SWLW #528: Managing your career without a manager, Shopify implemented a calendar purge, and more.

Heya,

Happy holidays and happy new year everyone! As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Writing Is Magic
5 minutes read.

"Getting people's full, focused, attention on your ideas is very hard. Reading, if your team has a strong document culture, is one of the only ways to do that. You give people a couple pages to read, ideally on paper, and they're likely to be quiet and focus on understanding your ideas for at least a few minutes. You get to be there, in their heads, with nothing else, for a while. You get to lay out an argument, tell a story, present some data, or ask their opinion without interruption, without back-and-forth. Just your voice. There are very few other ways to do that." -- what an incredible way to capture the value of writing at work.

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Culture

Me Returning to Coding After a 1 Week Holiday
1 minute read.

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

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Management Debt
8 minutes read.

"Span of Control Issues" as a Management Debt can quickly create execution problems. Span of Control is not only about ratios of managers to ICs but also the quality of management skills your managers can perform. Which type of Management Debt do you experience today? Where should you invest? What's working well?

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What Are Executive Off-Sites Good For?
7 minutes read.

Running an effective off-site is incredibly difficult. Tom Critchlow provides excellent insights from other leaders and his own experience.

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KPIs for Early Stage CTOs
10 minutes read.

Britton Broderick covers almost every direction you can consider to measure. This one is important to remember given that metrics, like many things, are all about tradeoffs: "And remember, high performing teams follow power laws. Team performance doesn’t follow a normal distribution. This means that high performing teams are likely to far outpace the average. You're not looking for high performers individually, but how to build them into cohesive teams that hit their stride, complement each other, and push outside the bounds of a normal distribution through continuous learning."

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Jobs [sponsored]

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 Looking to hire for your team? Promote your open positions on SWLW! 

Peopleware

How to Get Promoted at Work
10 minutes read.

Steve Dennis's post is a gold mine for people who want to get promoted and increase their chances. I highly recommend reading the sections "Tell impact stories" and "Avoid the victim trap."

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Finding Your "Hedgehog" (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I tried writing down my take and was surprised at how effective this method can be. Try it out with a few peers (or friends) you respect their opinion.

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From Story Points to Slam Dunks — Planning for Success
8 minutes read.

Matthew Croker covers a heated topic on the value of Story Points in planning, and offers a different way to think about estimations to trigger better (and deeper) conversations: "We stop talking about sizing, and we start talking about possibility, which requires a mindset shift."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@SchrodingrsBrat: Being able to create your personal utopia out of indifferent reality is the best measure of intelligence. Success is just being able to have life the way you want it. Being “smart” is just the ability to get what you want.

@shreyas: Some favorite survival tactics of managers who don’t actually know how to make impact: (1) Need a re-org (2) Must hire for a key role (3) Need to fix another function (4) Have a severe staffing shortage (5) Organize a Strategy Summit (6) Need a re-org. Can often survive for years this way.



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.