Blogs about Management

“Try harder” is the worst kind of plan. It’s basically not a plan, a small resistance to planning. An anti-plan that signals virtue but instead reflects shallow thinking. Don’t say “try harder”. “Try harder” implies …

A look into the books I read in 2023, the goals I set and how I did.

We are now living in the age of OpenAI narrative, and a lot of problems are to be aligned to fit it. What are going to be side-effects of its implementation is going to be …

A format I have found useful for making proposals is 1-measure-3-1. This is a variation on the 1-3-1 problem-solving method (nice summary here), focused specifically on proposals. 1-measure-3-1 1: one problem to solve or opportunity …

How organisations define their purpose and as an extension, the positive and negative consequences of relying on purpose as filtering mechanism for current and potential-future employees. Source Related posts: What should a 2013 not-for-profit look …

“Looks like you’re killing it.” “Someday I want to be where you are in your career.” “You seem so grounded and focused about pursuing what you want.” “It seems like this new phase of your …

As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I …

Leading Technical Change is a small, live, remote seminar aimed squarely at a single topic: Real Change in the Real World. A new cohort is open now: March 11,12,14, & 15, 10am to noon Eastern …

One of the common conceits in leadership is that nobody is truly essential for a company’s continuity. I call it a conceit, but I do mostly agree with it: I’ve felt literally sick after hearing …

I’m excited to share some innovative but experimental practices today. You can use them to improve the reliability of your engineering organization. They are based on ideas from chaos engineering. What is chaos engineering? The …

The court system is not created for “justice” as we tend to think about it. It’s a system that can only enforce the laws created by legislators whose interests often don’t align with the most …

Back in early 2021, I started a new three year goal cycle (following, as always, the 12 Week Year planning cycle). I only succeeded on 2 out of 7 yet it feels like a very …

Chapter 5 of The Staff Engineer’s Path is going to be about leading big projects, the kind that involve a lot of teams, or where the stakes are high, or the path forward is ambiguous–or …

A model I return to a lot when talking about engineering processes is Push and Pull. Often when we design a new process or system we struggle to get buy-in. That lack of buy-in can …

This year, I’ve helped 5 design teams draft their charter. At the outset of this work is a series of 4 2-hour group sessions (it used to be a one-day workshop in a conference room) …

A few years ago, we interviewed Jen Cardello for Finding Our Way, and she shared that her team (UX Research) is peered with “market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty” in …

You ask, "Should I be making a new directory for this feature I'm building?" You expect a return value of: "yes" or "no." You had a 50% chance of guessing the "correct" answer...right? Four hours, …

By asking why, repeating back, and sticking to first principles: you can drive your team towards a truthful outcome.