Issue No. 23

This week's newsletter was painful to birth... so painful that it took me two weeks to write it! So much for trying to ship a weekly newsletter.

I went deep, and it wasn't easy to write. I hope you find the lessons valuable.

💬 In this issue, I cover:

• 🛠️ The IKEA Effect - The idea that people like things more when they make them, and how this can help with changes at work.
• 📈 I Screwed Up! - How I messed up by not using the IKEA Effect in a change I was making, which led to a messy situation.
• 📚 Lessons Learned
  • 💬 Communicate 'the why' early - Explaining why you're doing things from the start is important.
  • 🤝 Establish a shared 'why' - How good it is when everyone agrees on the problem so they all want to fix it.
  • 📝 Communicate a 20% draft, not a finished masterpiece - Encourages sharing early, not-done versions to get feedback and work together.
  • 🔑 Our role or position has power, so use it wisely - Remember that what we do affects how much others want to help.
  • 🫴 Involve People and Do Smart Delegation - Getting people involved isn't enough. We need to hand out work in a smart way.
  • 🗣️ Use language to get buy-in - Use words that make it feel like everyone's working together.
  • ⏰ Give time for feedback - Give people enough time to think and share their thoughts.
  • 🐢 Go Slow to Go Fast - Getting people involved from the start might seem slow, but it makes change happen faster overall.

The IKEA Effect and How I Screwed Up!

I recently had an experience where I screwed up in a change I wanted to introduce. I should have followed the advice I often give, but because I didn't, the situation got messy.

When making a change, I firmly believe in doing it with the impacted people. In a recent newsletter called "The Collective Power of Co-Creating Shared Principles", I wrote:

When creating principles, the best approach is to involve everyone, utilising the IKEA effect. This way, instead of leadership deciding the principles, everyone's input through co-creation leads to increased buy-in and adherence.

🛠️ The IKEA Effect

What is the IKEA effect? Wikipedia has a great definition:

The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. The name refers to Swedish manufacturer and furniture retailer IKEA, which sells many items of furniture that require assembly.

A 2011 study found that subjects were willing to pay 63% more for furniture they had assembled themselves than for equivalent pre-assembled items.

We can use this when making changes in an organisation by co-creating the change with those impacted by the change because when people have a part in defining, designing, and refining, they're far more likely to feel ownership.

It creates buy-in, making folks more likely to understand and adopt the changes.

📈 How I Screwed Up!

Unfortunately, in my enthusiasm for implementing some changes with a client, I ignored my advice, and the situation blew up.

By sharing my mistakes, I hope you can learn from them.

Writing this up will help me retrospect the situation and further internalise the lessons I've extracted.

🧩 The Situation

While working with a client, I reviewed the organisation's process and looked for improvement opportunities.

As I got to know the organisation, I realised that things were working well at the team level; however, it soon became apparent that Engineering felt like a black box at the broader organisational level—their higher-level projects and when they were predicted to land needed to be visualised. In addition, I uncovered several other common issues with how the organisation worked, which were typical for their stage and type of business (a B2B SaaS).

I want to refrain from discussing further specifics of their organisation. Still, the traps I fell into were classics, and I fell into ALL of them. So, it's a good case study of how not to make a change.

I soon recognised some issues, and my conversations with the CPO and CTO backed up my observations. The areas to work on were also part of the mandate I received in my mission brief, so I set to work.

I had a good idea of what good looked like in this situation, so I got the CPO and CTO together for a workshop, and we worked through my rough draft of a proposal on a whiteboard. I wanted to get high-level alignment between us before going to the team (partly because I was serving in an interim role, so I needed to ensure that whatever I did had longer-term support). What we shaped made a lot of sense to us.

I took our rough outline and started working on a formal document that took all of our hasty sketches and turned them into a process proposal that the organisation could use as a living document that explained how the organisation worked (with the idea that as the process evolved, the document would evolve, too).

It was a lot of work. The document grew longer as I tried to combine everything into something cohesive and comprehensive. Our proposal didn't represent a considerable change for the organisation; however, there was a change in terminology, many clarifications, and a couple of shifts at the organisational or philosophical level.

I did the big reveal on a Friday before I went on a week's holiday. I wrote up what I thought was a great Slack message. I shared it with everyone, saying they had time to read through it over the next week, that nothing was set in stone, and that this was a proposal, a starting point for us to iterate on. I told them, "You know, this needs to be your process. You are going to live this. So you really need to give feedback on it".

The response was a mixture of a few negative comments and dead silence.

Predictable, I know! It is harder to write about this and to relive these moments with hindsight than it is for you to read about it!

So what happened here?

I had good intentions.

I was trying to solve a problem for the group.

Let's talk about what I did by viewing this through the lens of how I should have done things.

📚 Lessons Learned

I've already shared some of the ideas in this section in previous issues of this newsletter, and I've even gotten them right in the past. Here is what I should have done instead.

💬 Communicate What You Are Doing and, Most Importantly, "The Why" Early!

I worked in the background. Folks knew this work was part of my mission with the organisation (I had shared it with them as a group and in my one-to-ones during my onboarding).

But before I even ran the workshop with the CPO and CTO, I should have told folks that I was starting to tackle this part of my mission and reminded them why it was necessary.

🤝 Establish a Shared "Why" and Define the Problem Together

I should have involved people in defining the problem. When people feel like they're solving a problem together, they have more investment in it. If I wanted input, I should have started at the root cause, not the end. You permit people to give feedback when something needs to be defined and is unfinished.

I'm always amazed at what people and groups come up with that may not have occurred to me.

It's because each of us works differently. It's not because I am deficient that I can't come up with all the ideas. It's that we see things differently. We have different experiences.

So, to harness these differences between us, a wider divergence phase that includes more views around the problem will help us converge on a better problem statement and, by extension, a better solution.

Also, when people are involved in defining processes, methods, or how things should look in a change, they get a broader understanding of their work.

📝 Communicate a 20% Draft, Not a Finished Masterpiece!

I started with the idea that because this was part of my mission to tackle, I had a mandate to change it, and I thought I knew what needed to be changed. Second, I came out with a polished proposal document, which I had put a lot of thought into because I really cared about it. I wanted to solve the problem, but the document was so polished, it looked so complete and so professional, that it didn't really communicate that there was much room for people to get their fingerprints on it or have any input.

Unconsciously, when people are presented with a fully prepared proposal, they don't see an opportunity to contribute to its creation.

