Heartbeats: Keeping Strategies Alive
- James Stanier tl;dr: “The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been implemented in the time since the last heartbeat. It's a chance to show how the strategy is living and relevant, and that it's not just a document that was written once and then placed on the shelf.” James shares strategies for doing so.featured in #545
featured in #545
Engineering Team Meeting: Format & Topic Ideas
- Marc Gauthier tl;dr: “When I started managing the engineering department at my company, I wanted to have an interesting team meeting involving the entire team. My objective at the time was to set up a meeting that people would look forward to, going beyond simple team & company updates. It’s now been a few years since the first, and while not all presentations are a complete success, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.” Marc discusses the meeting format.featured in #545
featured in #545
When To Write Strategy, And How Much?
- Will Larson tl;dr: Will covers: (1) When to write strategy, in particular the pain points (like cross-team friction) and opportunities (like senior hires) that are good moments to start writing. (2) How much strategy your org can tolerate, avoiding the traps of writing so much that it’s ignored or so little that there’s not much impact. (3) Using strategy altitude – how permissive a given strategy is and where it’s implemented – to manage the overhead that strategies creates. (4) Mechanisms to debug whether you’re doing too much or too little strategy work.featured in #544
One On One Meeting Format Ideas
- Marc Gauthier tl;dr: “As a manager, doing one on one meetings with your direct reports is your most important tool. I’ve talked a bit before about opening lines, but I figured it could be interesting to dig into how I handle this every week with my teams. I think it’s important to have a clear format shared to direct reports. This frames the conversation and helps the manager fullfil the objective, while giving some insights to the direct report regarding what this is all about.”featured in #544
Enthusiasm: Managing Our Most Precious Resource
- Kent Beck tl;dr: “The enthusiasm-enhancing way to allocate people to tasks is to let the people allocate themselves. They have context, in the form of accountability and purpose and approximate proportions, but to preserve enthusiasm they must make their own decision. And a fired up engineer is five times (for some value of five) as valuable as that same engineer just putting in hours.”featured in #543
The 3 Motivational Forces Of Developers
- Ben Northrop tl;dr: “After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation. It undergirds all of his decisions and interactions. It predicts what kind of code he'll write, what technologies he'll prefer, and even how he'll succeed on a given assignment. And it's often quite easy to peg for any given developer after just a few days of working with him or her.”featured in #543
featured in #542
The 3 Motivational Forces Of Developers
- Ben Northrop tl;dr: “After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation. It undergirds all of his decisions and interactions. It predicts what kind of code he'll write, what technologies he'll prefer, and even how he'll succeed on a given assignment. And it's often quite easy to peg for any given developer after just a few days of working with him or her.”featured in #542