SWLW #511: Tackle the monkey first, Management by metrics leads us astray, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join our SWLW community in Slack - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​A Friend Just Asked if I Have "Personal Values." I Don't, but I've Had These 6 Points Swirling Around My Brain for the Past 8 Years
3 minutes read.

Great take by Khe Hy that made me think about what makes me operate. Such takes made me think, write and share before my decisioning framework for "Am I happy at work?" and "Mental Models I try to live by." What would you write?

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Culture

The World's 30 Most Beautiful Bookshops
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. I need to see these places IRL.

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Tackle the Monkey First
3 minutes read.

"It takes a lot of careful cultural engineering and long-term commitment from managers to get teams to run cheerfully at breaking their prototypes and proving their ideas wrong." -- Astro Teller writes it well. It feels obvious, yet so often we see companies run proof of concept without considering the actual risks they want to tackle (e.g. benchmarking a battle-tested 10 years technology on trivial use-cases)

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How Management by Metrics Leads Us Astray
4 minutes read.

If you shift from measuring metrics as a proxy of success to leveraging them as constraints, it might improve your creativity and progress. Then you can decide how much of the feedback you're gathering is quantitive (collecting numbers of usage/behaviors) and how much is qualitative (talking with humans). Jakob Greenfeld's framing is spot on: "I’ll look at all the facts and take everything in, even the stuff that can’t be measured, and then I’ll just go with my gut."

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How We Built Personio’s Three-Year CX Strategy
8 minutes read.

As many of us start thinking about targets and budget for next year, reading Jonas Rieke's post can give you the inspiration to experiment with a new approach (or parts of it you like).

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Peopleware

Be Good-Argument-Driven, Not Data-Driven
7 minutes read.

"It’s demoralizing to feel that your success, in the eyes of the organization, is defined by a metric that is either out of your control or doesn’t match your convictions about how to best serve users and the organization. [...]Metrics are tempting. They promise easy answers. Resist! Be skeptical! Have no tolerance for poor arguments made with data. Keep intrinsic motivation alive." -- Richard Marmorstein's suggestion offers a good balance that leaders in the organization should absorb and act upon. Anyone who tried to collect data to make an argument sees the fragility as decisions have multiple dimensions and plenty of known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns we experienced before.

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Been Thinking a Lot About Peak Performance, Genuine Excellence, and What Really Matters for It. Here Are 19 Habits and Principles, All Based on Years of Research, Writing, and Coaching (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I like (and agree with) Brad Stulberg's insights on building a healthy, successful, and sustainable career. My favorite one was: "Care Deeply - Not giving your all on something about which you care deeply can be a way of copping out. It gives you an excuse if things don’t go how you want them to. Giving your all, leaving every bit out there, exposes you. It makes you vulnerable. But that’s the point."

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First Rule of the Team: Size
4 minutes read.

A good read for new manager-of-managers considering the org structure they want to form. Thinking of the parameters you'd look at when considering the team size is the point I'm taking from this post.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@reidhoffman: Building your network matters not just for career success, but because the friendships formed along the way shape your sense of happiness, connection, and meaning. But how many of us slow down to be gracefully deliberate in our friendships and reflect on how to deepen them?

@swyx: The new engineering mantra should be: (1) Make it work (2) Make it safe (3) Make it fast. Security/Robustness needs to come earlier in the engineering conversation, and once you've sorted out performance as well, you've done 80% of what you need to "make it right".



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.