SWLW #517: Cross-Pollination over Imposed Standards, Symptoms of a broken Product Culture, 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

​​Guiding Principle: Cross-Pollination Over Imposed Standards
4 minutes read.

"Cross-pollination encourages de facto standardisation while allowing for flexibility. Ensure everyone is aware of defaults but also has the autonomy to choose an alternate approach as appropriate." -- The challenge is not only to share the defaults, but also the critical requirements they solve for. You want to enable a better approach, which should be comparable to the default. It's up to us to "promote" (or sell) the default properly regarding what it solves and how to leverage it effectively. Don't assume people will understand or appreciate it without that marketing effort (documentation, how-to, demos, example code, etc.), even if it's an internal tool.

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Culture

People Explaining Their Tech Stack in 2022
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Make Meetings Work
4 minutes read.

Meetings are extremely expensive. Following the "Begin with the end in mind" and "Contributors not attendees" principles here can cut that investment and make sure you make them more effective. Don't just read the post, try to change your next meeting to work for you. You can even try to do some "Better Next" (retrospective) and send your thoughts as the meeting organizer or as an attendee. Your teammates will appreciate it.

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Barrels and Ammunition - Keith Rabois
2 minutes read.

A short and important reminder by Keith Rabois to get you to think about how you build a team. Do you have enough "barrels" to create a vision and align people around it? Do you have enough "ammunition" to execute the vision effectively? Are they happy in their position? Can you help people find a fitting role they'll enjoy and increase their impact?

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Symptoms of a Broken Product Culture — Part 1
9 minutes read.

Miguel Carruego shares the pitfalls to be aware of when building a product-led organization. The pitfalls of "IT mindset" and "Slow outcome velocity" are helpful as a sanity check for how we work today.

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Peopleware

The Iterative-Hypothesis Customer Development Method
15 minutes read.

Most of the format (and great discovery questions) Jason Cohen shares can also be helpful when working on internal products: "If you don’t come away knowing something new and actionable at the end of the interview, you’ve wasted your time and theirs."

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Skyrocket Your Productivity With the ‘Touch It Once’ Rule
4 minutes read.

Reducing the cognitive load as a leader is one of the most significant leverages to seek. We need to aim to make fewer decisions with higher quality every day. Nicole Bandes shares helpful tips to drive that mindset.

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Why You Feel Uncertain About Everything You Make
2 minutes read.

"Ask enough people for their opinion and you’ll receive whatever answer you’re looking for – plus plenty more you didn’t want to hear. The feedback cancels itself out. [...] Getting others’ opinion can be valuable, until it’s not. So we must choose carefully when and how we get it. And realize that ultimately, our own opinion is what makes our work original." -- Tobias van Schneider reminds me of Naval's "If you survey enough people, all of the advice will cancel to zero."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@_svs_: Everyone wants a process, just not the one they currently have.

@paulg: 10 yo asked how I know so much. I told him curiosity x time.



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.