Tag: process
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Scaling Teams: People, Projects, and Process
Scaling teams is one of my favourite things to do – probably because it’s where people meet systems, with ever-changing questions about what makes teams effective and how to balance now versus next. Sometimes this gets presented in a pure numbers way, but I like to come at it from a systems perspective: Engineering teams…
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Low Process Culture, High Process Culture
When 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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Co-Active: Process
Continuing my Co-Active coaching training with course 3/4, Process. Earlier this year I took Balance (2/4), and Fulfillment (1/4), after taking Fundamentals last year. Once again, I took the 5 days. This time it coincided with moving, which was a bit of a nightmare organizationally – especially as our apartment wasn’t ready on schedule and…
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Talk: The Culture of Process
I 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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The culture of process
My 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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Three signs of a poor hiring process—and four ways to fix it
My latest in Quartz… When given the opportunity to establish a process, we’re all biased to advocate for one in which we would be successful ourselves. In hiring, this plays out in two main ways: “A” players build monocultures, hiring people just like them, and “B” players hire “C” players, hiring people who won’t threaten…
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Phase 1 of Hiring, Getting from 0-30
Towards the end of 2017, we reopened hiring on the mobile team at Automattic which had been shut since the start of the year as we got things in order. I think of this as phase 1 of hiring on the team – nailing the basics of the process, and making some progress with diversity…
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Understanding how process impacts outcome can help avoid useless meetings
My first article in Quartz! Earlier this year, when I was learning how to facilitate a specific type of workshop, a colleague revealed the secret to making it great: understanding the outcome and keeping it in mind throughout the entire process. If the team isn’t focused on the outcome, than they’re just performing a process.…
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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…