Latest Posts
Four Learning Areas for Prospective Engineering Managers
Software engineering management is a challenging role, with many different skills required to do it well. It can be challenging to know where to start when considering moving into the role. This post lays out a framework that can be used by the managers of prospective engineers as well as the engineers who may be …
Growing Leaders to Solve the Hardest Problems
In an organization with many teams, problems will arise that span across these teams and require solutions broader than an individual manager’s purview. These types of projects include things like: introducing changes to a quarterly planning process, agreeing on broad architectural changes, rolling out a new project management tool, or making changes to how on-call…
Organizational Change – Part 4: Scaffolding and Hooks
Much of creating organizational change involves finding ways to successfully get individuals to remember and recall new information at the right time to change an existing habit. Often, these new ideas and concepts are complex, and until humanity invents Matrix-style knowledge uploading, we’re limited to what we can convey in low-bandwidth and faulty human communication.…
Organizational Change – Part 3: Sisyphus and Successful Execution
condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill in Hades. He’s also a useful character when it comes to thinking about using our time effectively. I have seen many leaders of organizations recreate their own personal Sisyphean reality by failing to focus their attention.
Organizational Change – Part 2: Changing organizations is like moving a memory foam mattress
This post is Part 2 of a 4 part series looking at strategies and tactics for creating change in organizations! If you like it, consider signing up at the bottom of the page for email alerts of new posts. Check here for Part 1: Viral Ideas and Part 3: Sisyphus and Successful Execution. There’s something…
Organizational Change – Part 1: Viral Ideas
Emerging from the last year and a half, most of us are still processing the reality of a world with COVID. The way we see and experience everything has shifted — many of us have learned far more about epidemiology and microbiology than ever before. Before 2020, the notion of “viral spread” may have seemed…
Manager Tools: Capturing and Routing Information
One of the values of a good manager is effective communication — getting people the right information at the right time. This requires gathering, sifting, and routing the deluge of information available from meetings, emails, research, slack, etc.. It’s is hard to do well, and impossible to perfect. We can, though, use tools to improve…
Developing Expertise at Work: A Guide
Every company has a shortage of experts. The world inside and outside every organization is constantly changing, and even someone who has solved a problem before, hasn’t solved it in the current context. In a fast-paced company, this creates opportunities for people who are willing to put in the effort to learn and adapt.
How I Use Journaling to Capture Ideas and Build New Habits
I realized a few years ago that two of the smartest and most successful people I know took notes on everything. Both used notes heavily to capture ideas, quotes, learnings, etc. and frequently referred to these notes to recall ideas or remind themselves of something they may have forgotten. They also used the act of…
How I Stay Focused in a World of Distractions
I have a bad addiction to internet browser tabs. At any given time, I have 2–3 Chrome windows open, often with 20+ tabs per window. There is never enough time to read or see all of the things I want to in life. This is merely a symptom of a larger problem I struggle with.…
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