocity. IndyCar’s are some of the fastest race cars and get up to a top speed of 236mph, but compared to Top Fuel drag racers that hit 329mph, they are quite a bit slower. The obvious difference is that drag racers don’t turn! Applying this to organizations and teams, velocity requires two critical elements. A Speedometer A Finish line Going fast is arbitrary, but 120mph is a measure....
I’ve noticed that people often like to break down problems into hierarchies. When we are tasked with thinking about a Mission or Vision, the immediate goal is to define what we’re planning for on a longer time horizon. OKRs are another example where the Objective is simply a bigger task than each Key Result. Strategy is another concept that ends up being about the work rather than the impact. The question should be asked then, what the point of Missions, Visions, Strategies, Objectives, etc....
We’ve been building a house for my in-laws and it has been really interesting to watch things come together. I’ve been especially interested in the framing process after watching Essential Craftsman and working on leveling up my (very limited) construction skills. One big difference between a professional framer and a home carpenter is the set of tools. The framing team building the house had a large compressor, hundreds of feet of hose, multiple large nailguns and giant magazines of nails....
Organizations often focus on results over anything else. Specifically, the focus is on metrics around revenue and growth, which on the surface, makes nothing but sense. At the same time we also know that bad metrics will undoubtedly produce bad outcomes. Squeezing customers for every last nickel often means the customer will find someone else to buy from. Trying to release more features or products may dilute the brand or risk quality....
As an Engineering Manager, I’m often trying to coach my team members to think about how to break down tasks. I recently had a more junior engineer take on a task we pointed as an 8. This is typically considered a large task and I did push to see if we could break it down. The team felt that the ticket really couldn’t be broken down logically, so I said let’s go for it and see what we learn....
As a manager, I review a lot of resumes. In perfect world, I could read hundreds of resumes and give each a fair, objective chance. The reality is, I need to filter things quickly, while still avoiding my internal biases. With that in mind, I wanted to suggest some simple guidelines candidates can use to help make my life easier, which in turn, offers a better chance moving forward in the process....
As a long time Emacs user and org-mode user, I was hopeful that org-roam could tame the plethora of paths offered for taking notes and keeping track of information. The key factor was understanding this article on How to Take Smart-Notes with Org-mode. I’ll admit that when I read the article I essentially just skimmed it and totally missed the way the author uses links to files as tags, rather than tag properties they talk about in the docs....
One inevitable part of engineering management is some form of ticket management. For most, that means using Jira, and I’ve yet to meet someone who likes it. However, despite the distaste for Jira, everyone knows if we didn’t have ticket tracking, getting things done would be messy and error-prone. Ticketing tools give you a way to visualize work to ensure you can organize and prioritize effectively. Thinking of Jira as a way to visualize work, as opposed to a big TODO list, makes it possible to have a visual representation of the work....
It shouldn’t be surprising that as a manger, you have a lot of meetings. There are the organization wide meetings, syncs with other managers, staff meetings, 1:1s, project meetings, etc. One thing I’ve tried to do (and struggled with quite a bit) is running efficient meetings with my team. I’ve gotten reasonably good feedback from my meetings, but at the same time, I’ve felt that I would have liked to have gotten more out of the meeting....
One of the hardest things going from programming to managing has been the change in output. People often write about it is challenging being a manager because you don’t get those quick wins like you do as a programmer. Some challenging bug doesn’t get fix in a day and you don’t get repeated test suite passes as you work. Instead, you are forced to look at the larger picture, waiting for projects to get to a state where they can be communicated out for public consumption....