I have learned by doing the importance of having a well-curated timeline in any social media. So, I thought of sharing that across. Not as a recipe of how to make it; to be quite honest I am not entirely sure what is effective and what not… But the more I chose what I would interact with, the more value I could see on what was coming up…
My plan, therefore, is rather simple: to make a weekly wrap up of stuff that called my attention, and relate to the overarching theme of this blog/newsletter, obviously, and share it across over here. With a few comments of my own on top.
This is the first time. I hope you enjoy it!
David Anderson’s keynote at this year’s Kanban Global Summit
In case you didn’t know, David Anderson is the pioneer and leader of the Kanban method and movement, which aims at providing pragmatic and practical guidance to knowledge work management. In this keynote, which isn’t from this week as such, but I just happened to have watched recently, he talks about ‘how to scale’. An interesting aspect in my view, which is also consistent with the ideas I shared in my latest post, primarily drawing from the other Dave, Dave Snowden, is that scaling is fundamentally about replication of granular effective components.
Now, I don’t know to which extent the two ‘Daves’ know each other or even if they necessarily get along well. But as someone who draw from both works as references to my thinking, I can’t help to notice the synergy and the coherence.
David Anderson’s focus on the keynote was on leadership – how a leader can scale out and up… I always had a similar view, which I captured as in insight on this LinkedIn post of mine.
Ultimately, the maturity of an organization is a function of the maturity of its leadership. And by ‘maturity’ here I am mostly referring to effectiveness of actions in context.
Good System / Bad System by Daniel Mescheder
I had the pleasure of being Daniel’s colleague, we even collaborated around a guild-like initiative on learning at the office we both worked at. And I have been following his writing in his The Solution Space blog, which I recommend for deep technical strategic thinking.
In his latest post, he made a very insightful connection of designing systems with the famous Rumelt strategy framework called ‘Good Strategy / Bad Strategy’. And thus, advocating for a deeper involvement of technical people in the strategic level conversation, and in fact the other way around, so that there is more knowledge available for making (system) design decisions or choices.
I love this phrase at the conclusion of the post:
Building software systems is, among other things, a strategic exercise.
Rob England’s reminder of different framing that points out to essentially the same thing
This is a great recap of what should be common sense (which I learned enough to not underestimate how uncommon that often is…):
Information/ Transparency/Visualisation is great, if you do something with it. Information has no value until it is acted on.
John Cutler with two great reminders
Revenue is the indirect consequence of the real reasons for buying from you…
Surely and ultimately everything should contribute to the business, and money is nice, but not quite the actual value which is at play in the specific situation when the decision of buying happens.
Trying to understand those deeper and actual root-causes of why people are giving you money for your product or service, can be the difference between success (risking failure) by luck versus success via aligning fitness criteria and your execution around it.
What you focus your time on determines your priorities
I totally agree with him that we humans can always fill up our times, but what matters most is whether we are doing it with things that matter. It made me remember what I used to reiterate to my teams:
It’s not about being ‘busy’. It’s about being ‘good busy’, as in busy with the things we should be busy with, which add value.
Gergely Orosz counterbalancing the global tech layoffs
from the is someone who I recommend for anyone in technology, he produced valuable content and is becoming more and more a sort of de-facto journalist in the area, regularly breaking news. In his latest newsletter, he presented a crowdsourced list of companies which indicated that are still hiring. In his own words:I feel this list is a nice counterbalance to the grim news about widespread headcount reductions. There’s a lot of places which are growing and looking for new colleagues to join!
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/who-is-still-hiring-software-enginers
I do hope this is indeed the case, that this list is to a large extent trustworthy. Although I must be honest that I have experienced enough about layoffs, from different perspectives even, so I happened to know for a fact that reality can be much more nuanced. That while we speak and many positions might be officially open in an organization, leadership teams might be meeting to talk about headcount decisions – and cutting open positions is often a ‘no-brainer’ to avoid having to let people go…
To be clear – I do hope I am wrong in that remark which I’ve made. Just trying to present some nuance as a reality check. It is always better to live in and deal with reality as it is, not as we idealize it.
So… it’s a wrap for this week…
And I hope you found this insightful. I would love to ‘hear’ if you have any feedback or even some suggestions on what I am doing here.
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact