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Via Farnam Street :

I recently came across " Things I’ve learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager " by Jampa Uchoa and I loved it so much I wish I wrote it. Here are my favorite parts:  Everyone needs to care about the product : the most evident symptom of this is not happening is when we decide to hire QA or UX because we think they have the knowledge to fix the problem. Instead, the problem stays the same, and the flow of work breaks down. 60% of your job is being the cheerleader: the author mentions being the cheerleader for the team, and I would argue that we should also be the cheerleaders for the product. Your goal is for your team to thrive without you : I don't recall who said that leaders should be evaluated on their team's performance after they've left. It was probably former Navy captain David Marquet in "Turn the ship around! "

 Perspective is worth 80 IQ points Alan Kay’s line “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points” isn’t about literal intelligence. He’s pointing out that the ability to shift viewpoint, reframe a problem, or see a system from a higher level often produces more insight than raw analytical horsepower. Many problems look hard only because they’re being viewed from a narrow frame. Change the frame, and what looked complex becomes obvious or solvable. Why Perspective Feels Like “+80 IQ” A few mechanisms: Reframing reduces complexity. Seeing the structure of a problem—rather than its surface detail—often collapses the difficulty. It mimics what we associate with “smartness.” Most people get stuck in the default frame. They try to optimize inside an assumption instead of questioning it. Someone who steps outside can leapfrog them without being “smarter.” Systems thinking detects leverage points. Understanding how components interact exposes shortcuts, invariants, and constraints th...

The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work . Chuck Close -  via Farnam Street  - emphasis mine I saw Mark at MOMA a while back and was blown away by the superhuman attention to detail

What we call perception is other people's reality Have you ever heard somebody say: yes, but we are perceived as <adjective>? as a way to say we're not quite like that, it's their fault for not seeing us differently, etc. In other words we're not taking responsibility. Stop right there and remember that how we are perceived is other people's reality. And it's our responsibility to change it , should we not be ok with it. And it's our fault if we don't. As the saying goes: we have to deal with world as it is, not as we wish it it would be

A wise man said: Our ideas can be either ignored or misunderstood. And we don't get to choose. After a certain point it does not matter how much we refine our communication, it will never mean exactly what we think it does. And that's why it's more important to listen, than to talk: so that we can correct what must be corrected and ignore the rest because it will be distracting.

Accuracy is more important than precision! Let me illustrate that with an example: I need to measure the length of a piece of wood, let's say its real length is 10cm. Accuracy is how close I am to 10cm in the measurement, and precision is the number of decimal places (or error range, if you want) you can read out. If I measured with an extremely precise instrument and it said the piece of wood is 9.855 cm (3 decimal places) and another one that gave me 9.9, the first one would be very precise than the second but less accurate. Ultimately the second measurement is just more useful for practical purposes. Same happens with planning and estimates. An estimate of 18.55 man days for a piece of work is only as good as it is close the real value. If the work happens to take 21 days, then just saying three weeks is more accurate (but less precise). So let's say you make a year-long plan: it's more important that the plan is accurate than it is precise because that will mean that wh...

Inspired by Matthew Skelton's comment on Wholehearted I decided to read the book . This is not a review of the book, merely a note of the most important (to me, at least) take-aways. Being "whole" Why is it called wholehearted? The answer is given in the introduction and this helped me file the book in the right "box": a thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, [...] it is unwhole. Mike Burrows then gives examples of situations in which we experience that "magical chemistry" that makes performing (in a group of people) effortless. This is (at least to me) a powerful revelation and a great way to define what I get to experience from time to time when my organization just performs. When that happens we are whole. And it's an awesome experience. The other insight that I got is that a business is always "at war": with the market. But when it also goes to war against itself because of...

Besides the two breathtaking episodes on TSMC and Dr. Morris Chang , I am just 10 minutes into  The Art of Selling Enterprise Software (with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott) and then this quote blows my mind so much I had to pause listening to write it down: I always tell people in sales, and I said it then, performance is the price of freedom. I never wanted to sit in internal meetings and have a boss tell me what to do or how to do it. What I would just tell them is, I’ll be number one in the country or number one in the world. Just let me run. I'll just add that this should not be the case for Sales only. (I think I've found another favorite  podcast  😅 , and I got the t-shirt )

Another illuminating quote from Matthew Skelton , posting about Mike Burrows book Wholehearted : Don't re-organize people; re-organize purpose This made immediately sense to me, as I often find that teams that struggle to perform are teams that don't have purpose or have lost it or are so removed from their outcomes that they mechanically complete the next thing. Also, this once again shows how crucial the role of the chain of command is for providing this purpose (the why), making a compelling case against micro-managers, or we-need-a-process-for-everything managers.

