I like the word “myopia,” especially when analogically used to describe other issues. Being nearsighted and wearing glasses since seventh grade, I get it. I remember the first time I went out to the street with glasses and felt awestruck. I never knew that leaves were so beautiful or that you were supposed to be […]
Happy OKR season to you all. There comes a time when we hear about a methodology or process so much with any management trend, yet it seems like no one is clear on the right way to do it. If you’re going through the motions without grokking the reason behind them, you will likely get […]
Advice often heard is that one should refrain from making decisions until absolutely necessary. The logic behind it is that by keeping your options open, you will be able to make the “right” decision, as opposed to prematurely committing to a suboptimal choice. Sounds good, right? However, it’s often the wrong thing to do, especially […]
Leaders nowadays are suffering from a lot of FOMO and a constant urge to keep up with the Joneses, if you will. You see what others are doing and feel like you’re supposed to be doing the same or feel bad about not doing so. Inundated with Twitter threads, Medium posts, conference talks, or books […]
I don’t think I ever came across a manager or executive who claimed that micromanagement is a good thing in all my years in the industry. Everyone knows that the “right” thing is to let your people have autonomy. As a senior executive, you likely already know that you shouldn’t be too involved in day-to-day […]
For someone specializing in making R&D organizations accelerate delivery dramatically, there’s nothing easier than being called in when the team faces a clear obstacle. When you look, and you see that there’s an iceberg ahead, there’s not a lot of novelty required: you put all your might and attention to fix that glaring problem, and […]
Often, you notice these things while you’re doing something else and do a double-take. You’re glancing over emails trying to find a thread, and notice an update someone made. Maybe you saw a conversation in a Slack channel you rarely read. It can even be a sentence uttered in the hallway. But there’s no escaping […]
Much like we would stage an intervention, if a friend were obsessed with maxing out credit cards, we should stop focusing all developer attention on tech debt. There is a limit to the amount of debt that could be cleaned, but innovation is boundless. Let’s talk about spending some developer attention on amassing tech capital: […]
I go on and on about impact-per-engineer in organizations and how my mission is to help double and triple it for my clients. However, it seems like a significant portion of leaders in our industry cannot envision how this can come about without making engineers work “harder.” In fact, I believe that working less is […]
A challenge for all leaders of growing R&D organizations is maintaining a certain momentum throughout the ranks. Not to disregard the benefit of tools for measuring velocity, I have a hard time with its innate subjectivity. With time, teams face a stale velocity. I’ve discussed why we want to revisit our velocity in the past, […]