management
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LeadTime – How teams work: DuckDuckGo’s engineering team
→: LeadTime – How teams work: DuckDuckGo’s engineering teamI did an interview with Range, talking about how the fully distributed teams I lead at DuckDuckGo work. Read it here
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Low Process Culture, High Process Culture
→: Low Process Culture, High Process CultureWhen I changed jobs in 2020, I went from a low-process culture to a high-process culture (or: what I perceive as high-process, all things are relative). It was a bit of a culture shock. The process stressed me out. For instance, my previous job did not have performance review. You were supposed to submit feedback…
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Talk: The Culture of Process
→: Talk: The Culture of ProcessI recorded this talk for the previous round of LeadDev Together. You can access it here (requires signup). All the penguin imagery in this talk are photos my mom took in Antarctica.
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Remote Meetings Panel
→: Remote Meetings PanelI was on a panel recently – well, we ran it like a meeting, which was fun – about remote meetings and making them suck less. It was fun and I got some nice ideas from my fellow panelists! Watch it here.
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The culture of process
→: The culture of processMy latest in LeadDev… One of the challenges we face as engineering managers is how people react to process differently. Sometimes it’s like we’re talking about entirely different things – we propose something we expect to be lightweight, and people react like we’re instituting TPS reports or time-tracking in six minute intervals (normal for lawyers,…
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The Being and Doing Brainstorm
→: The Being and Doing BrainstormA tool in balance coaching is the being and doing brainstorm. You brainstorm in two lists: How am I being? What am I doing? The combination of the two feeds each other. E.g. you might say I’m “being proactive”, and then in doing you could list some ways to be proactive (e.g. “make a todo…
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Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, Work
→: Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, WorkI have been working for distributed companies for over 5 years – long before this pandemic malarkey and everyone becoming a “remote work expert”. The reality of the past 18 months for many people has been a lot of terrible remote work. Including for me at times – I love remote work in “normal times”,…
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Coachability: the overlooked factor in people development
→: Coachability: the overlooked factor in people developmentMy latest in LeadDev… How do your reports respond to feedback? As managers, it’s our job to grow the people we work with. This is how we build a bench, and scale ourselves and the organization. Of course, this is easy to say and hard to do, and we’ve all encountered a spectrum of people:…
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The Return of the Office
→: The Return of the OfficeThere has been Much Discourse over the past few days on forcing people to return to offices, and judgement of those who may not want to. Has Remote Work… Worked? I always wonder what’s on the other side of these edicts about returning to the office. How do the people writing them think the last…