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How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Instilling a Culture of Reliability

When the leader of a transitioning team joined their current company, they noticed a lack of clarity on the team's goals and alert and on-call procedures. To address this, they painted the big picture of success, wrote an on-call responsibilities document, implemented an ongoing on-call summary journal, and put post-mortems into effect. As a result, the team's operational health and reliability improved significantly, and the leader learned the importance of breaking down initiatives into manageable steps, sharing the wider narrative, and leading by example.

Building My Very First Team

The author was hired to help build a team and introduce the Agile methodology to a disorganized startup. He recruited people quickly with the help of a contractor and a hiring agency, and structured internal procedures with a mix of Kanban and Scrum. His efforts to make a positive change were praised and he was eventually appointed Director for Software Engineering. He learned that it is important to consult experts and to listen to team members when making decisions.

Staying Afloat During Rapid Growth and Transformation

A new team of five people was struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-growing startup. To address this, the team identified areas of responsibility, brainstormed solutions, prioritized tasks, and created space for two people to work on long-term projects. Through this process, they learned the importance of quick wins, taking action, and balancing research and development.

Identifying Prospective Managers

When engineers express a desire to become a manager, it can be an indicator of a lack of engagement or motivation. To address this, one-on-one sessions are held to understand the motivations behind the desire, and feedback is gathered from the team. Mentorship from experienced leaders is also used to help identify potential solutions. Ultimately, speaking with the team before making any changes helps to build trust and demonstrate that their opinion matters.

Transitioning to Managing Managers

While working at Airbnb, the author was responsible for a payment risk team and took on another team, requiring them to learn how to support a manager. To do this, they informally watched other managers, stepped away from teams to give the new manager space, and switched gears to focus on more tactical and execution notes. They also had to be flexible and adaptive to different sets of tools, and became more vulnerable with people. Through trial and error, the author learned lessons such as being careful with what they say and setting up trust and feedback by being vulnerable.

Building Strong OKR’s

This article discusses how teams can be empowered to make decisions and measure their success. It suggests distilling OKR's down to the simplest terms, participating in OKR drafts, and defining the business impact of metrics and logs. It also emphasizes the importance of having conversations early in the cycle.

Getting Out of an Operational Rut

A team was bogged down by daily production incidents that were draining their morale. To solve this problem, the team stopped all new product development and worked to fix the root of the problem. After two months, they had a newfound courage and synergy, but lacked ideas for what to do next. They decided to dream big and add a bit of crazy to their ideas, eventually creating a new product with good product-market fit. The takeaway is that you can't innovate when your boat is sinking, so it's important to fix the root of the problem before dreaming big.

Delivering to an Impossible Deadline

A manager was tasked with building a feature for a customer, but the team was limited in scope, schedule, and cost. The complexity of the system made it difficult to meet the customer's needs, and the team was feeling pressured. The manager asked the team what they wanted in return for delivering the project, and they asked for time and space to clean up the technical debt and the ability to move to another team. The manager negotiated a compromise with the business and shielded the team from other distractions. After successfully delivering the customer requirements, the team was happy and eventually shipped features to millions of customers. The manager learned to be honest and make good on promises to the team in order to build trust and respect.

Reorganizing A Multi-National Team to Save A Late Product Launch

A Quebec-based security company had a project that had gone more than a year without customers receiving any stable version of the product, leading to customers threatening legal action. The Paris team was divided and revolting against the product director, so the new manager had to figure out the issues and take action. He identified four categories of problems, re-engaged the team, created a melting pot of culture, reallocated QA responsibility, recruited new positions, and focused on putting humans and their interactions before the process and the tools. The team re-engagement was the biggest indicator of success and the customer engaged more with them.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Instilling a Culture of Reliability

When the leader of a transitioning team joined their current company, they noticed a lack of clarity on the team's goals and alert and on-call procedures. To address this, they painted the big picture of success, wrote an on-call responsibilities document, implemented an ongoing on-call summary journal, and put post-mortems into effect. As a result, the team's operational health and reliability improved significantly, and the leader learned the importance of breaking down initiatives into manageable steps, sharing the wider narrative, and leading by example.

Building My Very First Team

The author was hired to help build a team and introduce the Agile methodology to a disorganized startup. He recruited people quickly with the help of a contractor and a hiring agency, and structured internal procedures with a mix of Kanban and Scrum. His efforts to make a positive change were praised and he was eventually appointed Director for Software Engineering. He learned that it is important to consult experts and to listen to team members when making decisions.

