management
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Whose Expectations are Those, Anyway?
→: Whose Expectations are Those, Anyway?This is part 1 of a series of blog posts based on a talk I prepared called Successfully Derailed Product. It’s about the ways in which we define and talk about “success” influence what – and how – we build. There used to be a joke at a company I worked for that went…
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Managing Up and Down
→: Managing Up and Down“Managing up” can seem like a dirty word, I definitely thought so for a while, and deludedly aspired to be the kind of manager who did not need to be “managed up” (thankfully I have friends like Camille to call me on my bullshit). Now I can accept that 100% my team have to manage up with…
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Try This One Weird Tip To Increase Leadership in Your Organization
→: Try This One Weird Tip To Increase Leadership in Your OrganizationAs leaders, most of us have been in a place where we’re maxed out. It can be tempting to just do it ourselves and hope things improve. Another thing that often happens is that it gets shoved on someone else, and they’re left to deal with it. As a rule, I try not to hand…
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Questions for an End of Year 1:1
→: Questions for an End of Year 1:1My coach (Dani) went through this list of questions in our call last week, and I’ve been using it in my last 1:1s of 2017. I’ve been finding it interesting as a structure for a conversation that looks back at the year and where we are now, versus where we were a year ago. Sometimes…
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Home is Where the Work Is: Increment Mag
→: Home is Where the Work Is: Increment MagI was in Increment talking about remote work and what my schedule looks like working on a distributed, global team.
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Process Design
→: Process Design(or: be careful what you incentivise) When we design processes, we are heavily biased to design processes that we would be successful in. We see this with hiring processes, and we see this with promotion processes. You might think having multiple people would help with this but this seems just as likely to create the…
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New-ish Eng-Manager Slack, >1 Year On
→: New-ish Eng-Manager Slack, >1 Year OnMid-2016, we started a slack for newer engineering managers. After a couple of months, we started growing it more actively and I’m excited that it continues to grow. I believe in community, and the value of peer-mentoring, and it’s been great to create a space for that and have others value it too. For me…
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Quarterly Rituals: Empathy Challenge
→: Quarterly Rituals: Empathy ChallengeIt’s easy to get so focused on your day to day that you forget the bigger picture of the product you work on. We’ve been doing these quarterly challenges with the idea of building empathy for our users. Each time, taking this mindset, I discover things that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I try to choose…
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Book: How F*cked Up is Your Management?
→: Book: How F*cked Up is Your Management?How F*cked Up is Your Management? is a collection of essays, many of which I’d already read on Medium. I did like it though – there’s a value to reading a curated collection the builds upon each other. Also, I want to support people writing things that I appreciate. Some of it’s really good and actionable…