Agile
Product Owner is a Bad Bad Idea (via Maarten Dalmijn)
Two heavy hitters — Mary Poppendieck and Mike Cohn — have recently stated that the product owner (PO) role is a proxy between the people doing the work and the people needing the work done, with a shift left toward the people doing the work itself. Even Jeff Sutherland (founder of Scrum) says that the PO is likely a fill-in for someone who had a waterfall role in the org.
Structural Agility to Enable Flow (via Agile Amped)
- Structure… There’s a misunderstanding that it’s an only an org chart. It’s anything that creates boundaries around people and work.
- Structural agility… Capability to continually create and adapt structures that give life and enable the flow of value in sync with and response to the organization’s changing environment.
- Principles… 1) Living ecosystem 2) Continuous design 3) Create conditions for agility instead of directing activity 4) Leverage dynamic tensions 5) enable flow through hierarchies that service each other 6) Emergent organizations once established 7) Shed and spawn when needed 8) intentional development 9) shared identity for trust and self-org. Source
- Living, breathing systems have a soul (organism instead of a machine) via freedom, power, and connection. Find the places in your org that are blocking its soul. Is it that your hierarchy is tied to power?
- Bring your soul with you and don’t check it at the door.
- People may feel financial pressure to do what’s right for them (keep their job) instead of what’s best for the company. Imagine hundreds of people doing this!
- An easy way to create connection is through demos.
- Process… 1) What is the soulful purpose of this meeting? 2) What’s soul-crushing about this meeting? 3) Where is this process violating our freedom, power, or connection? 4) What tensions are at play? 5) What would it take for the process to be soulful?
- Tensions: two seemingly opposing forces that may be causing dysfunction but could be generative
- Common issue… stability vs. change. You can have both. Quality vs. productivity. You can have both.
- Companies seem good at bringing new ideas to bear, but are reluctant to quit ideas that aren’t working.
- Most people get caught up in adopting a framework (e.g., Spotify, Holocracy) instead of doing the work to figure out if it solves their problem.
Business
Graduates of Elite Universities Get Paid More. Do They Perform Better? (via Harvard Business Review)
Some universities yield better graduates because 1) they draw from a larger pool of applicants, so they can pick from the best, 2) they provide better training, 3) students are in a stimulating learning environment. However, a downside is that many elite graduates have an “us vs. them” mindset and may not integrate well with teams. There are some cases where it’s worth paying more for a recent elite school grad, but it’s not a guaranteed return.
How Boards Can Plan for the Disasters That No One Wants to Think About (via Harvard Business Review)
The author’s call COVID-19 a black elephant (black swan = rare event, elephant in the room = issue that’s likely yet no one wants to talk about). “Successful companies need to build in resilience to prepare for these events around three areas — governance, leadership development, and compensation — where boards should play a special role in preparation for future threats.”
Career
4 Questions to Help Women Navigate the Second Half of Their Careers (via Harvard Business Review)
Granted, women face particular career obstacles compared to men; however, in my opinion, these steps are useful to anyone.
- What would your career look like if nothing was in your way?
- What permissions do you need to give yourself in order to become who you want to be?
- How can you build and access your support network?
- What do you need to learn?
Communication
Remote Work Doesn’t Have to Mean All-Day Video Calls (via Harvard Business Review)
- Distributed workers lend themselves well to modular tasks (independent activity that requires little need or coordination)
- As a case study, GitLab 1) separates the responsibility of doing a task from the responsibility of declaring the task done, 2) work in small increments and integrate frequently, 3) have managers curate Slack messages to figure out what needs to go where and to whom.
Leadership
Our book club moved on to Chapter 7 (teams), where discussed the conversations you have around career — life story, dreams, and an eighteen-month plan. We also took some tangents on career/job alignment and what role the employer plays in your career, much of which was in-the-moment and difficult to capture in a blog post.
Psychology
We Actively Avoid Information That Can Help Us (via Harvard Business Review)
People avoid information (e.g., finances, healthcare, interpersonal issues) when they feel they can’t act on it. “When knowledge might damage our self-esteem, we often opt for willful ignorance.”
Technology
new codebase, who dis? (How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase) (via Software Lead Weekly)
This is a helpful “play” for when you’ve started in a new codebase. There are steps to follow with specific guidance of things to pay attention to that are clues to how things work. Reading code isn’t like reading a novel. Use the tools and develop hypotheses about how to move around it.