Staying Afloat During Rapid Growth and Transformation

A new team of five people was struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-growing startup. To address this, the team identified areas of responsibility, brainstormed solutions, prioritized tasks, and created space for two people to work on long-term projects. Through this process, they learned the importance of quick wins, taking action, and balancing research and development.

Identifying Prospective Managers

When engineers express a desire to become a manager, it can be an indicator of a lack of engagement or motivation. To address this, one-on-one sessions are held to understand the motivations behind the desire, and feedback is gathered from the team. Mentorship from experienced leaders is also used to help identify potential solutions. Ultimately, speaking with the team before making any changes helps to build trust and demonstrate that their opinion matters.

Transitioning to Managing Managers

While working at Airbnb, the author was responsible for a payment risk team and took on another team, requiring them to learn how to support a manager. To do this, they informally watched other managers, stepped away from teams to give the new manager space, and switched gears to focus on more tactical and execution notes. They also had to be flexible and adaptive to different sets of tools, and became more vulnerable with people. Through trial and error, the author learned lessons such as being careful with what they say and setting up trust and feedback by being vulnerable.

Building Strong OKR’s

This article discusses how teams can be empowered to make decisions and measure their success. It suggests distilling OKR's down to the simplest terms, participating in OKR drafts, and defining the business impact of metrics and logs. It also emphasizes the importance of having conversations early in the cycle.

Getting Out of an Operational Rut

A team was bogged down by daily production incidents that were draining their morale. To solve this problem, the team stopped all new product development and worked to fix the root of the problem. After two months, they had a newfound courage and synergy, but lacked ideas for what to do next. They decided to dream big and add a bit of crazy to their ideas, eventually creating a new product with good product-market fit. The takeaway is that you can't innovate when your boat is sinking, so it's important to fix the root of the problem before dreaming big.

Delivering to an Impossible Deadline

A manager was tasked with building a feature for a customer, but the team was limited in scope, schedule, and cost. The complexity of the system made it difficult to meet the customer's needs, and the team was feeling pressured. The manager asked the team what they wanted in return for delivering the project, and they asked for time and space to clean up the technical debt and the ability to move to another team. The manager negotiated a compromise with the business and shielded the team from other distractions. After successfully delivering the customer requirements, the team was happy and eventually shipped features to millions of customers. The manager learned to be honest and make good on promises to the team in order to build trust and respect.

Reorganizing A Multi-National Team to Save A Late Product Launch

A Quebec-based security company had a project that had gone more than a year without customers receiving any stable version of the product, leading to customers threatening legal action. The Paris team was divided and revolting against the product director, so the new manager had to figure out the issues and take action. He identified four categories of problems, re-engaged the team, created a melting pot of culture, reallocated QA responsibility, recruited new positions, and focused on putting humans and their interactions before the process and the tools. The team re-engagement was the biggest indicator of success and the customer engaged more with them.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Instilling a Culture of Reliability

When the leader of a transitioning team joined their current company, they noticed a lack of clarity on the team's goals and alert and on-call procedures. To address this, they painted the big picture of success, wrote an on-call responsibilities document, implemented an ongoing on-call summary journal, and put post-mortems into effect. As a result, the team's operational health and reliability improved significantly, and the leader learned the importance of breaking down initiatives into manageable steps, sharing the wider narrative, and leading by example.

Building My Very First Team

The author was hired to help build a team and introduce the Agile methodology to a disorganized startup. He recruited people quickly with the help of a contractor and a hiring agency, and structured internal procedures with a mix of Kanban and Scrum. His efforts to make a positive change were praised and he was eventually appointed Director for Software Engineering. He learned that it is important to consult experts and to listen to team members when making decisions.

Staying Afloat During Rapid Growth and Transformation

A new team of five people was struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-growing startup. To address this, the team identified areas of responsibility, brainstormed solutions, prioritized tasks, and created space for two people to work on long-term projects. Through this process, they learned the importance of quick wins, taking action, and balancing research and development.

Identifying Prospective Managers

When engineers express a desire to become a manager, it can be an indicator of a lack of engagement or motivation. To address this, one-on-one sessions are held to understand the motivations behind the desire, and feedback is gathered from the team. Mentorship from experienced leaders is also used to help identify potential solutions. Ultimately, speaking with the team before making any changes helps to build trust and demonstrate that their opinion matters.