One of the things I like the most about Accelerate is how it puts the focus on Culture and how a (measurable) Culture affects information flow. In other words, you can have a great working place and be business-effective (the two are not mutually exclusive, in fact they compound each other). Also, Accelerate introduced Generative Culture to a wider audience. Recently, I read the  Poor Charlie's Almanac and one of the things that caught my attention was the inversion principle . In my words: Inversion says that, often, the best way to solve a problem is to ask ourselves how to cause the problem, and then stopping/avoiding doing that I've set a goal to apply the inversion principle more in my activities, and today I said: what if I applied it to Culture? Being the lazy person that I am I asked Claude the following question: you are a manager in a medium-sized organization. How can you actively disrupt the flow of information in order to reduce the organization's effectivene...

Came across this interesting article  by Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya on sw ownership vs stewardship (think of Github codeowners feature) and I love how it explains why stewardship is a much better term to use in this context: Owners are concerned with the value of what they own. Stewards are concerned with how well it can serve the group. And this makes all the difference in producing better outcomes.

A note-to-self kind of post on a playbook to turning around a struggling sw engineering team. Core principles always behave trustworthily slow down and make time to address problems do you have the right people? if you can't get consensus, seek consent Foundational engineering best practices With regards to engineering best practices, the following are foundational and should be part of the execution somewhere between steps 4 and 8 of the playbook: trunk-based development continuous integration no separate tester or devops team (this can be relaxed after the team begins performing), seek out a stream-aligned team instead SCRUM with its process is useful to align the team and at last one main stakeholder automate as much as you can, especially the parts that come up often for discussion; one obvious but often overlooked example are customized coding styles (use the consent-over-consensus principle to reach a decision) If the team resists them or does not make progress, then see the...

When you have, when your engineers know what the right answer is, but they also feel that the right answer is culturally unobtainable, you have a cultural problem. Bryan Cantrill on Intel after Gelsinger @ 33:22

One of the things I always tell to those who come to seeking advice on a process improvement is the following: prepare for the inevitable downturn: things will get better in the short term, but then something bad will happen and things will get much worse than they are now. This is ok, and totally expected. Be prepared for it, know that the only way forward is through and then things will really get better. Then I usually draw this curve in the air with my hands: Most people stop at the first downturn, and that why most process improvements fail. Enough failures and people stop believing in any improvement at all, creating a death spiral. Another way to look at this is to think about is described in Gary Gruver's book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development : [...] after you have chosen an approach you don't need to worry about getting the advantages of that design because it will come naturally. Where you need to provide management focus is on addressing the dis...

Besides Entropy , the Buffett/Munger duo is another rabbit hole I find myself going down into often in these last days of the Xmas break. I liked this quote in particular: We can handle bad news, but we don't like them late

“The quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life.” Pick your work colleagues and culture wisely. One third of your awake time is spent at work.

The best people (game-changers) leave when they run out of things to learn.

There's one bit of this excellent piece by John Cutler that really caught my attention, and I've added it to my bag of leadership tricks (emphasis mine): Could you help me understand this for a second? Say <insert the thing that's being discussed here>; what would I see more or less of? Love how such a simple sentence can help turn a vague, fluffy concept into something more concrete that can be used as a basis for an effective conversation. Later on John Cutler explains: Describing actual behaviors can be extremely powerful. It cuts through the context collapse that tends to accompany vague concepts. I found this very effective when trying to push for change such the one outlined in  A Practical, Step-by-Step Guide to Wiring a Winning Organization from the Middle , and in particular this bit on page 131 (emphasis mine): Finally, incorporate into the message proof that these concepts actually work to be prepared to meet those who will oppose you . When leading from t...

Excellent post  ( LinkedIn ) by  Iccha Sethi  tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics. The graphics that sums it up is the reproduced on the side (I've remade it using SankeyMATIC  as I felt the original graphics did not make it justice). Interested? Now go read the article, it will be worth your time!