All organisations waste a huge amount of time believing that they are making progress on decisions, when in fact they’re just involved in the theatre of decision making. This happens through indirect actions that feel like progress is being made, but in fact contribute nothing to it. Small changes can speed up progress dramatically. This post is an expansion of an internal note that I circulated at work, mostly as advice to myself rather than for anyone in particular. This is because the behaviours that I’m going to outline are unbelievably easy to fall into when you are trying to create ideas ..read more

We spend a lot of time working on things that nobody else knows exists. A seemingly simple act of serving up a photostream with infinite scroll may require global infrastructure, aggressive caching and data being mirrored at the edges of a CDN. I’m sure there’s some kind of inverse correlation between the delight of a user experience and the challenge of the implementation in software at scale. This is because in order for the tip of the iceberg to be visible and beautiful, it has to be supported by the 90% of it that exists underwater. The part that others aren’t able to see.  The bigge ..read more

Not that long ago, I’d written about how I write an internal newsletter at work, as part of a wider piece on how to make sure that you’re being visible. This week’s post extracts a couple of the ideas that I’d recently been writing about internally and makes them suitable for a general audience. The core theme of this article is around getting straight to the point. That phrasing can sound somewhat harsh, but it’s really important when people that you work with are busy, which is pretty much everyone, all of the time.  In a world of continual context-switching and distraction, if you’re ..read more

Last week I wrote some thoughts on managing my energy better at work, through the lens of leading and lagging indicators. When I was writing that post—judging by the amount of times I had to check and recheck the definitions—I realised that I often get them muddled up. So, what better way of making sure I understand something than writing about it for a large audience? Here we go… Q: What are leading and lagging indicators? Why are they easy to get wrong? Whether you are building a product, running a team, or managing a company, understanding the relationship between your inputs and outputs is ..read more

If there’s one thing as sure as death and taxes, it’s the fact that you’re going to have many managers over the course of your career. Even if you stay at the same company for decades, it’s unlikely that your manager is going to as well. What’s more likely is that you may find yourself with a new manager every few years, due to one or more of the following reasons: You change jobs. You move to another team, either by choice or because priorities have changed. Your manager leaves. Your manager moves to another team, for the same reasons as above. You get the picture. So, this week, we’ll look ..read more

Recently I was fortunate enough to have a great discussion with Suzan Bond about my latest book, Effective Remote Work, and on remote working in general. We cover pretty much everything from how the book came about, the key themes and concepts, and the effect that remote working is having on our society. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. The post Book discussion with Lead Dev appeared first on The Engineering Manager ..read more

This article is part of a series on managing managers. Myself and Rebecca are sitting down to dinner. She asks me a question. “Were you doing lots of one-to-ones today?” “Yeah, why’d you ask?” “Do you realize that you pretty much said the same thing over and over again, all day?” “Huh. I had no idea. No wonder I feel so tired…” Do you ever feel like you’re repeating yourself? You probably are. Whether you’re managing one team or multiple teams, part of your job is gathering and distributing information. You likely have unique access into what is going on – and what is coming up – in the rest o ..read more

I recently published an article in the final ever issue of Stripe Press‘ Increment Magazine. It’s called Planning for Momentum. In the article, I make the case that planning is far from dead. In fact, it’s very much alive and more vital than ever before. Planning is a dynamic and generative process that improves your ideas, facilitates alignment and consensus, and leaves vital artefacts for the future. You can read the article over at Increment, and you can buy the physical copy of the magazine if you want to experience the beautiful issue in 3D. The post Planning for momentum appeared first ..read more

I am temporarily emerging from my writing den to proudly tell you that Effective Remote Work is now out in beta. You can pick it up as a DRM-free eBook in various digital formats suitable for your computer or e-reader over at the Pragmatic Bookshelf. At the time of writing, the beta release consists of over 50% of the book, and new chapters will be delivered to you over the coming weeks and months. Most of them are pretty much written, and I can’t wait for you to see them. Errata and feedback are kindly welcomed so we can iron out any bugs before the whole thing goes to print in the near futu ..read more

This article is part of a series on remote working. OK, a quick recap… In the last article we looked at the spectrum of permanence, which showed that: A strong correlation exists between the permanence of communication and asynchronousness. Permanence can be determined by how relevant, accurate, or useful a particular artifact is with time. Shifting to be more asynchronous means that you should leave an audit trail, maintain indexes of important information, and ensure that you regularly mark, file, tidy and delete your artifacts. In this article we’re going to look at what it means to feel ..read more