SWLW #471: Iterating on your Data Team, Mapping Alignment, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​Surprise! Inspiring Resilience (Video)
31 minutes read.

Cory Watson with a fun and interesting talk you should share with your teammates. Share this talk and then point them to "Choas Engineering" (or "Resilience Engineering") and "Game Days" for people who want to learn about improving their software to handle real-life production traffic.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

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Culture

The Majority of Organisations Use of Kubernates.
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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Share it via Twitter or email.


Iterating on Your Data Team
12 minutes read.

Figuring out how to structure the organization to set the right roles & responsibilities (clear and explicit ownership) is becoming more challenging in this "Big Data" age. Anna Filippova covers multiple directions to pay attention to as you think about your organization. It is worth taking the "6(ish) jobs to be done" and mapping it out to specific teams or roles in your organization.

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John Carmack Commencement (Video)
6 minutes read.

"I advocate for long hard work... sometimes important insights come only from a total immersion" -- a short and inspiring speech by John Carmack that I enjoyed this week.

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Mapping Alignment
4 minutes read.

"[...] different levels of an organisation consider work over different time horizons (ie executives are concerned about what the organisation will do over months and years and for members of agile development teams it’s days and weeks), the narrative they articulate together at each level is different to that at a different level" -- Chris McDermott introduced a few concepts here that made me curious, thinking of how to connect the practices and align the language across the org.

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Peopleware

Being Opinionated Is Good and Bad: Why I Think It Is Best to Be Opinionated, Even if Hard.
4 minutes read.

I can relate to Luca Cipriani's opinion here: "If you have a clear opinion, it is straightforward to carry it on in front of an audience and propose it to others. It means you will be responsible for your idea and give you the energy to move ahead with your solution. On the other side, if you are not opinionated, you could move from one opinion to another quickly, making yourself feel not responsible for any proposed solutions or not advocating for any of them."

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It Is Easy to Feel Trapped by Your ‘Zone of Competence’: Things You Are Good at Doing, but Do Not Love. I Spent 15 Years Doing That. To Truly Find Meaning in Your Work, Focus on Your ‘Zone of Genius’ Instead: (Thread)
3 minutes read.

"A useful exercise is to audit your entire calendar and areas of responsibility (AOR), and then figure out exactly what you are both good at, and love doing. List the tasks that you are terrible at & take too much energy/time from you in red." -- The entire thread by Justin Kan is packed with great ideas to try for yourself. You might learn a few things from it, and take notes on things you should delegate or focus more on.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


Stoicism Is Not Just for Emperors and Hipsters
4 minutes read.

Imagine you have an outage and your systems are down. The team is looking at you. What do you want to say? How do you want to act? What would you change (switching from "peace-time leader" to "war-time leader") in how you serve the team? For example, Dave Anderson asked the team to split and gave each individual one thing to explore and then returned to the team. And yes, it's probably DNS. Or your latest code deployment. Right?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@justinkan: If you can, read books that teach you how to think, not what to think.

@laserlikemike: Nothing destroys an organization faster than a leader with the desire to be well liked.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.