Consider being invited to a dinner party where the host has meticulously prepared every dish before you arrive. Your only role is to enjoy the meal, not to influence its flavours or components. This is akin to being shown a completed proposal; you can appreciate it but can't impact its development.

However, imagine a different kind of gathering—a cooking party. Here, you're not just a guest expected to dine; you're invited to select ingredients, taste test as the meal comes together, and offer suggestions for improvement. In this scenario, you're deeply involved in the culinary process, making the final meal partly your creation. This engagement and sense of ownership are what we aim for when involving people from the early stages of a project.

This doesn't mean everyone needs to be in the kitchen for every step, but inviting input and collaboration early on ensures the result is richer and more satisfying for all involved.

I could have asked for input, asked a few volunteers to work with me, or invited a few people to work with me. Even if I didn't include everybody in the group, at least some members could have represented their colleagues by providing their input. I could even have asked those people to gather input from others and ask for reviews from others.

🔑 Our Role or Position Has Power, So Use It Wisely!

I also discounted the impact of my position. I was at the same level as people's bosses. I was presenting something that looked polished and finished—something that a small group of senior leaders (who everyone reported to) had worked on.

Giving feedback to your boss, even when they ask for it, always creates friction. There's also always some perceived risk. It's quite natural to worry that your manager might perceive the feedback as critical and that negative feedback could somehow limit your career.

So, it was predictable that most people would be silent when I asked for input.

I've discussed ways I could have involved people from the start. These would have helped, but they wouldn't have addressed the power that came from my position.

Instead, I should have delegated certain parts of the definition or certain parts of the design to the team members rather than doing it myself.

🫴 Involve People and Do Smart Delegation

As an aside, if I were to delegate parts of the work to the team, I would have to give them a very explicit brief, including how I would have handled the results of their work.

It is not helpful to gather a group and then say, "Okay, you go off, and you come up with three possibilities, and then we will go through a process to figure out which one is going to be the best solution for us at this time or at least the best thing for us to start with as a solution and then we can evolve it as we go along".

How are we going to decide between the options? Will I decide or will we decide together?

What options are off the table? What things are just out of bounds that you wouldn't accept?

We don't want to be in a situation where the team choose a solution that we will definitely be rejected. The disappointment on the delegee's side will be huge after spending a lot of time coming up with a solution, only to have it rejected. On top of the damage that would cause, good luck trying to involve them again in a similar situation! It's a perfect way to destroy trust between the person delegating and the person doing the work.

It helps to think through the worst things that could happen and set some boundaries around what options will be acceptable so you don't end up in a worse situation.

🗣️ Use Language to Get Buy-In

Finally, some subtle things about my language came through in my request for feedback that torpedoed things. I presented this as "this is the process I worked on. I developed"

I used "I" language, which communicates ownership, and I used the past tense, indicating completion.

I should have talked about "we're working on" and "we are developing" so that it's clear that the process is still ongoing.

⏰ Give Time for Feedback

Another thing that I realised as I reflected on this situation was that when I asked for feedback, I had just dumped this big document on very busy people with a very, very broad ask. They had just been exposed to the information and didn't feel they had enough time to absorb it.

I could have started with a more progressive series of questions, starting with an open but not quite as broad question such as "What's your first impression?" or "When you look at the totality of this, what stands out for you?".

Then, I could have asked more specific questions.

Imagine you're taking a survey about your favourite foods. If the first question asks, "What do you like to eat?" you might struggle to give a comprehensive answer on the spot. Your mind might go blank or only remember a few dishes.

However, if the survey starts with a broad category like, "What's your favourite type of cuisine?" and then follows up with more specific questions like, "What's your go-to dish in that cuisine?" or "What ingredients make that dish stand out to you?", you'll likely find it much easier to provide detailed, thoughtful responses. The guided approach helps jog your memory and lets you clearly articulate your preferences.

When asked a super broad question, people often can't come up with a helpful answer. But if you start with a broader question that provides some context and then ask more specific questions, people can often give you much better feedback.

I should have also asked questions like:

• How will this address our problem?
• What do you see needs to be added?
• What is extra?
• What might we add?
• What aspects have we forgotten?

Then, depending on what they said, I could have asked many more specific questions. That would have helped people give more specific responses that would have been much more useful.

🐢 Go Slow to Go Fast

So, involving people has many upsides, from problem definition to shaping how the project is implemented.

Some people feel this will take a long time and that working on it yourself is faster. That might be true.

I did get to a pretty good document quite quickly, much faster than a committee, that is for sure!

But let's look at this in the context of the whole change, from idea to solution to implementation. I wasn't counting the portion of the change that's involved in persuading people to accept the change to get them to understand all the thinking behind it and to have them do whatever the change is with some enthusiasm instead of just mindlessly complying.

It's either you spend it at the front, or you spend it at the end.

And I'm pretty sure which one I should have chosen and will choose again.

I want to highlight a real danger I realised from the feelings I felt inside me during all this. If you do the work without involving folks, you can interpret your team's lack of input as not wanting to take the initiative or take any responsibility.

If you go down the path alone, you might feel burdened, like you have to solve all the problems thrown at your solution. You might start resenting the people who report to you, and you could become much more directive because you figure your team won't take responsibility anyway. So you could end up feeling like you have to tell them what to do, which will likely cause them to resent you, leading to a damaged relationship where the trust that may have been there is completely gone. And that would be a shame because all of us have worthy ideas.

If we can find ways to work together, we can achieve incredible outcomes.

🎬 Summary

To sum it up:

From the start, share what you're doing and why.

Get people involved in figuring out the problem. This helps everyone commit and come up with the best solutions.

Don't show others a finished product. Leave parts incomplete so people can share their ideas.

Know that your role can affect others.

Be smart about involving others and giving them tasks. Point out areas that can be changed for different situations. Make it clear what must stay the same and where people can add their touch while still getting the desired result.

Use words like "we" and the present tense to stress that the process is ongoing and collaborative.

When asking for feedback, make it clear that the work is still a draft and point out areas where individual input is welcome. Give people time to think about the information and ask more focused questions to gain valuable insights.

Take the time to involve others throughout the change process to get better results and maintain trust and relationships.

So that's the IKEA effect and how to use it based on my textbook failures. Create ways for people to shape the change throughout the process, from the definition to bringing it to life.

🔦 Highlight of the Week

This is a good reminder from a genius!

