SWLW #470: Agility ≠ Speed, OOPS Writeups, My Favorite PM Interview Set, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​Agility ≠ Speed
9 minutes read.

"An obsession with speed often overtakes the core values of agile software development. It’s not just the development of software; it’s the development of working software. And we should be cautious of any language or technique that optimises around project management measures. Software development is better thought of in terms of product development than project management, therefore time to market is typically less important than time in market. Sprinting matters less than endurance." -- A must-read by Kevlin Henney on software estimation, the difference between velocity and speed, using the wrong terminology, and what Agile is all about (hint: not measuring team's speed).

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

CEO Bragging About Features That Don’t Exist Yet vs. The Eng Team
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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Broken State of Data
7 minutes read.

“many organizations seem to have left out data in their microservices and dev ops transformations of the prior decade. These transformations radically changed technology and culture through massive decentralization of infrastructure, people, and responsibilities. Yet, we still see large data engineering organizations struggling between producers and consumers of data, holding the problematic parts.” -- Subbu Allamaraju writes about one of the biggest challenges all companies will face with now and in the future. This is both an organizational problem and a technological one.

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OOPS Writeups
7 minutes read.

Lorin Hochstein shares a template they use at Netflix to document incident analysis and learn from that. Which parts would you take from that and use in your company?

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Optimize Local Dev Environments for Better Onboarding
6 minutes read.

James Turnbull will get you questioning the local setup you have in your company, and how much friction it adds to when onboarding new engineers or even supporting the current team. The "Pseudo-local environments" approach feels like the right move if the tools continue to improve and deal with latency (between the developer's machine and the cloud) and overall user experience.

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Peopleware

Transferring Your Manager Skills When Returning to the Individual Contributor Track
7 minutes read.

Vaidehi Joshi shares what you can bring back to the role of IC after experiencing the perspective of a manager: "You can also be a powerful counterpart to your team’s manager, working together to keep projects on track. Your management experience will have given you a different perspective on teams, processes, and structure, so make sure that you share any red flags or concerns with your manager early and often."

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My Favorite PM Interview Set: (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Zachary Perret shares 3 great questions you can use when interviewing PMS. Note how a "great answer" looks like on the 3rd in the thread. You can continue the discussion around the 3rd bullet and better understand how they analyze their strength and passion ("Zone of Genius"), what was challenging for them and where they seek mentorship and growth.

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An Exact Breakdown of How One CEO Spent His First Two Years of Company-Building
17 minutes read.

Sam Corcos's approach is a bit extreme, but he provides helpful observations and insights into his day-to-day. Many of which we can take and practice. I plan to analyze my calendar and apply the "Don’t let recency determine priority" to figure out how to structure it differently going forward.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@shreyas: Being understaffed is often a feature, not a bug

@laserlikemike: Surround yourself with people who tell you the truth, even when you don’t want to hear it. And then support you, even when you ignore their advice.



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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 and my work by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.