This post will itemize my list of Software Engineering Management resources to help recover from mistakes and prevent repeat occurrences.
As leaders, we make mistakes. I’m sharing my collection of beloved resources that have helped me both tactically and also inspired me to lead with love. The blogs, books, and podcast episode resources are categorized by:
- People
- Decision Making
- Product
- Project / Process
- Leadership
Each item contains a Cliff Notes like snippet from myself either paraphrasing key points or quoting directly from the source. Enjoy!
People
- Manager Training including Coaching
- Excellent guides, templates, and resources from Google in their re:Work toolkit
- One on Ones in Chapter 7 of Managing Humans by Michael Lopp
- Highlights:
- “When I see the Disaster approaching, I carefully tuck all of my emotions in a box, lock the box…”
- “The person you’re talking to isn’t him- or herself…The person you’re familiar with will show up … eventually”
- “Shut up. Really”.
- Highlights:
- One on Ones template for effective meetings by Google re:Work
- Defining your working relationship
- Blog from Michael Lopp, author of Managing Humans, on defining a working relationship via a user guide written in the 1st person describing how he works. It captures expectations of the average work week, his principles and nuances.
- Why do this? To accelerate a working relationship
- Highlights: humans first principle, bias towards action, feedback is the core of building trust, intentional meetings
- Blog from Michael Lopp, author of Managing Humans, on defining a working relationship via a user guide written in the 1st person describing how he works. It captures expectations of the average work week, his principles and nuances.
- The Manager’s Path book
- How to evolve an engineering organization blog post
- Highlights:
- Define goals
- Conway’s Law: organizations create products that reflect their own structure.
- Minimize cross-team coordination so that teams are as self contained as possible
- Highlights:
Decision Making
- Mental Models to Make Better Decisions with Farnam Street Principles article
- The Art of Manliness podcast recently aired a thought process / decision making episode, interviewing former Canadian intelligence officer and owner of Farnam Street, Shane Parrish.
- The 5 guiding principles are crystal clear on the principles page of the Farnam Street blog.
- I’ve shared it with my team and highly encourage others to take a look
- Amazon Leadership Principles
- I love everything about Amazon’s leadership principles and love that the company publishes them.
- Netflix Culture
- Highlight: “We model ourselves on being a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love, despite, say, your siblings’ bad behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be, caring intensely about your teammates, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever.“
Product
- Product Strategy via problem selection blog post on product management
- Problem Discovery: user pain points, benchmark, competitive advantage, compounding leverage
- Problem Selection: ROI, industry trends, experiments to learn, surviving rounds
- Solution Validation: write a customer letter (does it sound exciting?), experimentation over analysis, justify switching costs, find reference users, find the path traveled more quickly
- Writing Strategies and Visions blog post
- Strategy: approach to a specific challenge that has tradeoffs
- Has 3 sections: diagnosis, policies, actions
- Example Strategies for: how we partner with other teams, how we ensure API performance latency, how we manage infrastructure costs
- When you read good coherent actions, you think, “This is going to be uncomfortable, but I think it can work.” When you read bad ones, you think, “Ah, we got afraid of the consequences and aren’t really changing anything.”
- Vision: aspirational documents that enable folks who don’t work closely together to make decisions that fit together cleanly… long term, gentle pressure
- Strategy: approach to a specific challenge that has tradeoffs
- How to Invest in Technical Infrastructure
- Fascinating blog post on short term work vs long term work and forced work vs discretionary work. It really gets you to think about team modes of operandi including fire-fighting, retrospectives, and technical leverage.
- I’ve shared this with my team and had a discussion around the tradeoffs of working in one mode vs another and what’s the ideal mode to work in.
Project
- Accelerate Developer Productivity blog post
- It’s a sensitive topic and I’m not a fan of measuring mini metrics that can be gamed but the 4 metrics here are customer and quality focused. The optics of these metrics aren’t such that a developer feels, at a glance, that they’re being judged in the same way that points per sprint does.
- Highlights: Delivery lead time, deployment frequency, time to restore service, change rate fail
- Sizing engineering teams blog post
- Checklist Manifesto book
- Checklists protect us against failure.
- Checklists establish a higher standard of baseline performance.
- In the end, a checklist is only an aid. If it doesn’t aid, it’s not right.
- Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering
- Atlassian also has a good blog post on cognitive biases
Leadership
- First Why and then Trust video by Simon Sinek
- Start with why – how leaders inspire action video by Simon Sinek
- How to speak so that people want to listen video
- Highlights:
- Honesty, Authenticity, Integrity (be your word), Love (wish them well)
- Replace “but” with “and”
- “But is a roadblock in a conversation. It tends to be that we pay attention to what comes after it because that’s the juicy bad bit”.
- “We’re committed to customer service BUT we’re obviously not going to do anything about it”
- Voice coaching tips: Register, timbre, prosody, pace, pitch, volume
- “We vote for politicians with lower voices because we associate depth with power”
- Highlights:
- Try to Add Value podcast interview of Bill Gross by Tony Robbins
- Highlights:
- Try and figure out “do we have some insight, that we know is true, that other people don’t know yet?” That is one of the biggest ingredients of having a successful idea.
- Test test test, test everything. Try little variations. Test and learn. Make some small change – see what happens
- Motivate your staff by sharing equity and upside… Share in the upside.
- Highlights:
- Culture and Customer Delight podcast interview of Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer by Tony Robbins
- Highlights:
- Everyone is truly walking around with this invisible sign around their neck that says, “Make me feel important”… The biggest thing I learned how to do is to read the subtitle… Everyone one of those signs has a subtitle that starts with the word “by”. “Make me feel important BY leaving me the hell alone… Make me feel important BY just listening to me”
- Golden rule of hospitality: Do unto others as you believe they would want done onto them. And you gotta be able to read their sign, because not everyone wants it the same way
- When asked for what to look for in future employees: “A high HQ (hospitality quotient)… you’re probably somebody who is happier yourself when you make someone else feel better.”
- You can’t teach the following abilities and emotional traits:
- Kindness & optimism
- Intellectual Curiosity
- Work ethic
- Empathy
- Self Awareness (knowing your own weather report on a given day)
- Integrity (having the judgment to do the right thing even when it may not be in your self interest)
- We can teach our leaders to celebrate the above emotional skills… “How many of you got bonused for how you made people feel?”
- The can vs can’t and will vs won’t chart
- If it’s a will and can, then our job is to celebrate this always
- It’s a can but won’t, then we have an attitude issue (not capability issue) and it’s our job to inspire, but keep a short timeframe here on the correction period
- Culture is just like a baby:
- you gotta watch it 24 x 7
- you gotta feed it atleast 7 times a day
- when it makes a mess, you better clean it up immediately
- Highlights:
Reference Podcasts: I listen to podcasts daily because I listen to them when I workout. And I workout daily. Here’s a list of podcasts I listen to for software, management, and leadership topics.
- Software Engineering Daily – software (LOVE this podcast)
- Managing Up – software, management, leadership
- CTO Connection – software, leadership
- *Managers Club – software, leadership, management
- SoftSkills Engineering – software, management, leadership
- HBR IdeaCast – business, leadership
- The Tony Robbins Podcast – leadership
- The Art of Manliness – leadership, self-awareness
- This is Success – entrepreneurship, leadership
- How I Built This – entrepreneurship, leadership (LOVE this podcast)
* Haven’t listened to any episodes but it looks promising and I intend on listening
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