💬 If you had some thoughts while reading this, I would love to hear them in the comments.

Issue No. 22

So this week's newsletter somehow got stuck in the pipe last week, apologies for that. Life happens! I'm still learning to ship something consistently and regularly with as little pain and stress as possible.

In other news, I've been trying to post more regularly on LinkedIn. Trying to iterate and learn feels better after putting my principles together. Now I'm trying to avoid checking LinkedIn all the time! How social media sucks you in is a giant trap. That's why I quit social media some time ago. So we'll see where we get there with that. I am going to have to use timeboxing, batching and scheduling when I'm going to be interacting there. I'll keep you posted on how that goes.

In my most recent posts, I've mainly been talking about principles and concepts - foundational stuff. I wanted to focus on foundational topics because I felt it was important to get my thoughts together and written down first. In the future I'll be composing them together and linking to them in articles that are more tactical and usable.

So onwards to this week's newsletter.

💬 In this issue, I cover:

• ⏳💪 Timeboxing - The Project Delivery Superpower
  • 📝⏱️The Two Rules of Timebox Management
    • 🥊🔒Timeboxing vs. Time Blocking
  • 📜⌛Origins and History of Timeboxing
  • 📆⏰Using Timeboxes
  • 💻🛠️Using Timeboxing to Build Software
    • 🗂️📉Tracking Progress Within a Timebox
• ⏱️Estimates and Timeboxes
• ⌛🙃Timeboxes: The Irony
• ⚖️Exercise Judgement
• 🌹Don't forget to stop and smell the roses
• 🔦 Highlight of the Week

⏳💪Timeboxing - The Project Delivery Superpower

When used well, I believe that timeboxing can give us superpowers by creating forcing functions that help us gain control over our time.

A timebox is a predetermined period during which a team strives to deliver a predetermined outcome by working until the time limit is reached. Instead of measuring the time taken to complete an outcome, the team evaluates what was accomplished within the timebox.

By implementing timeboxes, we can work in a focused environment towards completing a meaningful goal rather than just working without a goal. Timeboxes also help minimise risk by providing cut-off points for reflection and learning from what we have done.

Timeboxing creates boundaries that force us to think more granularly inside the box. If we can only dedicate six weeks to an outcome, especially if the task feels enormous, we must figure out how to move the needle within the timebox. That shift in thinking can make all the difference.

I believe timeboxing results in better outcomes for users. Firstly, aggressively timeboxing our work results in shipping smaller slices of value more frequently to users, resulting in earlier feedback from them, which informs the rest of our work. Further, since timeboxed periods end with a retrospective, we should improve with each iteration.

📝⏱️The Two Rules of Timebox Management

When it comes to timebox management, there are two critical rules to follow:

1. Release something before the timebox is up. This means achieving a specific outcome within the given time frame. Even if that means releasing less than we initially thought we would do.
2. Stop working when the timebox ends and review our progress. We should analyse our successes and failures to improve our work and plan future timeboxes. Always ask: Did we meet our target outcome at the end of the timebox?

Following these rules will help ensure effective time management and successful outcomes.

🥊🔒Timeboxing vs. Time Blocking

Time blocking is a widely recognised productivity technique that shouldn't be confused with timeboxing. Time blocking involves dedicating a specific time slot to accomplish a task (for example, setting aside 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. for meetings and communication). Timeboxing, on the other hand, refers to the total time allotted to complete a task. However, one could use time blocking to reserve a portion of their day for a specific timebox.

📜⌛Origins and History of Timeboxing

James Martin, author of Rapid Application Development, first used the term. He based it on Parkinson's law from the book by naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson. Parkinson's theory states that work expands to fill the time allotted to it, meaning if given a month for a project, people will stretch it out even if they could finish it sooner.

Martin saw Parkinson's law as relevant to software development due to the failures of the 1980s waterfall model. Developers, including Martin, worked toward a new model called rapid application development (RAD). This interactive, iterative approach involved teams working in short bursts and constantly communicating, reducing inefficiency and allowing immediate evaluation and improvement.

Timeboxing became a cornerstone of Agile methodologies like Scrum in the early 1990s. Scrum uses fixed-length iterations ("sprints") to drive progress, promote collaboration, and enable continuous improvement.

📆⏰Using Timeboxes

Timeboxes can be used everywhere.

Meetings can be timeboxes with goals (sadly, not all meetings!). I'm a big fan of the lean coffee approach to facilitating meetings. You gather topics, vote on them, have a timebox for each topic, and decide whether to extend them.

Timeboxes supercharge the building process. That's why we have the concept of iterations or sprints in Scrum. Other flavours of Agile also use timeboxes.

💻🛠️Using Timeboxing to Build Software

When coaching teams in delivery, I use timeboxes to set specific periods for completing the work. These periods can range from a day to multiple weeks. The goal is to use the shortest possible timeframe for our timebox.

I coach teams to set a timebox for any significant initiative (or project) they are working on. Suppose an initiative will take more than six weeks; in that case, we should chunk it up into multiple smaller initiatives.

Once we have our overall initiative (or project) timebox, we should then chop that up into a series of thin slices of value (or milestones). Each value slice is a week or two, three in extreme cases.

Applying the principles of timebox here means that if, as we get towards the end of a timebox, we realise we might be going over (backlogs always grow as we do the work due to what we learn and the unexpected) we can descope some work to be still able to release something that helps us reach our target outcome for the timebox. Then we re-evaluate, incorporate those learnings and have another go (if we decide to do another timebox).

🗂️📉Tracking Progress Within a Timebox

To ensure success with timeboxing, tracking progress throughout the timebox is essential. Here are some visual management tools to help you monitor your work effectively:

1. Kanban Boards: A popular visual management tool, Kanban boards provide an at-a-glance view of tasks and their progress within a timebox. By dividing tasks into "To Do", "In Progress", and "Done" columns, team members can quickly identify what needs attention and prioritize accordingly.
2. Burndown (or Burnup) Charts: These charts graphically represent the work remaining within a timebox versus the time left. They help teams visualize their progress and predict whether they will complete all tasks within the allotted timeframe.
3. Progress Bars: Simple yet effective, progress bars visually represent how much of the timebox has elapsed and how much remains. This helps keep team members aware of the countdown to completion.

By implementing one or a combination of these visual management tools, teams can effectively track their progress within each timebox, helping them stay focused and on track to achieve their desired outcomes.

