Team Charters are a trap.

• 💡 Team charters aim to address issues like building team alignment around mission and approach, as well as helping others understand the team’s mission.

• 🙅‍♂️ Team charters can be ineffective because they often become a bottoms-up initiative, driven by team members’ preferences rather than reflecting organizational goals.

• 📝 Teams may omit critical tasks from their charters, leading to conflicts when leadership expects them to fulfill those responsibilities.

• ⚖️ Top-down perspectives may provide the right content but may not be considered team charters, missing the consensus-building aspect.

• 🪣 Encouraging bottoms-up mission-setting in a top-down resource allocation organization can be counterproductive and lead to a trap.

Scaling People

A summary of the book Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe. tl; dr — read the book 😉

• 🌟 Core Principles: Essential for impactful company management and leadership.

• 💬 Communication: Stresses the importance of honesty and self-awareness in workplace conversations.

• 📈 Strategy and Values: Discusses the need for a focused strategy and clear company values, using Stripe as an example.

• 🎯 Goal Setting: Offers insights on setting effective goals and planning processes.

• 🤝 Recruitment and Onboarding: Highlights the importance of thorough onboarding and recruitment beyond just hiring.

• 📚 Interviewing Techniques: Suggests detailed interview questions and reference check strategies.

• 🚀 Leadership Hiring: Emphasizes stakeholder involvement in hiring senior roles.

• 📚 Onboarding Details: Provides comprehensive strategies for onboarding new hires.

• 📊 Performance Review: Discusses bias avoidance and fairness in performance evaluations.

• ⭐ Managing Different Performers: Offers tailored approaches for high, medium, and poor performers.

6 tiny wording tweaks to level up your communication as a software engineer

or as anyone working with others 😉

• 📝 Use “Would you be open to…” instead of “Can you…” to frame requests in a more open-minded manner.

• 🔍 Include “because” in requests to enhance their persuasiveness, as it increases compliance rates significantly.

• 🤝 Switch from “Can you…” to “Can we…” in requests, particularly in code reviews, to foster a more collaborative atmosphere.

• 🤔 End suggestions with “What do you think?” to maintain openness in discussions.

• 🔄 Use “It seems like” to effectively address and break stalemates in conversations.

• ⚖️ Be mindful of the order of “but” in sentences to ensure you’re negating the intended part of the statement for a more collaborative tone.

Ask for Advice, Not Permission

• 🚪 Asking for permission instead of advice can create conflict in collaborative environments.

• ⚖️ Seeking permission implies transferring some responsibility for your decision to others.

• 🤔 Permission-seeking can be seen as distrustful and may lead to resentment and wasted time.

• 🗣️ Asking for advice shows respect and keeps the decision-making responsibility with you.

• 🌟 Seeking advice fosters trust and avoids wasting time on second-guessing.

• 💡 Advice-seeking leads to more honest feedback and preserves your ego.

• 🤝 Requesting advice helps create advocates and gives others a personal stake in the outcome.

• 🚫 Beware of gatekeepers who think they have veto rights; maintain responsibility for your actions.

• 💬 Pitbull’s quote: “Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice,” highlights the value of seeking advice.

Help! I’m stuck! I want to get to the next level!!

Many engineers are frustrated because they feel stuck at their current level despite doing everything they believe is necessary. These feelings intensify when they see ‘less competent’ people in such desired positions. The response to such situations range from denial to blame and anger.

• 🚀 Career advancement requires more than technical skills; focus on interpersonal relationships and influence becomes essential at senior levels.

• 🤔 Understand the difference between fulfilling job duties and performing at a higher level; promotions often require the latter.

• 🗣️ Open communication with managers is crucial for career progression; unvoiced expectations can hinder growth.

• 🎯 Setting specific career goals and timelines with your manager is important to avoid vague or unmet expectations.

• 📊 Technical skills are foundational in early career stages, but building relationships and influencing others gain importance at senior levels.

• 🌐 Senior roles require a shift from focusing on outputs to outcomes, with an emphasis on guiding and impacting others.

• 🤲 Embracing a strategic approach and focusing on second-order outcomes becomes crucial as one advances in their career.

• 💡 Owning your career progression and proactively seeking opportunities and feedback is key to moving to higher levels.

• 📈 Recognizing the increasing complexity and ambiguity of challenges at advanced career stages is vital for continuous growth.

Agile Rehab: Replacing Process Dogma with Engineering to Achieve True Agility

• 🔄 Agile scaling frameworks often led to negative outcomes, necessitating a focus on technical and process issues to achieve agility.

• 🏗️ Organizational and application restructuring was crucial, not just changing development practices.

• 📅 The shift to daily delivery improved business output and team morale, offering a more humane work approach.

• 🚀 Optimizing for operations and using an emergency process for all deliveries ensured safety and drove feature delivery improvements.

• 📊 Measuring improvements is essential to retain them and demonstrate their value during management changes.

• 🛠️ Replacing Agile with engineering and focusing on Continuous Delivery (CD) was key to enhancing value delivery.

• 🤝 Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are fundamental for agile and efficient software development.

• 🎯 Emphasis on quality engineering and continuous testing is crucial in CD.

• 📈 Adopting CD led to a more humane work environment with less stress and more certainty in development.

• 🌐 Decoupling and descaling systems accelerated delivery and reduced dependency on frameworks like SAFe.

• 📝 Focusing on metrics such as code integration frequency, story delivery time, pipeline cycle time, and defect rates is vital.

• 💡 Continuous Delivery fosters a culture of quality, starting from the idea phase, not just coding.