The Making of a Manager · Julie Zhuo · 2019
Julie Zhuo’s writing style enables her to cover a lot of ground quickly. She frames the major challenges of leading a team really well, and I found myself agreeing with everything she said.
Key Takeaways
- Management is the art of getting better outcomes from a group of people working together through influencing purpose, people, and process
- Assess yourself based on both your team’s achievements now (your work) AND your teams’ ability to achieve outcomes in future
- Management is a role. Leadership is the ability to guide and influence people - it’s a skill
- People doing good work is a function of motivation and skill
- Power dynamics mean the manager must take the lead on building trust - invest time into it.
Coaching Model: Identify, Understand, Support
- Identify What Really Matters
- What is top of mind for you right now?
- What priorities are you thinking about this week?
- What's the best use of our time today?
- Understand by Getting to the Root of the Problem and What Can Be Done about It
- What does your ideal outcome look like?
- What’s hard for you in getting to that outcome?
- What do you really care about?
- What do you think is the best course of action?
- What's the worst case scenario you're worried about?
- Support by Identifying Things That You Can Do to Help
- How can I help you?
- What can I do to make you more successful?
- What was the most useful part of our conversation today?
- Great feedback inspires behaviour change → that results in their life getting better
- Every major disappointment is a failure to set expectations. You shouldn’t hear bad news for the first time in a review.
- Have a growth mindset. You can get better at anything. Feedback and making an effort to improve will accelerate your progress.
- Give every meeting a purpose → think about what a great outcome looks like.
- Diversity makes amazing teams, and diversity has many dimensions 💯
- Prioritise diversity by actively seeking candidates that offer something different 🔥💯
- Perfect execution is more powerful than perfect strategy
- People centric skills become more important as a manager: Hiring leaders, building self-reliant teams, establishing a clear vision, communicating it well
- Always walk the walk → if you’re not willing to change your behaviour for a stated value then don’t bring it up in the first place
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Organising Product Teams for Fast Time to Market and High Levels of Innovation · Abbott, Armelin · 2018
Poor system design is largely caused by poor organisation design, and as we will see later the two are inseparable; architectures and organisations must be designed together to work properly. This paper reviews several pieces of research ... to illuminate a better way of organising to develop modern internet products, systems and services
Org structure and team shapes are powerful forces. Swimming against them is hard if not futile. If you’re making some big bets, make sure you are setup to get after them. This paper covers the basics. It promotes... small empowered cross-functional teams, kept together as high performing units and aligned to outcomes.
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Book Highlights
In the book Playing to Win, the authors argue that if you do not decide on a strategy for winning, you will fail to make the resource investments and commitments required to become the leader in your segment. Nacho Bassino · Product Direction
Instead of cramming all of the information in one overlay page or setup wizard that almost everyone will ignore, guide users one step at a time by showing fewer options. Whatever information you present should be contextual, relevant, and immediate. Ramli John and Wes Bush · Product-Led Onboarding
Simplifying the types of teams to just these four helps to reduce ambiguity within the organisation (Stream-Aligned, Enabling, Platform, Complicated Sub-system). Skelton, Pais and Malan · Team Topologies
I was a skeptic on objectives and key results until Grove sat down with me and explained why they mattered. If you tell everybody to go to the center of Europe, and some start marching off to France, and some to Germany, and some to Italy, that’s no good—not if you want them all going to Switzerland. If the vectors point in different directions, they add up to zero. But if you get everybody pointing in the same direction, you maximize the results. That was the pitch Grove gave me—and then he told me I had to teach it. John Doerr · Measure What Matters
After a while, this consistency pays off, and the programmers begin to adopt personas and refer to them by name. Alan Cooper · The Inmates Are Running The Asylum
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Quotes & Tweets
Factors that may inhibit new behaviors: - Lack of feedback - Unclear goals - Unlearning an existing behavior - Unawareness of consequences/bigger picture - Lack of environment or process support - Anxiety/fear/discomfort - Lack of confidence/belief about capabilities - MistrustSocial proof - Lack of autonomy/ownership - Learned helplessness - Misaligned incentives - Lack of identity or value alignment - Emotional reaction Julie Dirksen
Focus on 95% compliance with any routine. It's high enough to get the benefits of the structure, but leaves room for the 5% chaos where a lot of incredible memories are made. Sahil Bloom