I usually recommend refining the work to small tasks (around one day of work), tracking them in a Kanban board and visualising our progress via a burndown (or burnup) chart that simply tracks the number of tasks.

⏱️Estimates and Timeboxes

Underestimating the time required for tasks can lead to incomplete work and missed deadlines. I'm not an advocate for estimation, instead I would recommend refining the work to small tasks (around one day of work) and tracking velocity by simply counting the number of tasks you get done historically in a week. Through this, you should get a good feel for your velocity and you will easily spot when a task get stuck for a few days (it might mean someone needs help or the task should be split further).

⌛🙃Timeboxes: The Irony

Ironically, while timeboxes are simple and powerful, they're surprisingly difficult to apply.

People naturally resist constraints, and backlogs tend to grow as we learn and work, with Murphy's Law lurking around every corner.

We fear what the world will think if we release our work in its current state. So, when we reach the end of a timebox and don't think our work is ready, we hesitate to let the world see it, thinking, "If only we do a few more things, it'll be perfect."

In those moments, remember that embracing timeboxes can lead to a more focused and efficient workflow.

Be brave and remove scope aggressively. Remove what doesn't matter to the point that you can still deliver the outcome of the timebox; if it feels painful, you are probably starting to do it right.

⚖️Exercise Judgement

I will say, please exercise judgement with timeboxes. Don't be too inflexible and rigid with your timeboxes. Allow for some flexibility within timeboxes. If a high-priority task emerges, adjust the timebox to accommodate it. Review and adjust your timeboxes regularly to ensure they align with your target outcomes and priorities.

🌹Don't forget to stop and smell the roses

Failing to review and learn from completed timeboxes can limit improvement and lead to repeated mistakes, so schedule retrospectives after each timebox to discuss what worked, what didn't, and how to improve. Use these insights to refine your ways of working and enhance team performance.

🔦 Highlight of the Week

This quote resonated with me when I read it, and I've repeated it many times over the years since I read the book Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco. I highly recommend this book, it's a classic!

💬 If you had some thoughts while reading this, I would love to hear them in the comments.

Issue No. 21

This past week, I've been experimenting with posting more on LinkedIn. Promoting my work on LinkedIn makes me squirm! 🤮

I believe what I say is valuable to others, so I've bitten the bullet and decided to post more regularly on LinkedIn (I'm skipping a return to X/Twitter for now or trying to master Threads).

However, some posts and the need to create content still made me feel icky this week.

And I started to feel like my values and how I was promoting myself didn't add up. 🤒

So, I've followed my advice from last week's post on principles and written these principles for how I will engage on social media. I would love your feedback.

Onwards to this week's issue which is focused on ensuring your team or organisation has a healthy baseline before you try to implement anything more sophisticated like operating principles.

💬 In this issue, I cover:

• Baseline Principles for Teams
  • The Leader Sets the Tone for the Group
  • How do we establish these five foundational principles?
  • Product and Engineering Require the Same Solid Foundation to Achieve Success Together
• 🔦 Highlight of the Week

Baseline Principles for Teams

All leaders must establish a healthy baseline before doing anything else with their team.

These baseline or foundational Principles of how teams and organisations should work together are covered best in the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni and are captured in this image.

• Psychological Safety & Trust - A physiologically safe environment where team members can be vulnerable without fear of repercussions.
• Healthy Conflict - The best decisions are made when team members can openly air their opinions. The team can engage in unfiltered, passionate debate about key issues rather than veiled discussions and back-channel comments.
• Commitment - Clarity and buy-in. We have a clear direction, and team members commit to decisions.
• Accountability - Help people get back on track when they’ve made their commitments. We commit to a clear plan of action and call our peers on actions and behaviours that may seem counterproductive to the team's overall good.
• Outcomes - Focus on collective outcomes. We focus on the need to create results and put the team's needs ahead of our own (ego, career development, recognition, etc.)

Teams won't work without getting these fundamentals right. These principles form the basis by which the relationships in a team will live or die. I don't believe an organisation (or a team) can build a great product without nailing these basics.

The Leader Sets the Tone for the Group

A leader's actions and behaviour significantly impact a team's psychological safety and trust.

By fostering an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, ideas, and concerns without fear of retribution, a leader can create a strong foundation for collaboration and innovation. This includes being open to feedback, admitting mistakes, and treating everyone fairly. When a leader demonstrates these qualities, it sets a positive example for the rest of the team, encouraging them to follow suit and contribute to a healthy, trusting, and psychologically safe work environment.

I've found that many leaders will nod and agree with this, and their internal monologue will say, "Yes, this is exactly what I'm doing".

However, if they were to hear what their team says behind their back, they would be surprised by the gap between their self-image and what the team thinks.

This is because most leaders are not vulnerable with their team. Vulnerability is the key to authentic leadership and creating psychological safety and trust. If you can't open up about your deepest fears, how can you expect someone on your team to speak up without fear of repercussion?

If you are a manager of managers, how can you expect your managers to lead authentically if you are not authentic with them AND the whole organisation? Authenticity doesn't end inside your team meeting; you must lead authentically in your all-hands meeting in front of everyone.

Wow, this is tough!

No amount of lecturing others about the theories of great leadership will have an impact if you cannot demonstrate the characteristics of authentic and open leadership yourself.

So, if you are a leader, and I would argue that everyone is a leader, I would encourage you to lead with authenticity and openness so that those around you feel like it's a safe space to share what is happening inside them.

How do we establish these five foundational principles?

I wish there was a simple formula I could give for you to follow here. Unfortunately, like many things in life, this is a people problem, not a technical one, requiring deeper conversations.

Some things we can try include:

• Lead by example by being open to feedback, admitting mistakes, and showing vulnerability.
• Invest in team-building activities and workshops to enhance trust, communication, and collaboration skills outside the normal day-to-day. Just breaking bread together and talking about our personal lives, hobbies and interests can (not) surprisingly impact team cohesion and allow deeper bonds to form in the team. This is especially important for remote or "hybrid" teams, as these teams have fewer in-person opportunities to get to know each other outside of work.
• Write a social contract or team working agreement together. This can be invaluable in setting expectations and fostering a positive team culture. Regularly reviewing and updating this agreement during team retrospectives ensures that it remains relevant and effective in guiding team interactions.
• Encourage open communication and feedback through regular check-ins, team retrospectives, and anonymous surveys.
• It might also be worth actively tackling this subject by working through this topic together. For example, you could read through the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni as a team. Be careful how you facilitate this if you are the manager of the team, it can often be best to ask someone else to facilitate or rotate the faciliation between team members. Remember this should be an invitation and optional and not something you force on them or it will fail and could even set you back.