Transitioning to Managing Managers

While working at Airbnb, the author was responsible for a payment risk team and took on another team, requiring them to learn how to support a manager. To do this, they informally watched other managers, stepped away from teams to give the new manager space, and switched gears to focus on more tactical and execution notes. They also had to be flexible and adaptive to different sets of tools, and became more vulnerable with people. Through trial and error, the author learned lessons such as being careful with what they say and setting up trust and feedback by being vulnerable.

Building Strong OKR’s

This article discusses how teams can be empowered to make decisions and measure their success. It suggests distilling OKR's down to the simplest terms, participating in OKR drafts, and defining the business impact of metrics and logs. It also emphasizes the importance of having conversations early in the cycle.

Getting Out of an Operational Rut

A team was bogged down by daily production incidents that were draining their morale. To solve this problem, the team stopped all new product development and worked to fix the root of the problem. After two months, they had a newfound courage and synergy, but lacked ideas for what to do next. They decided to dream big and add a bit of crazy to their ideas, eventually creating a new product with good product-market fit. The takeaway is that you can't innovate when your boat is sinking, so it's important to fix the root of the problem before dreaming big.

Delivering to an Impossible Deadline

A manager was tasked with building a feature for a customer, but the team was limited in scope, schedule, and cost. The complexity of the system made it difficult to meet the customer's needs, and the team was feeling pressured. The manager asked the team what they wanted in return for delivering the project, and they asked for time and space to clean up the technical debt and the ability to move to another team. The manager negotiated a compromise with the business and shielded the team from other distractions. After successfully delivering the customer requirements, the team was happy and eventually shipped features to millions of customers. The manager learned to be honest and make good on promises to the team in order to build trust and respect.

Reorganizing A Multi-National Team to Save A Late Product Launch

A Quebec-based security company had a project that had gone more than a year without customers receiving any stable version of the product, leading to customers threatening legal action. The Paris team was divided and revolting against the product director, so the new manager had to figure out the issues and take action. He identified four categories of problems, re-engaged the team, created a melting pot of culture, reallocated QA responsibility, recruited new positions, and focused on putting humans and their interactions before the process and the tools. The team re-engagement was the biggest indicator of success and the customer engaged more with them.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Instilling a Culture of Reliability

When the leader of a transitioning team joined their current company, they noticed a lack of clarity on the team's goals and alert and on-call procedures. To address this, they painted the big picture of success, wrote an on-call responsibilities document, implemented an ongoing on-call summary journal, and put post-mortems into effect. As a result, the team's operational health and reliability improved significantly, and the leader learned the importance of breaking down initiatives into manageable steps, sharing the wider narrative, and leading by example.

Building My Very First Team

The author was hired to help build a team and introduce the Agile methodology to a disorganized startup. He recruited people quickly with the help of a contractor and a hiring agency, and structured internal procedures with a mix of Kanban and Scrum. His efforts to make a positive change were praised and he was eventually appointed Director for Software Engineering. He learned that it is important to consult experts and to listen to team members when making decisions.

Staying Afloat During Rapid Growth and Transformation

A new team of five people was struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-growing startup. To address this, the team identified areas of responsibility, brainstormed solutions, prioritized tasks, and created space for two people to work on long-term projects. Through this process, they learned the importance of quick wins, taking action, and balancing research and development.

Identifying Prospective Managers

When engineers express a desire to become a manager, it can be an indicator of a lack of engagement or motivation. To address this, one-on-one sessions are held to understand the motivations behind the desire, and feedback is gathered from the team. Mentorship from experienced leaders is also used to help identify potential solutions. Ultimately, speaking with the team before making any changes helps to build trust and demonstrate that their opinion matters.

Transitioning to Managing Managers

While working at Airbnb, the author was responsible for a payment risk team and took on another team, requiring them to learn how to support a manager. To do this, they informally watched other managers, stepped away from teams to give the new manager space, and switched gears to focus on more tactical and execution notes. They also had to be flexible and adaptive to different sets of tools, and became more vulnerable with people. Through trial and error, the author learned lessons such as being careful with what they say and setting up trust and feedback by being vulnerable.

Building Strong OKR’s

This article discusses how teams can be empowered to make decisions and measure their success. It suggests distilling OKR's down to the simplest terms, participating in OKR drafts, and defining the business impact of metrics and logs. It also emphasizes the importance of having conversations early in the cycle.

