Book recommendations.
July 24, 2018 Folks occasionally ask me to recommend books to help them in their professional career.I can usually think of a couple recommendations in the moment, but always feel like I'm forgetting far more good book than I'm recommending. In the hope of providing a better answer going forward, I've written up some of the general purpose, leadership and management books I've read.
Succession planning.
July 23, 2018 Two or three years into a role, you may find that your personal rate of learning has trailed off. You know your team well, the industry particulars are no longer quite as intimidating, the mystery of getting things done at your company solved. This can be a sign to start looking for your next role, but it's also a great opportunity to build experience with succession planning.
Identify your controls.
July 21, 2018 When I transitioned from supporting teams directly to instead partnering their managers, I struggled to remain effective without understanding their day to day work. My first instincts were to retain the same fidelity of context over a much wider area, and for the folks working with me this was probably indistinguishable from micromanagement. Maybe it even _was_ micromanagement.
Opportunity & Membership.
July 17, 2018 Fostering an inclusive organization is intimidating work. Not only is it intimidating, for the longest time I struggled to find a framework to even think about it effectively. Over time, I've found a framework for thinking about inclusion efforts that is simple but that I've found very useful. An inclusive organization is one where folks have access to membership and opportunity. Membership is participating as version of themselves they feel comfortable with. Opportunity is having access to professional success and development.
Sizing engineering teams.
July 14, 2018 I've come to believe that most organizational design questions can be answered by recursively applying a framework for sizing teams. Over the past year I've refined my approach to team sizing into a bit of a framework, and even changed my mind on several aspects, especially the viability of small teams. This post describes how I now size teams