Building a solid foundation takes time and effort. Be patient and persistent in cultivating these principles within your team. As you do so, you'll see the positive impact on your team's performance and overall success.

Product and Engineering Require the Same Solid Foundation to Achieve Success Together

These foundational principles apply to the relationship between Product and Engineering as well.

With enough trust in each other, a product and tech partnership can overcome every obstacle and jointly steer towards successful outcomes.

Without these principles, especially trust, the product and tech relationship will rarely deliver successful outcomes. No amount of process or documentation of roles and responsibilities will overcome the need for a partnership grounded in trust.

The more trust we have, the less time and effort we need to spend aligning with our principles and discussing who owns the territory.

I'll probably write more about this in the future as there is much more to say here, including how the relationship between the CPO and the CTO sets the tone for the whole organisation.

🔦 Highlight of the Week

My brother-in-law, Chris Mitton, writes a daily devotional, Further Up | Further In. While I wouldn't say I am "religious", I have enjoyed regularly dipping into his devotional. I find his writing brilliant and insightful.

Chris' analogy in 15.02 | What Pressure Reveals felt very fitting for this issue. As a leader, I have failed under pressure so many times.

💬 If you had some thoughts while reading this, I would love to hear them in the comments.

Issue No. 21

I hope this week's issue finds you well.

This week, I added 📚 A List of Good Books To Read For Leaders to the Free Resources section of my site. In the next few weeks, I have a few spreadsheets and other resources that I plan to add to The Members-Only Area.

I'm also introducing a new section I'm calling "Highlight of the Week", which is my pick of all the highlights I've made this week while reading (I usually spend at least an hour a day reading).

Plus, today, there is a bonus section at the end.

Onwards to this week's issue, which is a topic I have cared about for a long time, Principles!

💬 In this issue, I cover:

• The Bedrock of Success: Why Organisational Principles Matter
  • 🛤️ My Journey and Struggle with Principles
  • 🧊 The Iceberg Effect: Unseen Forces Shaping Our Work
  • 🧭 Principles Are The Philosophies That Guide Us
  • 💡 The Advantages of Clarity: How Principles Benefit Organisations
  • 🤝 The Collective Power of Co-Creating Shared Principles
  • 🐴➡️🛒 Don't Put the Horse Before the Cart: Start with Why
  • 🌱 The Delicate Nature of Organisational Values and Principles
  • 🔄 When to Bend Your Own Rules
• 🔦 Highlight of the Week
• 🎁🤩 Bonus: A Cool Tool that I found 👉 Lean Coffee Table 👈

🛤️ My Journey and Struggle with Principles

I've been thinking about and collecting articles about principles for years. I have over 62 articles tagged with "principles" in my Reader account and 93 in my Pocket account (which I used before Reader). I'm unsure how many are in my Instapaper account (which I used before Pocket) because my free account won't let me see my tags anymore.

So yeah, I think principles are incredibly important.

Principles will continue to be a recurring topic in this newsletter, and I've already written several times on the subject.

After an organisation or team has agreed on its purpose, mission and vision, then establishing shared principles for how they will work together is crucial to execute together.

It sounds easy, but I have struggled with principles for years.

You see I have a great strength that can also be my Achilles heel. According to the Gallup CliftonStrengths assessment, my top strength is "Belief". Here is a little about that strength (and an insight into what makes me tick):

The Gallup CliftonStrengths "Belief" theme is characterised by having certain core values that are unchanging, which lead to a defined purpose in life. Individuals with a strong Belief theme are often family-oriented and altruistic, and they value responsibility and high ethics. They are driven to act on their values and find meaning and satisfaction in life through living out their core values. This theme falls under the Executing domain of CliftonStrengths, and individuals with dominant Executing themes like Belief are known for making things happen. People with strong Belief talents are seen as dependable and are known for providing stability, clarity, and conviction of values. They can be powerful proclaimers of the truth and can provide organisational stability during times of change by communicating core values that should not change. However, individuals with a strong Belief theme may need to be mindful of being seen as inflexible or intolerant of differing points of view. Coaches can help them explore different theme combinations to either accelerate or soften Belief. To develop and apply the Belief talent, individuals are encouraged to actively cultivate a network of people who share their basic values and to give voice to their values at work. The Belief theme can be a powerful asset in leadership roles, as it can help individuals provide stability, lead meaningful conversations, and be a conscience for their team and organisation.
- Summarised by AI from these citations [1][2][3][4][5].

So, I have strong core values that impact who I am and what I see as my life's purpose.

Unfortunately, if the values and principles around me start falling out of line with my core values and principles, my motivation and engagement can easily spiral downward. As I said, it can be a huge asset and my Achilles heel.

As I've come to understand myself and how systems and organisations work, I have always tried to create clarity by establishing clear principles in the teams I have led.

🧊 The Iceberg Effect: Unseen Forces Shaping Our Work

Most of the time we are focused on execution, getting stuff done. You can think of our ways of working as the top of the iceberg above the water. These are the practices we use, our meetings and rituals, and how we collaborate day-to-day.

However, if we look under the water, we will see the larger part of the iceberg that keeps the tip of the iceberg above the water. This is our purpose, mission, vision and our values and principles.

Most organisations have defined their purpose and have a clear mission statement based on their vision for the world they want to create. Most also take the time to outline their organisation's values. Few have defined some core operating principles.

Sadly, I've worked for long enough to know that it is the exception rather than the rule that an organisation is in alignment with what they have written down. Usually, they are in a part of the employee handbook, shared during your onboarding and then promptly forgotten about for the rest of the time.

Thankfully, I've also had the privilege to work at some companies where everything seems to line up. It is the most amazing experience to work at a company where you feel that, collectively, you are executing towards a shared mission with the same values and principles. Those are the companies that you feel proud to work at. You tell your friends and family about where you work and recommend people you know to work there. You feel you are doing some of your life's best work.

🧭 Principles Are The Philosophies That Guide Us

Principles are different than your values, they are a guiding philosophy. For example, Facebook initially had a well-known principle: "Move fast and break things". This clarity proved successful for them.