Getting Out of an Operational Rut

A team was bogged down by daily production incidents that were draining their morale. To solve this problem, the team stopped all new product development and worked to fix the root of the problem. After two months, they had a newfound courage and synergy, but lacked ideas for what to do next. They decided to dream big and add a bit of crazy to their ideas, eventually creating a new product with good product-market fit. The takeaway is that you can't innovate when your boat is sinking, so it's important to fix the root of the problem before dreaming big.

Delivering to an Impossible Deadline

A manager was tasked with building a feature for a customer, but the team was limited in scope, schedule, and cost. The complexity of the system made it difficult to meet the customer's needs, and the team was feeling pressured. The manager asked the team what they wanted in return for delivering the project, and they asked for time and space to clean up the technical debt and the ability to move to another team. The manager negotiated a compromise with the business and shielded the team from other distractions. After successfully delivering the customer requirements, the team was happy and eventually shipped features to millions of customers. The manager learned to be honest and make good on promises to the team in order to build trust and respect.

Reorganizing A Multi-National Team to Save A Late Product Launch

A Quebec-based security company had a project that had gone more than a year without customers receiving any stable version of the product, leading to customers threatening legal action. The Paris team was divided and revolting against the product director, so the new manager had to figure out the issues and take action. He identified four categories of problems, re-engaged the team, created a melting pot of culture, reallocated QA responsibility, recruited new positions, and focused on putting humans and their interactions before the process and the tools. The team re-engagement was the biggest indicator of success and the customer engaged more with them.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Instilling a Culture of Reliability

When the leader of a transitioning team joined their current company, they noticed a lack of clarity on the team's goals and alert and on-call procedures. To address this, they painted the big picture of success, wrote an on-call responsibilities document, implemented an ongoing on-call summary journal, and put post-mortems into effect. As a result, the team's operational health and reliability improved significantly, and the leader learned the importance of breaking down initiatives into manageable steps, sharing the wider narrative, and leading by example.

Building My Very First Team

The author was hired to help build a team and introduce the Agile methodology to a disorganized startup. He recruited people quickly with the help of a contractor and a hiring agency, and structured internal procedures with a mix of Kanban and Scrum. His efforts to make a positive change were praised and he was eventually appointed Director for Software Engineering. He learned that it is important to consult experts and to listen to team members when making decisions.

Staying Afloat During Rapid Growth and Transformation

A new team of five people was struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-growing startup. To address this, the team identified areas of responsibility, brainstormed solutions, prioritized tasks, and created space for two people to work on long-term projects. Through this process, they learned the importance of quick wins, taking action, and balancing research and development.

Identifying Prospective Managers

When engineers express a desire to become a manager, it can be an indicator of a lack of engagement or motivation. To address this, one-on-one sessions are held to understand the motivations behind the desire, and feedback is gathered from the team. Mentorship from experienced leaders is also used to help identify potential solutions. Ultimately, speaking with the team before making any changes helps to build trust and demonstrate that their opinion matters.

Transitioning to Managing Managers

While working at Airbnb, the author was responsible for a payment risk team and took on another team, requiring them to learn how to support a manager. To do this, they informally watched other managers, stepped away from teams to give the new manager space, and switched gears to focus on more tactical and execution notes. They also had to be flexible and adaptive to different sets of tools, and became more vulnerable with people. Through trial and error, the author learned lessons such as being careful with what they say and setting up trust and feedback by being vulnerable.

Building Strong OKR’s

This article discusses how teams can be empowered to make decisions and measure their success. It suggests distilling OKR's down to the simplest terms, participating in OKR drafts, and defining the business impact of metrics and logs. It also emphasizes the importance of having conversations early in the cycle.

Getting Out of an Operational Rut

A team was bogged down by daily production incidents that were draining their morale. To solve this problem, the team stopped all new product development and worked to fix the root of the problem. After two months, they had a newfound courage and synergy, but lacked ideas for what to do next. They decided to dream big and add a bit of crazy to their ideas, eventually creating a new product with good product-market fit. The takeaway is that you can't innovate when your boat is sinking, so it's important to fix the root of the problem before dreaming big.

