#management (168 links)
- Some final words on Foursquare teendrama.substack.com
A brutal ending for a business I liked a lot back in the day.
Via Rosieland.
Medium’s recap, financial turnaround, and difficult path back to health.
- Design System Generations medium.com
How to discuss and describe a design system’s biggest changes
- TBM 330: (Un)common Sense Playbook - by John Cutler cutlefish.substack.com
This is a great example of how a mix of common challenges can stymie the common sense playbook. The mix of optics pressure, a "guarded" toxic personality, low trust, and a swamped partner is hard to surmount. Even an experienced manager will struggle in this situation.
- BICEPS palomamedina.com
There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: You might find that equity and belonging are most important to you, but choice and status are most important to your employee, your partner, your child. Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work.
- The Middle Management of a Design System Program sparkbox.com
The shape of your design system team and the hierarchy it falls within can greatly impact the way you approach the work. A key role to the success of your program is the middle manager.
- Understanding the Tiger Team Approach | Lucidchart Blog lucidchart.com
A tiger team is a specialized, cross-functional team brought together to solve or investigate a specific problem or critical issue.
- Directly Responsible Individual vs Single Threaded Leader | by Oliver Hu | Keqiu’s Management Notes medium.com
STL is short for Single Threaded Leader. Different from previous approach, this [...] makes the leader exclusively dedicated to a project. The individual ONLY works on this single top level initiative.
- How I ship projects at big tech companies seangoedecke.com
Ship it.
- Words on Founder Mode randsinrepose.com
- Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
👋 Hi, this is Gergely with the monthly, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the…
- Broken Ownership blog.alexewerlof.com
Have you been in any of these situations? Managers make decisions that’s out of their leagues and everyone else in the team ends up paying for it. Knowledgeable…
This is based on an internal quip doc I wrote up about careful communication in the context of rebuilding trust. I got a couple requests to turn it into a blog…
- Split Your Overwhelmed Teams - ACM Queue queue.acm.org
Two teams of five is not the same as one team of ten.
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.
In his 1959 book, “Landmarks of Tomorrow,” he coined the term “knowledge work,” and argued that autonomy would be the central feature of the new corporate world. Drucker predicted that corporate profits would depend on mental effort, and that each individual knowledge worker, possessing skills too specialized to be broken down into “repetitive, simple, mechanical motions” choreographed from above, would need to decide how to “apply his knowledge as a professional” and monitor his own productivity. “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote, in “The Effective Executive,” from 1967. “He must direct himself.”
U.S. companies such as DuPont and General Motors moved from a functional to a multidivisional structure in the early 20th century. By the latter half of the century the vast majority of large corporations had followed suit. Apple proves that this conventional approach is not necessary and that the functional structure may benefit companies facing tremendous technological change and industry upheaval.
Its fundamental belief is that those with the most expertise and experience in a domain should have decision rights for that domain. This is based on two views: First, Apple competes in markets where the rates of technological change and disruption are high, so it must rely on the judgment and intuition of people with deep knowledge of the technologies responsible for disruption.
- How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class theatlantic.com
Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities.
- Progression at Monzo progression.monzo.com
Progression frameworks are tools that help us evaluate and pay our staff consistently, and help people understand how to progress in their work. We've put them here for everyone at Monzo (and anyone in the world!) to use.
