Archives for November 2015

A Better Launcher For A Better You

November 25, 2015 Leave a Comment

I have been thinking about a special launcher. It is something I very much want to exist, and ideally it would be baked into the core platforms, but I wonder if I am strange for wanting it.

I am on a constant quest to be more productive and use my time wisely. This manifests with processes and tools to help implement them. I build habits with checklists to follow through and track items I want to make progress on with the calendar to tie it to my day.

There is a lot of friction with the myriad of tools (e.g. Asana, Coach.me, Inbox, Calendar, Anki, Pocket) and it is easy to fall out of the process. This is where the Better Launcher comes in.

I want to setup rules for my time:

I can’t do X until I do Y
Every hour take ten minutes to knock something off of the check list (this can be Spanish, spaced repetition, push ups, hunting vs. reading of info, etc)
I can do X for Y minutes per day / week.

I want pressure to stay on course, so these rules need to show up throughout the system. For example, if I launch Facebook and the critical items for the day aren’t complete yet, put that right in my face. Tell me how long I have spent and live with the caps. It is OK to have that square of dark chocolate as a reward for a good eating day, but don’t scoff the whole bar. This is the same for the digital areas of life. Enjoy one game of VainGlory with your friends, just don’t make it 5! 🙂

I think that this friction and virtual guide would help me. It would surface what I am trying to do without having to remember to keep going into my daily checklist.

Modern Family

I have harped on about the need for platforms to consider family contexts. Imagine a parent being able to setup these rules for their children! By setting up the rules, the kids are still empowered to make their choices on the when and how, which helps teach them vital organizational skills that they will need in life.

Humans love control and knowing their constraints. As a parent I see a huge difference when I can frame a conversation as “Ok, the 10 minute alarm went off so I guess it’s time to move on to the next thing” vs. “I am the boss of you. You will now stop doing what you are doing because I saw so”.

Having the system be able to track progress and time, and be able to redirect you:

“You said you wanted to do Facebook but how about we direct your attention to something more productive. There will be time for Facebook later though…. just not right now.”

Yup, I would love Peter the Productivity Guide. I think it could turn the tables on the prison that is the distraction in your pocket, but since it is a little like helping you take your vitamins, would you appreciate it? If you think you would appreciate it, would you actually use it? Or would you turn it off after a week?

Wife Swap? Role Swap!

November 19, 2015 Leave a Comment

In the world of management your job is partially to build the team that builds the things. As an engineering manager, I sometimes find myself thinking:

“Man, dealing with computers…. so nice. So rational.”

People are complex and predictably irrational. Fortunately, I actually like people and find the challenge of helping teams a rewarding one, even if there are some days that I come home quite pensive.

While asleep my brain is off trying to find patterns, and this act leads to connections such as comparing how teams are related to each other and their behavior and how families are structured.

When it comes to these, and peer-to-peer dynamics, one root cause is often a lack of empathy and a slew of assumptions that your brain has created in order to try to understand the complex world around it. This leads me to think “man, if they could walk in each others shoes for a day….” from time to time, and I wonder why we don’t do more to make that happen?

Some companies do a good job of having shadowing programs, moving people around so culture and knowledge can be shared, and experience can be gained. It also happens organically, as people naturally move about. But would it make sense to do this much more regularly?

I have seen the need in a few situations:

Understanding another role

It isn’t always easy to understand the trials and tribulations of someone in a very different field, or in a different role. It is easy for us to think that what we do is hard and complex (as we know about the complexities) whereas their work seems easy (as we see the output vs. the toil and training that went into it).

This also can become an issue if there are roles where people feel like more input is directed at them, and they can’t give the same level of input back. My typical example here is the engineer and the designer. A designer on my team once complained that it wasn’t fair that the engineer was giving so much feedback on their wires. They felt like they were the expert and that “I can’t do a code review and give feedback there!” That was the real issue, the perceived asymmetry. Since we are all users of computing platforms, many of us feel like we have opinions on the UX of a product that we are building. That doesn’t mean that we have the same level of deep understanding of a UX expert though, which is why they are responsible for the experience. That responsibility does NOT mean their job is to come up with all the ideas though, which is why a good UXer will listen to all and look for good things they have missed.

Also, although you may not be capable of a code review, you can review the engineering. You can look for crashes, UX bugs, jank, etc. That is very much in scope, so in reality you can have a lot of feedback back to engineering.

