Agile
What Happens When You Use Agile for the Wrong Reasons? (via Mountain Goat Software)
It rarely goes well. Don’t just follow the herd; ask yourself why certain things are important to you. (The Five Whys technique is helpful here.)
Multiple Product Owners with Competing Priorities (via Leading Agile)
- Problem: multiple people responsible for different things, incentivized in different ways, have competing things to achieve, fighting for the same group of people to do the work
- Look at the org design and alignment of teams. You need a stable, cross-functional team that can deliver a specific capability or feature set. Optimize for flow.
- Get all the POs in the room. Get senior leadership to define what’s important and how those decisions are made. They have to agree that they won’t go behind each other’s back. Find out (from management) how to tell POs that they can’t have what they want.
- All of the POs need to align on what value is, what effort is, how to prioritize.
- You may need to spend more time collaborating among POs outside of team-level meetings.
- The way you prioritize work should be transparent and agreed upon. Don’t keep this secret.
- Do not honor toxic rogue actors that work around the system (pulling rank, loudest voice). For people that do get stuff done, find out why that worked.
- It is important that the developers understand the why, because it’s (1) engaging, (2) letting them catch misalignments where the work is being done. Push the context down to where the work is being done.
Business
Why Rookie CEOs Outperform (via Harvard Business Review)
“…because [veteran CEOs] fall back on the playbook from their last job, become overly concerned with cost-cutting, and are less adaptable than rookies, who tend to pay more attention to top-line growth.”
Career
Worried You Might Be in a Dying Industry? (via Harvard Business Review)
Industries rarely disappear overnight, so take stock of what skills are transferrable to another job to help you prepare. If you’re in a position of influence, perhaps you can help steer the ship instead of letting it sink.
What to Do After a Final-Round Job Interview (via Harvard Business Review)
You don’t want to come across as desperate or insecure. Also, you may not get the job through no fault of your own (hiring freeze, change of strategy). Instead focus on things you can control, like being around people who lift you up.
How to Tell Your Boss You’re Burned Out (via Harvard Business Review)
Burnout not only affects you, but those around you. This article outlines actionable steps for acknowledging, communicating about, and getting help with burnout. Two things that stood out to me (1) don’t apologize for being burned out, but do take responsibility for how your behavior affects others, (2) reach out to others, because our instinct is to retreat, and our inner conversations aren’t always accurate.
Communication
Crush Your Next Virtual Presentation (via Harvard Business Review)
- Use the tech’s features (e.g., polls, reactions) to understand audience engagement
- Open with a story that speaks to your specific audience
- Solicit participation in advance
- Be clear, be brief, and be quiet
- Don’t discount nonverbal cues entirely
- Follow up for feedback
Process
Productivity Is About Your Systems, Not Your People (via Harvard Business Review)
- Tricks like Inbox Zero, Pomodoro, the Eisenhower matrix, and Getting Things Done work mainly at the individual level. However, big productivity bottlenecks are caused by interdependencies among people.
- Use tiered huddles, where front-line workers meet at the start of the workday, managers 30 minutes later, directors, VPs, and then execs. Get problems addressed at the lowest level possible, then escalate when you can’t reach a conclusion.
- Make work visible to know what people are doing and to see where people are overloaded.
- Define your company’s “bat signal” so people know what to do in urgent situations.
- “If an employee is responsible for an outcome, they should have the authority to make the necessary decisions, without being forced into an endless string of emails, meetings, or presentations.”
The 1-Minute Secret to Forming a New Habit (via TED)
“The truth is that our ability to follow through on our best intentions, to get into a new habit like exercise or to change our behavior in any way, really, doesn’t actually depend on the reasons we might do it or on the depth of our convictions that we should do so. It doesn’t depend on our understanding of the benefits of our particular behavior or even on the strength of our willpower. It depends on our willingness to be bad at our desired behavior. And I hate being bad at stuff. I am a go-big-or-go-home kind of a gal. I like being good at things, and I quit exercising because I wasn’t willing to be bad at it. Here’s why we need to be willing to be bad: being good requires that our effort and our motivation be in proportion to each other. The harder something is for us to do, the more motivation we need to do that thing.”
Software Development
A Common-sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms (Part 6)
Our book club discussed dynamic programming, a technique for solving problems with overlapping solutions.