SWLW #613: Demanding and supportive, The map is not the territory, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week.  

 

This Week's Favorite

Demanding and Supportive
3 minutes read.

"Most people think of demanding and supportive as opposite ends of a spectrum. You can either be tough or you can be nice. But the best leaders don’t choose. They are both highly demanding and highly supportive. They push you to new heights and they also have your back. What I’ve come to realize over time is that, far from being contradictory, being demanding and supportive are inextricably linked. It’s the way you are when you believe in someone more than they believe in themselves." -- Ravi Gupta wrote it so beautifully. Many of us want to be both demanding and supportive. To our family, to our friends, to our teammates, but above all and before all - to ourselves.

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Culture

"Did You Finish Writing That PRD?"
1 minute read.

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

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The Map Is Not the Territory
9 minutes read.

Mario Caropreso is spot on with his observation: "In order to ensure Operational Excellence is prioritised, it is important to create a relentless focus on the customer. In a healthy engineering team, the starting point should always be the customer. [...] The problem is that usually the customer is exactly the person whose voice is missing when this question is asked, thus it’s important to find ways to represent the customer’s point of view in these discussions."

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Building With Purpose: How to Explain Developers That They Are Wasting Company Money
5 minutes read.

Asking the question of how success would look like, in metrics or otherwise, can be a great way to align people on the outcome everyone seeks to experience. Once you have a few ways to explain how success looks like, try to offer painful tradeoffs to see which are more valuable to the stakeholders and the business. To counter the automatic reaction of bloated planning, I find it helpful to use a time constraint (e.g. "we'll use the next 2 days to complete alignment and set goals and tradeoffs").

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One on One Meeting Format Ideas
6 minutes read.

This is an excellent post for managers who seek ways to have effective 1:1s with their teammates, going beyond the obvious project status update that doesn't help to build deeper relationships.

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Peopleware

Circle of Competence - Mental Model
4 minutes read.

The Circle of Competence idea can be a powerful method to extract both feedback and insights from your peers and managers (across levels). It will help map out how the organization sees you, where they think your strength is, and how you can increase it if that's something you wish to achieve. So next time you have a 1:1 or meeting with someone you trust, ask them: "What do you think looks easy for me to do quickly and with excellent quality that others usually struggle with?"

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Priorities of A Great Engineering Leader
5 minutes read.

Roni Poyas with a great post, covering the fundamentals of engineering leadership. I loved Roni's "Collection Of Potential Leader Success Traits" and think it can be a great practice to write your own view from different perspectives (team, stakeholders, yourself).

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The Myth of the First 90 Days
5 minutes read.

How quickly should you start shifting the team's operational cadence and strategy? Mapping out the goals and purpose of the team, where it should focus, and where it should expand (future opportunities) is what you should start with. Creating momentum in the wrong direction might feel good, but it's not sustainable or valuable. You have many ways to influence. Figure out which unique strength you bring to the table that the team needs now.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@shreyas: In any org, the more advanced the math you use & the more incomprehensible the chart you show, the more credible & correct it will seem. Counterintuitively, this bias is greater in top tier companies because of the implicit culture of needing to project a high IQ all the time.

@StartupArchive_: A long-term commitment is the only arbitrage opportunity left in startups “Most companies have a 2-3 year time horizon. But companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work. If you think about it that way from the very beginning, you will make very different and much better decisions. I think this is the only arbitrage opportunity left in the market. Almost no one makes a fairly long-term commitment to a new project. But if you do that, you will think in a different way, you will hire different people, and it will work very well.”



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.