Establishing principles at the organisational, departmental, and team levels is powerful and can change over time, depending on the organisation's needs. It's vital to establish, operationalise, and maintain these principles.

💡 The Advantages of Clarity: How Principles Benefit Organisations

Having shared principles helps because they:

• Promote a unified way of working: Shared principles ensure that all team members work towards the same goals and share a common understanding of the organisation's values.
• Improves communication: Clear principles facilitate better communication among team members, providing a shared language and framework for discussing issues and making decisions.
• Enhances collaboration: When everyone in the organisation adheres to the same principles, it fosters a collaborative environment where team members can effectively work together and support each other.
• Increases efficiency: With well-defined principles, team members can make decisions more quickly and confidently, leading to increased productivity and streamlined processes.
• Boosts employee engagement: When an organisation has clear principles that align with employees' values, it contributes to a positive workplace culture and higher employee satisfaction, ultimately resulting in increased engagement and retention.

🤝 The Collective Power of Co-Creating Shared Principles

When creating principles, the best approach is to involve everyone, utilising the IKEA effect. This way, instead of leadership deciding the principles, everyone's input through co-creation leads to increased buy-in and adherence.

While top-down principles can be operationalised, as seen with my Facebook example, ensuring they are followed can be more challenging.

🐴➡️🛒 Don't Put the Horse Before the Cart: Start with Why

Having principles is crucial, but it's essential to first Start With Why. This means understanding your organisation's purpose, vision, mission and values. Once you have these foundational elements in place, you can start defining your principles for how you will operate.

🌱 The Delicate Nature of Organisational Values and Principles

A word of caution: mission, vision, values, and principles form a fragile structure requiring constant maintenance. If not tended to, they can quickly lose their meaning and impact. Thus, it's essential to continually nurture and uphold these foundational aspects of your organisation.

Factors that can cause principles to fall apart or fade away include:

• Lack of clarity or communication: If the principles are not communicated or understood by all team members, it can lead to confusion and inconsistent adherence.
• Leadership fails to inspire and empower people to follow the organisation's principles: People may feel less inclined to follow the principles when leaders do not actively promote or adhere to the principles. On the other hand, when leaders demonstrate their commitment to the principles and empower employees to do the same, it can create a strong, positive company culture.
  I've seen first-hand how a CEO change can bring about a wholesale shift in company culture, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse!
  Unfortunately, in one company I worked at the new CEO said they didn't believe in the values their predecessor had spent two years co-creating with staff and operationalising in their first week! You can imagine what happened next.
• Inconsistency: If the principles are applied inconsistently or selectively, it can undermine their credibility and discourage adherence. Organisations must operationalise their values and principles in the day-to-day fabric of an organisation and leaders at every level must remind and reinforce these principles during decision-making.
• Lack of accountability: Without operationalising the principles and integrating them into the culture and everyday actions of employees, staff may not feel compelled to adhere to them, leading to a gradual decline in commitment.
• Misalignment with individual values: Employees may be less likely to follow the organisation's principles if they do not personally align with them.
  I think this is going on right now in many organisations where leadership is trying to get everyone to return to the office.
• Organisational changes: Mergers, acquisitions, or significant restructuring can disrupt established principles and confuse which values should guide behaviour.
  I've also seen first-hand how an acquisition can radically change an organisation; even when the two companies are kept separate to preserve the culture of the acquired company, changes creep in through things like a new, more restrictive expense policy or a change in the back-office tooling like the HR system.
• Competing priorities: In some cases, organisational priorities or pressures may conflict with established principles, causing employees to prioritise other goals over following the principles. (See "When to Bend Your Own Rules" below).

In conclusion, to prevent principles from losing significance, it's essential to uphold and put them into action, ensuring they stay at the heart of your organisation's decision-making process.

🔄 When to Bend Your Own Rules

It's acceptable to go against principles occasionally. There are always exceptions.

However, I strongly recommend documenting why you are breaking a principle in a particular situation. This act of documentation is part of operationalising your principles.

In a Theory Y organisation, I would certainly expect that the operating principles would continually adapt in response to employee feedback and changing circumstances, rather than just documenting the exceptions.

🔦 Highlight of the Week

This quote by Kent Beck is a great reminder for how product teams should work, regardless of the different "stacks" in the team.

🎁🤩 Bonus: Lean Coffee Table

I've been using the Lean Coffee as a way to facilitate meetings for quite some time now. I think it is a fantastic format to ensure everyone's voice is heard and that we surface all the topics on people's minds, talking about the most important ones while using timeboxing to stay on track.

Lean Coffee Table is a really cool tool to facilitate meetings using the Lean Coffee format that I used with some friends this week and I loved it straight away.

If you use Lean Coffee already or you would like to try it out, I highly recommend this tool over using something like Miro, Trello, Notion, Confluence etc (I've tried all of these and Lean Coffee Table is way better).

💬 If you had some thoughts while reading this, I would love to hear them in the comments.

Issue No. 20

This week's newsletter is coming out a little late as we are recovering from a bout of flu in our house.

I've also updated my website with new pages for my consulting and mentoring services and a new addition to the member-only area: open office hours!

Now, onwards to this week's post!

I recently shared this funny clip from Ismo with my partner.

🤣 It had me laughing out loud, doubly so, because it rang true for a recent conversation!

Side note: Ismo is one of my favourite comedians, partly because his dry Finnish humour connects me to my mother's homeland).

As you can guess, I might be the messier person in our house. Sometimes, I don't see the mess, or my brain doesn't register it like it does for my partner. We humans are funny like that!

Maintaining harmony in the household is a priority, so I've had to develop ways to ensure I leave less of a mess behind me.

Honestly, if I resolve to be "less messy," I usually fail. However, I can be less messy if I construct processes and then try to turn those into habits through the habit loop. The habit loop is composed of a cue, which should trigger the habit and then a reward.

Processes for Efficiency and Success

I rarely have that stressful moment where I can't find my keys when I leave the house. This is because I keep particular objects, like the keys to the house, in the same place in the house and the same pocket in my coat or bag.

Habits like these are crucial to my sanity (and marital harmony).

Similarly, the processes in our organisations keep us all aligned and working well together.

Managers and Process

Managers are often responsible for setting up processes and ensuring they are followed. Depending on your seniority, that might be across the whole company in a department or at the team level.

As managers and leaders, we aim to embed processes to be followed automatically and provide mechanisms for continuous improvement.

