SWLW #549: Leading through multiple re-orgs, Fire and Motion, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

Potential Impacts of Large Language Models on Engineering Management
5 minutes read.

Shy Alter gives us a few ideas on how LLM startups might look to help managers get faster feedback and provide them with insights and suggestions to become better leaders for their teams. Do you have other ideas that come to mind? Try them out in your next hackathon.

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Culture

And I Thought Our CI Setup Was Impressive...
1 minute read.

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

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How to Accelerate the Adoption of Your Internal Platform
7 minutes read.

Javier Turegano with a post that every platform team needs to execute to improve their product thinking and learn to leverage product management practices. I think the "Flex out your Internal marketing muscle" section is often overlooked and highly important if you want to create buzz and get more early adopters who can become fans of the new platform.

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Leading Through Multiple Reorgs
9 minutes read.

Allison McMillan with interesting stories from her days at GitHub going through multiple reorgs. I think this takeaway is important to remember when you make a change to promote a different direction for the company: "with reorgs it’s really easy to land on an us versus them path as a fast way to gain trust from your team. It’s easy to slip into this space, use it as a chance to reframe yourself. Figure out what talking points feel right for you that don't fall on that sort of us versus them path."

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The Black Box
4 minutes read.

This story can feel so real because we've all been there. Larissa's comment is the proper reaction to John's writing: "I’m dying and laughing and crying."

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Peopleware

Stop Being Who You Aren’t
5 minutes read.

"Rather than pretending that everything was okay, when it wasn’t, we both opened up to each other, and I will always be grateful that we did. [...] I’m not advocating for careless or excessive vulnerability, though. Vulnerability is like fire, which, when handled well, can cook meals, heat homes, and ward off predators. But when it’s handled poorly, it can burn you. I encourage you to get familiar with the felt experience of safe vulnerability. It’s just a little bit past your comfort zone, but not so far past it that it would put you off being vulnerable again if your moment of courage backfires. [...] Stay alive to the moments when you could step into that tender space just outside of your comfort zone and see if the person you’re with joins you in it." -- Michael Ashcroft with beautiful words and life advice. This can be helpful for us at work and outside of it. Life as an archaeologist (vs. architect) is a great mindset.

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When I Was a Chief of Staff, One Meeting Generated More Stress Than *All the Others* in the Week. What Was It? Our Tuesday Weekly Business Review (Thread)
4 minutes read.

"Empower a meeting moderator. Business leaders have a unique ability to get diverted into discussions about how we should measure a thing, rather than how the thing is going. The meeting moderator helps you get through the agenda. [...] Be systematic about actions. Assign them, track them in a tool, and check in on their completion. Slack or email are not the right tool (they are too ephemeral)" -- Archie's tips on running effective business review are golden. Running such meetings can be extremely effective on multiple levels.

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Fire and Motion
6 minutes read.

"An object at rest tends to remain at rest. [...] Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started." -- This is why I love practical self (and peer) pressure using deadlines (e.g., setting a meeting to present your work in 2 days) or working with someone else to kickstart a significant effort.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@cecile_mcm: “Too many people bring the best of themselves to work, and bring the leftovers home.” -- Esther Perel. Ouch. 30yo me would have benefitted from hearing that. She would probably have been too distracted by the singing of the career sirens for the message to land properly though.

@aymanalabdul: New CEO: I see 100 different opportunities we can pursue. Experienced CEO: Let's nail this 1 really big opportunity



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.