Emotional Signposting: Why You Should Tell People How To Feel
- Wes Kao tl;dr: “If you share information that’s not obviously positive or negative, you must proactively tell people how they should feel. Give context to the information, data, or fact. If there’s even a slight chance your audience might benefit from the extra clues, I would consider using signposting. It’s super fast for you, and super helpful for them.” Wes shares examples.featured in #517
featured in #517
Getting Buy-In To Get Things Done
- Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya tl;dr: “One way to get people to go from agreeing it should happen to actually doing the work is to get buy-in. When you have buy-in, people will actively work toward the goal instead of just agreeing to it. Getting buy-in is hard. It's also extremely rewarding, and it's how you get real work done as a leader. Without it, the work falls away when you're not around. With it, everyone will push forward together.”featured in #517
Making Engineering Strategies More Readable
- Will Larson tl;dr: “A complete engineering strategy has five components: explore, diagnose, refine, policy, and operation. However, it’s actually quite challenging to read a strategy document written that way. That’s an effective sequence for creating a strategy, but it’s a challenging sequence for those trying to quickly read and apply a strategy without necessarily wanting to understand the complete thinking behind each decision.” Will covers: (1) Why the order for writing strategy is hard to reading strategy. (2) How to organize a strategy document for reading. (3) How to refactor and merge components for improved readability. (4) Additional tips for effective strategy documents.featured in #516
Getting Buy-In To Get Things Done
- Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya tl;dr: “One way to get people to go from agreeing it should happen to actually doing the work is to get buy-in. When you have buy-in, people will actively work toward the goal instead of just agreeing to it. Getting buy-in is hard. It's also extremely rewarding, and it's how you get real work done as a leader. Without it, the work falls away when you're not around. With it, everyone will push forward together.”featured in #516
Delegating Gets Easier When You Get Better At Explaining Your Ideas
- Wes Kao tl;dr: Wes developed the framework below when explaining projects to direct reports, dotted-line reports, vendors, agencies, contractors, recruiters, and anyone she’s managing formally or informally. Here are five areas to cover: (1) Increase comprehension: Am I explaining in a way that’s easy to understand? (2) Increase buy-in: Am I getting the person excited? (3) Derisk: Am I addressing obvious risks? (4) Confirm alignment: Am I giving them a chance to speak up? (5) Feedback loop: Am I creating the shortest feedback loop possible?featured in #516
Delegating Gets Easier When You Get Better At Explaining Your Ideas
- Wes Kao tl;dr: Wes developed the framework below when explaining projects to direct reports, dotted-line reports, vendors, agencies, contractors, recruiters, and anyone she’s managing formally or informally. Here are five areas to cover: (1) Increase comprehension: Am I explaining in a way that’s easy to understand? (2) Increase buy-in: Am I getting the person excited? (3) Derisk: Am I addressing obvious risks? (4) Confirm alignment: Am I giving them a chance to speak up? (5) Feedback loop: Am I creating the shortest feedback loop possible?featured in #515
featured in #515
Sensible Benchmarks For Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Your Engineering Organization
- Rebecca Murphey tl;dr: A lot of engineering leaders are looking for benchmarks to understand what “good” looks like. The problem is, most benchmarks out there offer a long list of metrics and encourage spending time on areas that are already going well. In this blog post, you’ll learn how we landed on the five fundamental metrics in our benchmarks and how you should use them to drive meaningful change in your engineering organization.featured in #515
A Useful Productivity Measure?
- James Shore tl;dr: James is using value-add capacity i.e. the % of time on value-add work, as a productivity proxy for the eng organization. While this number is easily prone to gaming, it shifted the conversation from constantly pressuring the eng team to deliver more, to helping it reduce the time engineers spend on non-value-adding activities.featured in #515