Process Entropy

The challenge is to create systems that work within a team without management constantly supporting them, allowing the team to be autonomous in following and changing processes.

At the team level, especially in software development, the manager or tech lead often ensures the process works. They are the ones keeping entropy at bay, holding the system together.

Entropy in systems and processes often occurs when managers and management responsible for maintaining these processes change or leave. This can lead to the entire system falling apart or a slow decay.

This happens because the team members have not internalised the processes as a habit.

When an organisation changes a senior leader, such as a VP of Engineering, CTO or CPO, existing processes can rapidly deteriorate in the transition. The incoming leader will either try to re-establish the current processes or, more usually, change them altogether based on their own opinions.

This is just one of many reasons organisational processes experience change and entropy.

What can we do about this?

Theory X and Theory Y Approaches to Process

In a Theory X world, it is unimaginable not to have a manager, as people are conditioned to rely on them for guidance and adherence to processes. Managers ensure "compliance". Managers are also trained to behave and act this way.

In a Theory Y world, there is a different approach. Managers are still required. However, "how" they operate is very different.

Theory Y managers must use a different approach because we expect folks and their teams to be self-organising and autonomous. They involve their team from the start in the creation of the processes, and as the processes are put in place, they need to take on a life of their own as the team is empowered to improve and adapt how they work constantly.

Won't This Create a "Wild West" of Process Chaos?

Suppose every team in an organisation can constantly "improve and adapt" how they work. Won't it eventually result in every team following different divergent processes and leave the whole organisation feeling like a Wild West of process chaos?

Yes, it could. This is why standardisation is vital, especially in a self-organising organisation. Just enough standardisation with clear interfaces in how teams and groups of teams interact is vital for the smooth functioning of the whole.

Approaching the topic of standardisation with a Theory Y mindset means having teams work together to define these interfaces and standards and putting in place mechanisms for them to evolve.

6 Characteristics of Good Processes

Here are some characteristics of good processes that are more likely to "stick" with a group of people:

1. Good Process Stick Because We All Know "Why" We Are Doing Them

Understanding the "why" behind a process is crucial for team members to embrace and follow it fully. When people understand the purpose of a process and the problem it aims to solve, they are more likely to see its value and commit to it. This understanding also helps them to better adapt the process to changing circumstances and contribute to its continuous improvement, as they can see the connection between the process and the desired outcome.

If the reason behind a process doesn't make sense to the people involved in creating or following it, the results will be far from ideal. They might be downright disappointing.

2. Good Processes Are Built Together

Involving the people following a process in its creation fosters a sense of ownership and commitment (the Ikea Effect). When team members have a say in the design and implementation of a process, they are more likely to understand its purpose and value, leading to increased buy-in and adherence. This collaborative approach also allows for diverse perspectives and experiences to be considered, resulting in more effective and efficient processes tailored to the team's needs and strengths.

3. Good Processes Work Like Habits

When a team is setting up their process, it's essential to approach it similarly to how individuals build habits. A habit loop consisting of a cue, habit, and reward can lead to a more effective and efficient workflow.

The habit loop begins with a cue, a trigger that initiates the habit. In a team setting, this could be a specific time of day, a meeting, or an event that signals it's time to start a particular task.

Next comes the habit itself, which is the action or series of actions the team takes in response to the cue. This could include updating project management tools, holding a daily stand-up meeting, or collaborating on a shared document.

Finally, the reward is the positive reinforcement that motivates the team to continue performing the habit. This could be something as simple as a sense of accomplishment from completing a task, recognition from team members, or even a tiny celebration after reaching a milestone.

By incorporating the habit loop into their processes, teams can create a more organised and efficient working environment, ultimately leading to better results and a happier, more cohesive group.

4. Good Processes Depend on Team Competency

There are two aspects to competency here.

• Having the experience, knowledge and skills to develop and improve a process.
• And being able to follow the process itself.

Training and education on the process can help encourage team members to internalise it. This could involve providing training sessions or workshops on the process or assigning a mentor to guide new employees until they become familiar with it.

My favourite approach is to encourage mobbing and pairing inside the team to avoid a single point of failure where only one person knows how to do something.

5. Good Processes have built-in Feedback Mechanisms

A feedback mechanism for team members is vital for engagement and continuous improvement.

Identifying areas for improvement is crucial in maintaining efficient processes. One way to do this is by soliciting feedback from team members about what they think could be improved during team or organisation retrospectives.

Industry best practices change, new techniques or tools emerge, and it's crucial for teams to be able to experiment and adapt to stay ahead of the curve and continuously improve how they work.

6. Good Processes Work Because Leaders Lead by Example

Leaders should lead by example when it comes to following processes themselves. Team members won't value or follow a process if their leader doesn't. At best, they will go through the motions and play lip service to it.

Take a simple example: turning up to meetings on time. It is unlikely that people in an organisation will turn up on time to meetings if their leader is constantly late.

Wrapping Up

Avoiding process entropy is not easy. The approaches outlined here might help you keep it at bay in your organisation.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

💬 As I said, I struggled to articulate my thoughts on this one, so if you had some thoughts while reading this, please reply, comment, or take a second and use the 👍 or 👎 to give me some quick feedback.

Issue No. 19

❤️ Thank you for your likes and comments on last week's update and the big response on LinkedIn. ❤️

Today, normal newsletter service resumes!

Recently, I reminisced about my time at Red Hat's Open Innovation Labs. I couldn't help but remember a slide I frequently used as an icebreaker when kicking off presentations about transformation and culture change.

It was based on Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y.

I've included it below.

The core principles behind Theory Y are fundamental to my approach to work.

Theory X and Theory Y

Have a look at the table below.

Which theory best describes how you want to be treated? Is that how you try to treat others as well?

Which one fits the people around you? Your boss?

Does your company, department or team work in a Theory X or a Theory Y way? If you are a manager, would your team agree with you?

I Am a Theory Y Person!

When asked which theory about human nature - X or Y - describes us, everyone immediately says "I am a Theory Y person!"

But They Are a Theory X Person!

However, when it comes to others, the answer isn't as simple. We've all encountered Theory X individuals numerous times.

No one is a Theory X person!

In his 1960 book "The Human Side of Enterprise," Douglas McGregor introduced two contrasting views of human nature, Theory X and Theory Y. He emphasized that Theory X, which assumes people need external motivation, is a misconception. McGregor argued that Theory X individuals don't exist in reality; they are just a figment of our imagination. Consequently, Theory X, though commonly held as a view of human nature, is nothing more than an unfounded prejudice about people in the workplace.

