SWLW #398: 2 years of studying production incidents closely, Building effective Feedback Loops, and more...

I hope that you and your family are doing well, and you are able to find a new rhythm in this hard situation.

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

This Week's Favorite

​​Findings From the Field: Two Years of Studying Incidents Closely (Slides)
6 minutes read.

John Allspaw has so many insights and suggestions to learn from when dealing and learning from production incidents. Slide 14 is incredibly important: spending more time figuring out how difficult it was to debug the problem (rather than on what caused it and how we fixed it) can help you spot the tools and practices you need to adopt.

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Culture

How I Feel When I Send a Really Good Email
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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Can Engineering Productivity Be Measured?
6 minutes read.

"Your execs should well know this: how would THEY like to be evaluated based on, like, how many emails they send in a day? Do they believe that would be good for the business? Or would they object that they are tasked with the holistic success of the org, and that their roles are too complex to reduce to a set of metrics without context?" -- I've been thinking a lot about the health and quality of our engineering team. I think that having a clear expectation of different roles in the organization (aka Career Ladder) helps with that. As Charity Majors suggests, it sets the right behaviors (not metrics) and outcome (not output) the organization is promoting.

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My Favorite Takeaways From the Book "How to Have Impossible Conversations" Book (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Erik Torenberg will make you buy one of the best books to give technical leads and managers, sharing his takeaways from the book. This book with Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke should help them level up their skills around having difficult conversations. With the tools shared in these books, they can grow faster (get more feedback) and become better mentors to others.

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Ideas Aren't Cheap
5 minutes read.

I love this mindset by Justin Jackson, as it's true for everything you do. We set the ceiling of success by picking which ideas or projects to promote - as internal projects in the company, a new process to experiment with, side-projects we do on the weekends, blog posts we write, etc. Spend more time figuring out the size of the audience, e.g. how many engineers will use the tool you suggest?

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Peopleware

Feedback Loops
5 minutes read.

I'm going to use Daniel Gross's formula a lot when dealing with my habits I'd like to see in my life: P(ease of acquisition) * P(pleasure of activity) * P(clarity on future reward/penalty) * mood. This is also useful to make sure I do the right things (activities I do or promote) as I'm trying to increase my circle of impact, thinking more about the future reward (impact).

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Let’s Talk About High Agency: An Attitude I’ve Seen in Every Successful Product Manager & Leader I’ve Known. Some Ppl Are Born/Raised With High Agency. It Can Also Be Developed Later in Life. High Agency Is a Prerequisite for Making a Profound Impact in One's Life & Work (Thread)
4 minutes read.

I'd share this with hiring managers and everyone on the team who seek to increase their impact on the organization. Talent is hard to measure (you know one when you see one), but applying High Agency principles is a choice we make, like picking a Growth Mindset over Fixed Mindset. Make sure you have a few questions that can help you spot High Agency while also looking for high integrity.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@Suhail: Speed is a near universal value in most startups: speed to ship, speed of initial ux, speed of the app loading, speed of decision making, speed of hiring or firing, speed of customer support. Speed is your best defense while you have no moat.

@dvassallo: Life becomes much more pleasant once you start treating it as an adventure rather than a competition.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.