Delivering to an Impossible Deadline

A manager was tasked with building a feature for a customer, but the team was limited in scope, schedule, and cost. The complexity of the system made it difficult to meet the customer's needs, and the team was feeling pressured. The manager asked the team what they wanted in return for delivering the project, and they asked for time and space to clean up the technical debt and the ability to move to another team. The manager negotiated a compromise with the business and shielded the team from other distractions. After successfully delivering the customer requirements, the team was happy and eventually shipped features to millions of customers. The manager learned to be honest and make good on promises to the team in order to build trust and respect.

Reorganizing A Multi-National Team to Save A Late Product Launch

A Quebec-based security company had a project that had gone more than a year without customers receiving any stable version of the product, leading to customers threatening legal action. The Paris team was divided and revolting against the product director, so the new manager had to figure out the issues and take action. He identified four categories of problems, re-engaged the team, created a melting pot of culture, reallocated QA responsibility, recruited new positions, and focused on putting humans and their interactions before the process and the tools. The team re-engagement was the biggest indicator of success and the customer engaged more with them.

How to Communicate Poor Decisions Made by Management

As a frontline manager, it is important to approach higher-level managers with curiosity and specificity when raising issues and concerns. It is also important to be constructive and make tangible requests, as well as offer help and appreciation when appropriate. These lessons can help ensure that the issues are addressed and resolved in a timely and effective manner.

The Power of the Reframe

Reframing is a powerful technique that can be used in the workplace to help people see a different view of a situation, event, or person. This article discusses how to use reframing to help direct reports who are feeling discouraged, frustrated, or disappointed. The article emphasizes the importance of validating someone's experience before trying to open them to another perspective, and suggests that any setback or challenge can be seen as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Fixing Communication Bugs

This article discusses the importance of being aware of communication bugs, or the difference between what is said and what is heard. It emphasizes the importance of verifying the translation of what is said and understanding the other person's goals and motivations in order to ensure that communication is effective. Tools such as Brene Brown's "The Story I'm Telling Myself is" can be used to check perspectives and ensure that communication is successful.

Running Distributed Teams: A Human Connection Is Vital

When working with distributed teams, communication and cultural differences must be taken into account. Video calling has improved communication, but face-to-face meetings are still important for building trust and relationships. To ensure teams are in sync, it is important to prioritize tasks, over-communicate goals, and build relationships with team members. Investing time in building relationships will pay dividends in the long run and will help to eliminate miscommunication.

Effective Prioritization: A Balance of Timeline Planning, Rice, Precision, And Accuracy

Prioritization is an important skill to have when working with distributed teams. To prioritize effectively, it is important to understand what is being solved and why, and to establish a timeline. The Rice Prioritization Framework can be used to measure reach, impact, confidence, and effort. This helps to make qualitative tasks more quantitative and allows for a more predictable process. Precision is also important, as it helps to prioritize the right tasks.

Formalizing Processes to Gain Visibility in a Remote Organization

A director of engineering in a fully distributed company realized that they had very little visibility into the performance of individual contributors and that engineering managers were not objectively evaluating their teams. To gain better visibility, the director implemented four actionable steps: changing the 360 feedback mechanism, pivoting team-based skip-level meetings to skip-level one-on-ones, enforcing a tech lead role on every initiative, and having retrospectives for every project. These steps have allowed the director to gain better visibility into the performance of the team and to advocate for engineers who are going unrecognized by their manager.

Product Managers and Founders: Ingredients for a Good Relationship

Product managers and founders who have a product mindset can have difficult relationships due to misunderstandings. To create a successful relationship, it is important to set expectations upfront, assess when to include the founder in the conversation, and test and adjust the framework. Additionally, it is important to be firm and hold the founder accountable to the agreed-upon framework, while also being respectful. Doing this upfront will create trust and understanding between the two parties.

Transitioning from Engineering to Product Management

Engineers transitioning to product management often struggle to be comfortable in the problem space, as they are used to immediately offering solutions. To help them, it is important to understand the concept of the problem space and how to navigate it, as well as to learn different communication styles to effectively convey messages to different audiences. Additionally, engineers need to unlearn their training in the solution space and accept the uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with working with customers.

Failed Startups and Resume Gaps: The Career Path of a Product Manager

Product managers often fail in their attempts to build their own products, but this experience can be valuable and should be embraced. It is important to learn from experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, in order to gain valuable skills and competencies. This is demonstrated through the example of a person transitioning to product management from industrial engineering, who had built an open-source social network for people interested in boats and sailing. The lesson to be learned is that all experiences can be valuable, and that learning from them requires discipline.

