SWLW #588: The bureaucratization of Agile, How your relationship with time shapes your career, and more

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

Seconds to Strategy: How Your Relationship With Time Shapes Your Career
6 minutes read.

Auren Hoffman wrote a great post you can use when planning your career and the next time you're interviewing someone: "How you should spend your time depends on what type of career timescale you are optimizing for. The longer the timescale you are optimizing for, the more you should spend reading (and gathering information). The shorter your timescale, the more you should spend doing (for muscle memory)."

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Culture

That One EC2 Instance You Forgot to Turn Off
1 minute read.

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

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The Bureaucratization of Agile
3 minutes read.

"If bureaucracy is the tool that a system has, then solutions look like different forms of bureaucracy." -- I highly recommend sharing Kevin Meadows's post with anyone dealing with structuring teams and processes.

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What to Do When Product Growth Stalls
9 minutes read.

This is an excellent post by Andrew Chen for everyone who builds products (mostly external products, but also helpful mindset and practices for internal products). Product Managers and Marketing folks have the intuition and numbers, at least most of them. I find that software engineers need to learn the tools and benchmarks to figure out how to become good partners with their peers when experimenting with ideas. This one is golden: "Admit it when people don’t want your product. There’s an ugly truth that when most products are put under a microscope, most of them simply don’t have the retention to sustain growth over time — this is pouring water into a leaky bucket."

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Manager of Managers — Outcomes Over Output
4 minutes read.

The reason that senior managers need to focus on outcomes is the outlook perspective. Nobody cares about what you did, only about themselves. So, your customers care about your product's impact on their lives. To stay closer to the output, this is excellent advice: "I have found a few techniques helpful in keeping me plugged in: participating in demos, architecture reviews, product reviews, etc. Other ways I’ve kept up are through PR reviews, metric dashboards, sprint reports, 1:1s, release notes, etc. Doing the above, you will inevitably find a deficiency. What you don’t want to do is undercut the people running your teams. You want to help, but not fix things yourself. Doing so, would certainly steal away coaching opportunities from those managers."

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Peopleware

Does Your Team Need a Meeting Reset?
7 minutes read.

Is it time to consider a broad reset of the company's meetings? You can start with your group's meetings to see which ones are re-added due to their value to others. The idea is not new, and every year is a good time to consider exploiting this tool of calendar reset.

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Escape the Competition Through Authenticity (Video)
3 minutes read.

Naval Ravikant will be considered one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Luckily, we can enjoy his work now. His superpower is articulating complex concepts in a sentence, sometimes a couple of words, making it memorable and effective. "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?" is a sentence I carry with me for years to find peace with the monkey in my head.

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The Secret to Work Life Balance
4 minutes read.

The "Work life balance gap" graph is a good capture of the complexity, and maybe the inherent internal dilemma (and suffering), for how and where we put our time. A helpful way to map this graph is to set the minimal thresholds to determine where a healthy intersection point of these (and many other) graphs might be. It will reveal your preferences. That's a lot.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@nickcammarata: I’m not sure I know anyone who self identifies as very happy in their normal life with all the activities who isn’t also at least pretty happy sitting down doing nothing (not even “meditating”). I think it’s hard to get around needing to figure out how to be happy doing nothing

@kunalb11: Life is short. Be known for impatience as much as competence.



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.