SWLW #536: How to become more predictable, The age of cargo cult Agile must end, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Underpants Gnomes, Outcomes, and Intermittent Reinforcement
6 minutes read.

"I believe that in business acting on our ideas delivers a dopamine hit that overrides our ability to be more objective about our ideas." -- Jeff Patton with a great post explaining how we build (usually low value) products and how we can better leverage our behaviors.

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Culture

Midjourney AI Imagining Different Historical Variations of Spider-Man
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. Generative AI blows my mind.

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Your View of Management Is Upside Down
5 minutes read.

"This also explains the disappointing sensation of promotion. It is simply not a reward. It is the actual removal of services that you had previously been receiving. Very often, these are services you did not even know you were receiving. Problems came to you pre-digested. Dependencies on other teams were identified for you. Colleagues just appeared without your having to find, vet, and hire them. Someone above you sheltered you from demands from someone further above them. More and more of these services get stripped away – not added – as you climb the managerial ladder." -- Ethan Bond sees management as serving our clients (teammates). How do you see it?

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The Age of Cargo Cult Agile Must End
11 minutes read.

Tradeoffs. Unfortunately, it's all pretty bad. Luckily, there are many upsides. I read this post by Jason Yip and admire how one can apply critical thinking. Familiarize yourself with various methodologies to take inspiration and develop (copy & adjust) something that works for your organization.

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A Year of Scaling to a Multi-Hundred Person Engineering Organization at Pleo
6 minutes read.

The section on "Developing Our Capabilities through Training and Hiring" is one of these areas I feel most companies still struggle a lot with. An interesting approach is via an official peer mentorship program: "We launched a peer mentorship program that offered suggestions of mentorship topics based on the career framework and paired people across teams. Most important, the mentorship provides a sense of feeling connected to and supported by the tech community in the company."

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Peopleware

Why You Should Send a Weekly Summary Email
5 minutes read.

"In addition to the forward looking alignment aspects, it also enables you to make “invisible work” visible — i.e. the kind of work that is important but your manager might not otherwise notice. In some cases, this could simply be an opportunity for your manager to recognize these achievements. In other cases, it might be an opportunity for re-alignment, if your manager doesn’t agree that these tasks should have been high priority. In those cases, the weekly email again provides an opportunity to realign and course correct." -- Jens-Fabian Goetzmann with an idea I wish I could be more consistent with my hectic life. Making the invisible work visible is a powerful way to acknowledge and appreciate your teammates' work.

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How to Become More Predictable vs. How to Fail at Being More Predictable
3 minutes read.

As managers, we must pick the fundamentals and rituals the team will use to create a sense of togetherness. It creates momentum and enables predictability. It helps eliminate options. It reduces mental overhead.

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Peter Thiel’s Religion
21 minutes read.

David Perell is an excellent writer. Covering Peter Thiel's philosophy is a great way to get to know one of the brightest (and controversial) minds in our generation. This is such a powerful, long-term thinking concept: "Great people trade the temptations of today for the trophies of tomorrow. Think like you’re immortal. Place the eternal before the perishable. Treat people like you’ll know them for the next ten thousand years and work on the kinds of projects you’ll be proud to tell your grandchildren about. Live like you’ll be alive forever."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@awilkinson: "Here's the number I used to win the lottery" – Entrepreneurs giving advice

@earthlingworks: Super basic 2010 lean startup-ish lesson that seems forgotten: Identify riskiest assumptions and prove those right/wrong first Sometimes it’s “will people pay” but other times it’s: Can I get distribution, can I build a brand that stands out, can I deliver on the USP, etc



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.