management
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Leadership Podcast with John Maeda!
→: Leadership Podcast with John Maeda!My colleague John and I recorded a little podcast together, and you can listen to it here. We talked about listen-first leadership, being judged on performance vs potential, and how I think of a senior engineer as “making the whole team better”. There’s also a transcript available for those of you (like me!) who hate…
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Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 6: Encouraging Accountability
→: Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 6: Encouraging AccountabilityAccountable: People can have expectations of each other. This includes leadership. Problem: Often these things result in mobile being a bit disconnected. Server side changes can break clients, and then mobile teams take the heat from users and leadership. This can lead to resentment, which makes accountability hard. Accountability comes last, because it builds on…
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Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 5: Automating Things
→: Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 5: Automating ThingsLet’s talk about automation. This seems like an out of place thing in this series. Predictable! Prioritized! Connected! Accountable! These are all fuzzy people things. Automated sounds like… more fun? Like Proper Developer Work? Automation is like documentation, but developers might actually write it. Without automation: It’s easy to have random esoteric things that few…
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Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 4: Building Connections
→: Running an Effective Mobile Team, Part 4: Building ConnectionsConnected: People work together and take an interest in each other (this doesn’t mean everyone has to be friends – but they are friendly). Problem: We lack a clear model for mobile infrastructure. This leads to discussions like whether to have a mobile team or pods. Regardless of what your “mobile teams” look like –…
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Book: The Manager’s Path
→: Book: The Manager’s PathI loved my friend Camille‘s book The Manager’s Path (Amazon). When I became a manger, I assembled myself a little course – some books, blogs, newsletters, and made my way through them. I wish I’d had this book to start off with – it’s the overview I needed, but never found until now. I plan…
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Learn to Take Positive Feedback Well
→: Learn to Take Positive Feedback WellOne of the things I found most surprising when I started my current job, is that I would ask for feedback and people would tell me concrete things that they thought I had done well, and tell me why they appreciated it, or what they thought the impact was. For comparison, a manager at the…
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Running a Manager Feedback Cycle
→: Running a Manager Feedback CycleI just ran a thorough feedback cycle for the managers (leads) in my team. This is what it looked like. Motivation: It’s hard to get feedback as a manager, the hope was that people would be more candid if they 1) submitted feedback anonymously 2) to someone else. Because we tend to amplify negative…
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The Weekly Notes Post
→: The Weekly Notes PostI read a lot of stuff on the internet, and a lot of that is about being a better manager. It’s rare to find something that is: Extremely concrete and actionable. At the exact time you need it. But in November, I did. I found this post from @SonOfGarr about sharing information with his team.…
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The Reaction
→: The ReactionSince that article on Uber dropped, I’ve been watching people’s reaction. There was the shock from people who should know better, and the lack of surprise from many women but there was also something that I can only describe as a PTSD reaction from many technical women I know. I saw it on Twitter. I…