Understanding another team

The same notion of “I understand the complexity and only see your output” also kicks in with teams. From the outside it is easy to think that another team is under performing based on your assumptions. This doesn’t mean that they are NOT under performing of course, and it may be that this is a team that you know well, and have a deep understanding of their domain, but it isn’t always the case.

This can often happen between the “business” and “product development” worlds. The business naturally wants features and functionality and often tends to wonder why its so hard to get those screens up and running! They can also easily run into “I saw them do screen A in a day, so why is screen B taking a month!” when the complexity differences are huge. If the misunderstanding is this far off though, then the product development team isn’t doing a good enough job at explaining what they are doing 🙂

Understanding at another level in the chain

The pointy hair boss. What a moron. He has the easy job at the top! Why doesn’t he always do thinks that I want him to do? Our strategy is dumb and “if I was in charge….”. I admit to meeting plenty of pointy haired bosses, but it turns out that it isn’t as fun up there as you imagine it is. They have to manage multiple teams with complex priorities and unclear answers.

You know your area of the org deeply, but take a minute to think about what is going on in the other parts of the org, or in other parts of the company. Do you understand the strategy? Do you think you have a good handle on the context? If not you should get it from management, and it is poor form if they haven’t pushed it down to you. You can’t be expected to make the best decisions if you don’t have the context.

It is for these reasons that I think it is wise to think about how to keep organizations a little more dynamic. Change is constant these days more than ever so why not embrace it and think about how to use it to dispel some tension and gain shared understanding?

Do you party with your cousin orgs more that your siblings?

November 13, 2015 Leave a Comment

I remember when it hit me. I had back to back meetings with two teams, and they were polar opposite experiences. In the first meeting, you would be hard pressed to know who belonged to which team. Everyone was problem solving and coming together for the customers.

Then we rolled into the next meeting, one that was silted and the air was filled with the pungent smell of CYA. Fingers were pointed, everyone was guarded with what they said, and the ball barely moved an inch. It was awful.

The stark contrast meant that I couldn’t help but compare. What was the root problem that was stopping the teams from working well together in the second example?

It could be many things of course:

Personality clashes between the teams
No clarity of ownership and purpose
Incentives being misaligned.

But it didn’t fit neatly into any of those buckets. Then I stepped up a level from thinking about the individuals and their personalities, and instead looked at the groups. And there it was. One of the groups was a close peer, with both of us reporting to the same immediate boss. The other was more removed, all part of the same family, but further up the tree.

This got me thinking about families.

I have witnessed interesting behavior where siblings can go at each other like cats and dogs, but when cousins are around everyone has a blast. With cousins there aren’t the same concerns with pecking order in the family, and instead you are left with super-friends… in that they are family, they will be around your whole life, and that you get the overall crazy of your particular family group. It also doesn’t hurt that generally when you gather with cousins it is to celebrate and chances are you end up with presents. You don’t have to live with them and all their warts, as you do with your siblings.

There are many occasions where I have witnessed someone react to behavior from someone else and I know that they would have reacted totally differently if the other party was someone else. It hasn’t been uncommon for me to say to someone “what would you have done if I had said that to you?” Once a bit is flipped, we often look for things to prove why we flipped that bit and we get frustrated, whereas with someone we like we are willing to deal with more and give them the benefit of the doubt.

All of these people, and family, dynamics can be seen in the corporate world. As you try to build a healthy company you need to watch over these dynamics and step in when appropriate. This doesn’t mean that every relationship should be happy happy joy joy. Not only is that not realistic, but it isn’t even ideal. It is good for us to push each other. It is good for us to have friction. The key isn’t to freak out at that, but rather find ways to process the friction. You don’t have to be best friends with every person or org out there, but you do need to work well together. That often comes down to trust.

The Poison

There are situations where I didn’t trust other orgs, and that was always a poisonous situation. This is where “politics” come out and you try to protect your team. In the short term this can keep the team moving and productive, but in the long run it is destined to break down as the natural structures don’t make any sense.

As someone responsible for some part of an organization, your job is to build trust over time throughout your organization. This includes working with your peers. Andy Grove calls this out explicitly when he defines the output of management as:

“A manager’s output is not her individual work, but instead the output of her organization plus that of the neighboring organizations under her influence”

This responsibility is important. We are all ultimately one family, and there is plenty to go around, so don’t be insular, but help with empathy.

With this in mind, I will try to treat everyone like a cousin, even at the org level 🙂