/Leadership

7 Questions I Get Asked Frequently As An EM

- Nitin Dhar tl;dr: Nitin provides example answers to each of the following: (1) What is the KTLO cost for the team? (2) What is the impact of project X? (3) When will project X be live to customers? (4) What's the overall impact of your team? (5) How much tech debt do you have? (6) What's the team's mean time to recovery (MTTR) from incidents? (7) How much churn (throwaway work) have you seen in recent sprints?

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Monkey Business

- Subbu Allamaraju tl;dr: “The metaphor helps debug the root causes behind managers struggling with busy calendars, not investing in themselves, not having detached vacations, or, more importantly, not having time to be strategic. In this article, let me introduce that metaphor visually and point out some techniques to address the root causes.”

featured in #556

7 Questions I Get Asked Frequently As An EM

- Nitin Dhar tl;dr: Nitin provides example answers to each of the following: (1) What is the KTLO cost for the team? (2) What is the impact of project X? (3) When will project X be live to customers? (4) What's the overall impact of your team? (5) How much tech debt do you have? (6) What's the team's mean time to recovery (MTTR) from incidents? (7) How much churn (throwaway work) have you seen in recent sprints?

featured in #556

Slow Deployment Causes Meetings

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “If you want more changes to get through, you need to expand the far end of the hose, to increase deployment capacity. You can do this the hard way, by reducing the deployment cycle and dealing with the ensuing chaos, or the harder way, by increasing the number of changes per deployment (better tests, better monitoring, better isolation between elements, better social relationships on the team). But don’t try to reduce overhead. That’ll just lead inevitably to a series of meetings on how to reduce meetings. At least that will keep you from trying to ship too much code, though.”

featured in #556

What Conditions Make Developers Thrive Most?

- Lizzie Matusov tl;dr: (1) Agency: Developers have the ability to voice disagreements and influence how their work is measured, which empowers them to take ownership of their contributions. (2) Motivation and Self-Efficacy: A developer’s motivation to work on code they are passionate about, confidence in their problem-solving abilities, and the sense of making tangible progress. (3) Learning Culture: A thriving environment encourages continuous learning and sharing of knowledge among team members, fostering growth and innovation. (4) Support and Belonging: The feeling of being supported by their team and accepted for who they are.

featured in #555

Stars And Guardians

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “There are lots of teams tasked with risk reduction: legal, security, and finance just to name a few. These teams generally err on the side of moving more slowly or saying no entirely. Other teams like sales, engineering, and design are generally in roles that involve risk creation. They tend to be inclined to say yes to new ideas in the pursuit of new forms of value.” This organizational phenomenon is called Stars and Guardians, and Andrew discusses how to lead with both. 

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How To Start A New Role

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: Mike shares his 90-day plan for starting a new role as an executive. “These types of plans are not set in stone. You probably know very little about the company, the people, the operations, the issues, etc. despite numerous rounds of interviews. You will learn more in the first week of full time work than you will in all your interviews. You need to be nimble on your feet and prepared to deviate from your plan when necessary. If you were hired because of a crisis and you can’t wait a month or two to make a critical decision, obviously make the decision. Don’t wait just because your plan says so.”

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Testing Strategy: Avoid The Waterfall Strategy Trap With Iterative Refinement

- Will Larson tl;dr: “If I could only popularize one idea about technical strategy, it would be that prematurely applying pressure to a strategy’s rollout prevents evaluating whether the strategy is effective. Pressure changes behavior in profound ways, and many of those changes are intended to make you believe your strategy is working while minimizing change to the status quo (if you’re an executive) or get your strategy repealed (if you’re not an executive). Neither is particular helpful.”

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Conducting A Time Audit

- Andy Sparks tl;dr: The founder of Visa “preached that great managers spent 50% of their time managing themselves, 25% managing up, 20% managing across, and 5% managing down. In comparison, most actual managers preoccupy themselves with a hell of a lot more downward management than 5% of their time.”

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What Does A Date Actually Mean?

- James Stanier tl;dr: “But this isn't an article about how bad we are at estimating, nor does it offer any solutions for you to getting better at estimating. In fact, I want to focus on why dates are pretty dangerous things to be throwing around in the first place, and what an alternative might look like that could save you a lot of pain.”

featured in #554