- Operating principles - Justin Stach justin.stach.uk
* Spend more time really understanding the present and making it better than you do predicting or designing the future (the now is undervalued) * Leave things in a better state than you found them * Decentralise the decisions, centralise the vision and principles * Automate routine stuff, leave the complicated stuff to humans * Find (or create) and reinforce positive feedback loops * ~~Don’t worry about predicting the future, focus on understanding the present~~ * Make it safe to change your plans * Do the work to make the work work * Avoid creating bottlenecks, never be a gatekeeper * Avoid big, attention-seeking, resource hungry projects: find the little things with unnoticed potential that don’t need lots of energy - set a few of these going
- A Distributed Meeting Primer – Rands in Repose randsinrepose.com
As a leader who primarily values team health, I place great value on the weekly 1:1 because it’s where I assess health. It’s my highest bandwidth meeting, and…
Leveling up a design system’s multi-channel approach to messaging designers, developers and everyone else Nathan Curtis Oct 15 · 11 min read Operating a design…
- A Design System Governance Process bradfrost.com
You can have a comprehensive design system that contains a slew of well-structured components, thorough documentation, thoughtful guidelines, and a…
Study after study after study into remote work has made one thing clear: Remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. What’s not…
- What do executives do, anyway? - apenwarr apenwarr.ca
What do executives do, anyway? An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of workin a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year…
I never planned to do a series of articles, but this write-up almost came as a natural follow-up to the post I wrote last week about Context over Control and…
- Reflections of a business guru - Bartleby economist.com
C HARLES HANDY has been through a lot of challenges in a long career as a manager at Royal Dutch Shell, an oil giant, followed by a spell in academia and…
- Anna Shipman : JFDI annashipman.co.uk
Russell Davies's strategy advice 08 July 2019 Last year, I met the excellent Russell Davies to ask his advice on how to create a strategy. Russell was the…
- How to evolve digital design teams medium.com
How do design leaders stay ahead of the curve, while simultaneously managing their teams and delivering the required design excellence that drives their brands…
- Minimal Project Management - Hiltmon hiltmon.com
With my team starting to grow at work, its time to add some Project Management to our process. However, I do not want this to add any additional time, meetings…
- No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization? | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
Many more people get a chance to try out a leadership role to grow, but it is expected to be temporary so people can go back to being technical with no…
Ian Nowland Apr 11 1 Summary A challenge of organizations is the aggregation of local information to a point where a globally optimal decision can be made in a…
- On Code Reviews medium.com
Nick Schrock Oct 3, 2018 There’s no such thing as perfect code Code reviews are a really important part of the engineering process. However, they can become…
Being a Good Decision Maker Intuitively, being right a lot matters . At the same time, and in contrast, there are often factors outside of our control that…
And can true leadership save it? Jack Skeels Jun 24, 2018 If one believes the latest cover story from the leader of promoting management trends, The Harvard…
- Everything Breaks – Rands in Repose randsinrepose.com
We’re going to play a really simple and really dumb game. I’ll explain the setup and the rules: Two one-person ‘teams.’ On a flat, boring surface, you draw two…
Introduction At Stripe, we think a lot about scale. As we’ve scaled our products to process billions of dollars a year for millions of businesses, we’ve also…
- What I Learned in Six Years at GDS ◆ 24 ways 24ways.org
Anna Shipman 8 Dec ember 2018 Published in Business No comments When I joined the Government Digital Service in April 2012, GOV.UK was just going into public…
- Adding value, by adding values public.digital
This week I had the great honour of being named by the RSA as the first Royal Designer for Industry for Service Design. My hope is to inspire the next…
- When your design system fails medium.com
We’ve heard a lot about great design systems, but what happens when they don’t work out? Introduction Any mature application will eventually experience a UI…
- The Product Pragmatist – ProductCoalition.com productcoalition.com
How often have you spent time in multi-day planning sessions, created a huge set of goals for the upcoming year, only to circle back a year later to find that…
- What I’m up to: tech leadership - Laughing Meme laughingmeme.org
I told myself at the 6 month mark of fun employment I’d publish my notes about what I’d been up to. I missed that. Did some yak shaving. Having a couple of…
- On Heroes | Jeffrey Snover's blog jsnover.com
Technology heroes are always difficult subject. As an engineering manager, I remember the first time I participated in a “life boat” drill where you have to…
Citizens can get the information and services they need more quickly because users' needs are considered in government service design, and suppliers can work…
- Why Are Enterprises So Slow? zwischenzugs.com
tl;dr In this article I want to explain a few things about enterprises and their software, based on my experiences, and also describe what things need to be in…