/Leadership

Ad Hoc Infrastructure

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “My intention in this note is to reclaim the phrase ad hoc from those who use it as a pejorative, especially as applied to infrastructure. Instead, building infrastructure ad hoc is the safest, most efficient strategy. It carefully balances the risks inherent in creating infrastructure, stages investment, and realizes economies of scale.”

featured in #546

Technical Coherence

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “Software development slows down over time. I wrote a whole book to help leaders reverse this slowdown and the central point of the book is a process any engineering leader can apply. I call this process Technical Coherence and you can mostly achieve it in a single meeting with your leaders. You can implement it in your org gradually or all at once.”

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Differing Values In A Team Are Costly

- Raphael Gaschignard tl;dr: “A team has a set of values, and members of those teams have values. If everyone is in perfect alignment, you might argue that there are blind spots. But if people are highly performant along those axes, then the blind spots almost don't matter. Meanwhile, if you have a team of 2 people, and they have a huge values gap, their job now becomes a tug-of-war, on top of the normal work of building things.”

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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. 

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Demanding And Supportive

- Ravi Gupta tl;dr: “Most people think of demanding and supportive as opposite ends of a spectrum. You can either be tough or you can be nice. But the best leaders don’t choose. They are both highly demanding and highly supportive. They push you to new heights and they also have your back.”

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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. 

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Let Small Fires Burn

tl;dr: “Humans are bad at judging the absolute value of things. We can't estimate tasks, can't assess what's important, and we're poor predictors of impact. But we’re really good at taking two problems and saying "Yep that one's worse than the other one". You can take this insight and use it to create an ordered list of priorities. Go pair-wise through your fires, swap to put the bigger fire on top, and after n^2 iterations you'll have a stack ranked list of fires from biggest to smallest.”

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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. 

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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.”

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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