tl;dr:“It's a long story but I recently started a CTO role and it made me reflect again on what is success for me in a role like this: (1) Results. (2) How those results are achieved. (3) How you make people feel.” While most care about the results, the best way to achieve them in a way that endures is by focusing on the list above in reverse: If people feel good about being in the team, about working with you and others, about their learning, they'll excel at doing their part in implementing systems that deliver results and results will be sustainably achieved.
tl;dr:Everyone has a switch. Your job is to find it. If you don’t, all the latent energy this person has will remain untapped. To find that switch, you have to temporarily forget the work and focus on the human. Build a relationship. It’s never wasted time. “What is something you found really interesting recently? Teach me all about it.” is a good question to see what lights them up — and, if you pay attention, you’ll likely hear in the answer important clues that might help you change something at work.
tl;dr:Yelling at the weather sums up the reality of senior leadership in many companies when trying to “fix” a complex system. Paulo gives us a recipe to approach such a situation. The crux is to understand that failure is “the price of admission to discover the path to success,” and create a culture of rapid experimentation to embrace that philosophy. Paulo discusses this in detail here.
tl;dr:Paulo discusses the conflict between our desires - as engineers - to “crave certainty, order, and structure” and the constantly changing scope of our work. “If you’ve done it before, requirements are known. If someone else has done it before, requirements are knowable. If it’s never been done before by anyone, requirements will change.” and most of our work falls in this last space. Paulo believes this requires a “momentous shift in mindset” with how we approach our work with “less predicting & planning, more probing, sensing & responding.”
tl;dr:“Throughout my entire engineering management career, what percentage of the time did I spend in a state of overwhelm?” Paolo provides the tools to prevent you to become intentional with how you spend your time and energy: (1) Clarify what goals, and how they align with your team and company, so you have a framework to decide how to not spend your time. (2) Use the Energy Audit to create visibility on where your time, attention and energy are going. (3) Given your goals, focus on leverage instead of productivity. Use the modified Eisenhower Matrix to define what’s truly important and a multiplier of your input. (4) With all of the above, design your ideal week and overlay each actual week on top of it. Push yourself to reduce the gap, and use the two as a means to reflect and improve weekly. (5) Whatever you do, focus on that thing only.
tl;dr:"If I could pick one skill, and one skill only, this would be it - for any relationship, but especially so for the relationship with a manager. So many difficult conversations become a lot less difficult if only you get curious about the other person’s challenges and needs before getting into yours." Questions to ask are: What keeps my manager up at night? What is success for them now and in the long run? What pressures are they subject to? Where do they come from? What do they expect from me? And more.
tl;dr:Paolo discusses hesitating due to one's imposter syndrome: "How can we create the conditions to just start? How can we feel the fear… and do it anyway?" (1) Create a process… and then trust in it. (2) Use the Procrastination Pomodoro. (3) 80% is good enough. (4) Feed your own feedback loop. (5) Don’t seek to make the right decision. Make the decision right.
tl;dr:"It may not be obvious, but it’s one of the most common issues in product & engineering teams: different people are solving different problems, whether they realize it or not. And that is the root of much anxiety, frustration, and disappointment." Paulo advises us on how to reconcile such a situation.
tl;dr:"Why do so many processes tell people to behave slightly different from what common sense tells them to do?" Paulo discusses a framework to design processes: (1) Purpose: what is this process supposed to make either possible or significantly simpler? (2) Principles: what orients the design of this process towards its purpose? (3) Practices: how is the process to be executed?
tl;dr:"I’ll delve into how to write well in the context of driving effective organizational change that people do understand — and buy into." Clear writing should be intentional, emotional and empathetic. Paulo cites the SCARF framework as a tool to navigate the written document away from language that may feel threatening to those impacted by the organizational change.