Items tagged management in 2019
Filters: Year: 2019 × management × Sorted by date
For creative work, you can’t cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone’s day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
— Tobi Lutke # 26th December 2019, 7:06 pm
The Blue Tape List (via) I’ve often thought there’s something magical about your first month at a new job—you can meet anyone and ask any question, taking advantage of your “newbie” status. I like this suggestion by Michael Lopp to encourage your new hires to take notes on things that they think are broken but reserve acting on them for long enough to gain fuller context of how the new organization works. # 10th December 2019, 6:09 pm
OPP (Other People’s Problems) (via) Camille Fournier provides a comprehensive guide to picking your battles: in a large organization how can you navigate the enormous array of problems you can see that you’d like to fix, especially when so many of those problems aren’t directly in your area of control? # 7th August 2019, 1:58 pm
Friday wins and a case study in ritual design. “Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture.” # 8th June 2019, 6:14 pm
Amazon’s Away Teams laid bare: How AWS’s hivemind of engineers develop and maintain their internal tech (via) Some interesting insights into how Amazon structure their engineering organization to maximize team productivity in a service-oriented environment. Two things that stood out to me: each service is owned by a “home team”, but sometimes features that are needed by other teams can be built by forming an “away team” to build out that functionality. Secondly, Amazon has a concept of “bar raisers” who are engineers across the organization who help approve key design and architectural decisions. It’s possible to go against the recommendation of a bar raiser but “such a move is noted and made visible to higher levels of management”. # 14th May 2019, 6:32 pm
One of the standards you have to have demonstrated to being able to reach Principle Engineer inside Amazon is “Respect what has gone before”. It’s very likely you don’t know the why, what or how of it. Often what was written was the best that could be done to the constraints.
— Paul Graydon # 25th April 2019, 5:52 pm
The Behavioral Change Stairway Model. BCSM is the FBI’s model for crisis negotiation, but it looks like it could be a useful negotiation framework for all kinds of other conflict mediation as well. # 19th April 2019, 5:46 pm
Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions (via) I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the challenges of efficiently getting to consensus within a larger organization spread across multiple locations and time zones. This model described by Ian Nowland based on his experience at AWS seems very promising. The goal is to achieve a decision or “disagree and commit” consensus using a max 6 page document and a one hour meeting. The first fifteen minutes of the meeting are dedicated to silently reading the document—if you’ve read it already you are given the option of arriving fifteen minutes late. # 11th April 2019, 3:46 am
The Eleven Laws of Showrunning (via) Fascinating essay on how to run a modern TV show by Javier Grillo-Marxuach. Being a showrunner basically involves running a 100+ person startup with a 7 digit budget, almost immovable deadlines, high maintenance activist investors and you’re still expected to write some of the scripts! So many useful lessons here about management, creativity and delegation: almost everything in here is relevant to product management, startup founding and engineering management as well. # 19th February 2019, 7:27 pm