SWLW #584: Why I'm not an SRE, Make something to learn more about what's inside you, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week.

 

This Week's Favorite

Make Something to Learn More About What's Inside You
5 minutes read.

“I know I’m being my “best self” when I’m making something.” — one sentence that captures so well how I feel. Mindful consumption of content is a valuable method to get inspiration, but without applying it somewhere, it’s easy to get lost in others’ worlds without realizing where we stand, how we want to create, and what makes us unique.

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Culture

Me Reviewing a Colleague’s Design
1 minute read.

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

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Talking to Customers Isn’t Enough
3 minutes read.

Learning to do Customer Interviews is an incredible skill to practice. You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to leverage it. This is helpful when building products for internal customers or for paying customers. David Peterson's advice on using the Five Whys method is an excellent way to nurture curiosity. It often won’t reveal the answer (the solution you need to build) but opens up a shared language you can use later on as you’ll be able to speak in ways your future customers care about.

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23 Mission Statement Examples (And How to Create Your Own)
9 minutes read.

Being able to articulate an inspiring vision and practical mission statement is a great way to align people together around a shared journey. The framework suggested, followed by the examples and their analysis, could help make you think about your company's vision and mission or even take it a few levels down to your group. After all, any meaningful journey is long and with many challenges. A strong narrative and stories help to create the shared language and motivation to help your team work together to get there.

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Useful Tradeoffs Are Multi-Dimensional.
4 minutes read.

Adding more dimensions to enable better decision-making is an interesting approach to consider. It either adds a constraint (fixed budget per investment) or allows a limited downside to reduce the risk of the decision (e.g., diversification). “When you work with someone who’s particularly good at this [adding dimensions], the entire idea of tradeoffs starts to melt away to be replaced by thoughtful solutions. […] Ultimately, you should only add a dimension to a tradeoff if it provides significantly better outcomes for the stakeholders involved. Once you start thinking about this idea, there’s a temptation to add dimensions everywhere, but avoid additional dimensions that make things decisions harder to explain without greatly improving your options.”

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Peopleware

Why I'm Not an SRE
3 minutes read.

I like this takeaway of not putting ourselves into boxes: “I just don’t want to be boxed in, as simple as that. For that reason, I don’t identify as an SRE, and I just stick to “engineer” (luckily not a protected title in the US). That way I don’t let a reliability bias hold me back from making hard tradeoffs when the time comes.” — The same applies to being an Architect or a Tester. I think wearing the hats of an architect, a tester, a reliability engineer, a security engineer, a performance engineer, etc., should all be used to various degrees based on our product maturity and business needs.

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Why Do Companies With Major Resources & Distribution Often Make Mediocre Products That Don’t Reach Their Potential? Operators Optimizing for Optics (Thread)
7 minutes read.

The story behind “Operators Optimizing for Optics” is insightful and hits home for many of us who’ve seen it. It’s easy to judge the situation from the outside, but when you’re involved in the story, it’s rare to know what is right and wrong. Often, you’ll “feel” something is off, but making the proper adjustments can feel that you didn’t give it a real chance. Then, it’s too late, and you know you should have done something months back, but the Sunk Cost fallacy hurts as it reflects deeply on you. Above all, understanding the leader's qualities and ensuring they’re a strong match to the team's needs is where you need to shine. This is true at all levels.

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The Seven Things a Corporate Chief of Staff Does
7 minutes read.

This post by Ben Balter is one of the best ones I’ve seen to explain the role. Use it as a framework to extract areas you want to focus on and work together to set expectations for building effective relationships. Any organization at a specific size requires such a role to leverage executives further, leaning on their natural strengths to complement each other.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@asmartbear: I don’t like “capturing value” and “leaving money on the table.” Sounds like an adversarial game. I like: Create tons of value for customers, then split that bounty via price, loyalty, and advocacy. Good for customers, and good for you.

@TheConquerMM: Hang around with people who motivate you, inspire you, and challenge you to become better.



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.