Product Managers: Leaders, Not All-Around Experts

The author, a product manager with no technical background, shares their experience of learning and implementing Agile, building strong relationships with experts, and focusing on their strengths instead of weaknesses. They recommend Product Managers to keep learning, build relationships, and trust themselves.

Establishing Annual OKRs For Your Team

This article outlines the process of setting annual OKRs for a team that lacked a clear direction. The author held a group session to identify key work streams and then established specific objectives and key results. The team felt invested in the goals and the OKRs acted as a self-alignment tool. The author also learned that three is a good number to stick to when establishing annual OKRs and that it gives the team clarity on priorities.

Instilling a Culture of Reliability

When the leader of a transitioning team joined their current company, they noticed a lack of clarity on the team's goals and alert and on-call procedures. To address this, they painted the big picture of success, wrote an on-call responsibilities document, implemented an ongoing on-call summary journal, and put post-mortems into effect. As a result, the team's operational health and reliability improved significantly, and the leader learned the importance of breaking down initiatives into manageable steps, sharing the wider narrative, and leading by example.

Building My Very First Team

The author was hired to help build a team and introduce the Agile methodology to a disorganized startup. He recruited people quickly with the help of a contractor and a hiring agency, and structured internal procedures with a mix of Kanban and Scrum. His efforts to make a positive change were praised and he was eventually appointed Director for Software Engineering. He learned that it is important to consult experts and to listen to team members when making decisions.

Staying Afloat During Rapid Growth and Transformation

A new team of five people was struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-growing startup. To address this, the team identified areas of responsibility, brainstormed solutions, prioritized tasks, and created space for two people to work on long-term projects. Through this process, they learned the importance of quick wins, taking action, and balancing research and development.

Identifying Prospective Managers

When engineers express a desire to become a manager, it can be an indicator of a lack of engagement or motivation. To address this, one-on-one sessions are held to understand the motivations behind the desire, and feedback is gathered from the team. Mentorship from experienced leaders is also used to help identify potential solutions. Ultimately, speaking with the team before making any changes helps to build trust and demonstrate that their opinion matters.

Transitioning to Managing Managers

While working at Airbnb, the author was responsible for a payment risk team and took on another team, requiring them to learn how to support a manager. To do this, they informally watched other managers, stepped away from teams to give the new manager space, and switched gears to focus on more tactical and execution notes. They also had to be flexible and adaptive to different sets of tools, and became more vulnerable with people. Through trial and error, the author learned lessons such as being careful with what they say and setting up trust and feedback by being vulnerable.

Building Strong OKR’s

This article discusses how teams can be empowered to make decisions and measure their success. It suggests distilling OKR's down to the simplest terms, participating in OKR drafts, and defining the business impact of metrics and logs. It also emphasizes the importance of having conversations early in the cycle.

Getting Out of an Operational Rut

A team was bogged down by daily production incidents that were draining their morale. To solve this problem, the team stopped all new product development and worked to fix the root of the problem. After two months, they had a newfound courage and synergy, but lacked ideas for what to do next. They decided to dream big and add a bit of crazy to their ideas, eventually creating a new product with good product-market fit. The takeaway is that you can't innovate when your boat is sinking, so it's important to fix the root of the problem before dreaming big.

Delivering to an Impossible Deadline

A manager was tasked with building a feature for a customer, but the team was limited in scope, schedule, and cost. The complexity of the system made it difficult to meet the customer's needs, and the team was feeling pressured. The manager asked the team what they wanted in return for delivering the project, and they asked for time and space to clean up the technical debt and the ability to move to another team. The manager negotiated a compromise with the business and shielded the team from other distractions. After successfully delivering the customer requirements, the team was happy and eventually shipped features to millions of customers. The manager learned to be honest and make good on promises to the team in order to build trust and respect.

Reorganizing A Multi-National Team to Save A Late Product Launch

A Quebec-based security company had a project that had gone more than a year without customers receiving any stable version of the product, leading to customers threatening legal action. The Paris team was divided and revolting against the product director, so the new manager had to figure out the issues and take action. He identified four categories of problems, re-engaged the team, created a melting pot of culture, reallocated QA responsibility, recruited new positions, and focused on putting humans and their interactions before the process and the tools. The team re-engagement was the biggest indicator of success and the customer engaged more with them.