This is GREAT news! It means that every single human being is a Theory Y human! Our world is full of hardworking folks who, when engaged, truly shine. They yearn to be recognized as the self-driven achievers they are.

This is important. It's important because our assumptions about others shape our behaviour and how we design and manage organizations. If you believe in the existence of Theory X humans, then you'll lean towards command-and-control systems.

To create a modern organization that can thrive in complexity, we need a shared, enlightened, and nuanced understanding of human nature.

Theory X Doesn't Have a Place in a Modern Sense and Respond Organisation

Here are some reasons we should not use Theory X in our team, department, or organisation:

1. Reduced trust: Distrust erodes healthy working relationships, leading to conflict, reduced loyalty, and declining organizational culture.
2. Limited collaboration: Theory X management styles prioritize individual performance, resulting in less teamwork and cross-functional cooperation.
3. Increased employee dissatisfaction: Constant monitoring and pressure from micromanagement leads to stress and dissatisfaction, causing higher absenteeism and turnover rates.
4. Stifled creativity and innovation: A command-and-control environment discourages experimentation, hindering growth and innovation.
5. Inability to adapt: Organizations clinging to Theory X principles struggle to adapt to the rapidly changing business landscape.
6. Talent attraction and retention issues: Theory X biases make it difficult to attract top talent and retain the best performers.

In contrast, Theory Y organizations display the opposite characteristics, as they can attract, nurture, and retain talented individuals due to their high-trust, highly engaged, collaborative, and innovative culture. This environment enables them to adapt to the constantly changing world around them.

But then why does Theory X thinking persist today?

One reason is that it reflects ideas from Frederic Taylor's Industrial Age of Scientific Management. Taylorism has become firmly ingrained in our education system and our businesses.

Because of this we stubbornly cling to a myth that McGregor attempted to debunk in 1960, we use methods and processes tailored for Xers. We're trapped in a Theory X illusion. Most of us are guilty of perpetuating this Theory X bias.

What's scarier is that even if we don't agree with old-fashioned ideas or think we're open-minded, we might still not know how to deal with others. So, we end up using Theory X methods to get our way with them.

We make it worse because when we observe others, we often make assumptions about their nature while overlooking their full context and we let our biases paint a cynical picture of them. Trust me, I know – I fall into this trap all the time!

This is important because our assumptions about others influence our behaviour and how we design and manage organizations. If you believe that Theory X humans exist, then you'll likely create command-and-control systems accordingly.

Sometimes it "feels" easier to take the Theory X approach than it is to take the "slow way" and work out a Theory Y approach to achieve something.

Unfortunately, if you are trying to create a Theory Y organisation but you use Theory X methods you will end up with a Theory X organisation.

Okay Then... How Can We Avoid Theory X Thinking and What Are Some Good Theory Y Methods I Can Use?

Aha! I'm glad you asked... I'll be covering the answers to these questions and more in future issues of this newsletter.

💬 I'm eager to hear from you! What's your go-to Theory Y method or practice that has helped your team's dynamics? Share your insights by replying or commenting below.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Issue No. 18

I apologise for starting the year with a more reflective newsletter than usual. Don't worry, I'll be back to my regular content soon (I'll explain more later). If you're not interested in a personal update from me, feel free to skip this week's episode or just skip to the summary at the end.

Since this letter is longer than I intended, here is the bottom line up front: 2023 was a challenging year, but it taught me a lot. I made some significant changes, including moving to a new city and leaving my job at the end of the year. In the coming months, I plan to invest my time and energy into this newsletter and explore other projects.

More than in previous years 2023 ended with a lot of hope for me as the start of 2024 feels like a new beginning, a rebirth if you will.

Before I delve into why I'm hopeful for the coming year, indulge me as I reflect on the past year

Retrospecting On 2023

“There's so much more to who you are than you know right now. You are, indeed, something mysterious and someone magnificent. You hold within you — secreted for safekeeping in your heart — a great gift for this world. Although you might sometimes feel like a cog in a huge machine, that you don't really matter in the great scheme of things, the truth is that you are fully eligible for a meaningful life, a mystical life, a life of the greatest fulfillment and service...”

― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

In some ways, it was a difficult year and I felt my situation reflected many of the macro events going on in the world. Rising inflation, wars and a tightening of belts and attitudes in venture-backed startups had a ripple effect which touched many of us who were working in VC-backed startups.

As I look back on the year, I'm incredibly proud of what my team and I accomplished at work. However, despite my professional successes, I began to feel the signs of burnout. After work, I lacked the energy to invest in my relationships, health, and other important aspects of my life. It became clear that while I had achieved great results, I was losing sight of my purpose and wasn't in an environment where I could thrive.

During the summer, I came to a realization and decided to make some changes. I began exercising more regularly and my family and I finally acted on one of our long-standing dreams. In just two months, we packed up our belongings, rented out our flat, and moved 750 km (466 miles) south from Paris to Montpellier.

Making changes hasn't been easy. Exercising regularly has been especially tough, especially with a big move. The move itself was exhausting. But as I started to change one part of my life, I realized I needed to keep going and change other things too. These changes started to have a ripple effect.

I eventually realized that to unlock my potential, I needed to make professional changes. This meant finding a way to do my work without sacrificing everything and being in a place where I can grow, learn, and make a difference.

To reach my full potential, I must exist at the frontier of what I know and what is possible. I spent quite a lot of my early career in this space, however, I've drifted away from that frontier. I had become too comfortable, prioritizing safe choices and taking fewer risks.

I realised that the cost of staying in my comfort zone, further from the frontier was taking its toll on me. The moments where I felt alive were getting fewer and farther apart and I was more likely to be found moaning about stuff that happened to me than taking action and doing things that energised me. My responses to situations had drifted to the negative rather than the positive.

I was paying a price in terms of compromising, pushing back my feelings, accepting situations and trying to see the silver lining even when I felt my core values and principles were being diluted.

But the price I was paying was much more costly. By not pushing out towards the frontier I was missing out on a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that I know is available to me.

To truly grow, I need to push myself back out to the edge, take risks and have faith in myself. In 2024 it's time to leap forward and see what I am truly capable of.

"Alive" is My Word for This Year

I’ve never had a “word of the year” before or a theme for how I want to approach the year ahead, but inspired by Ryan Halliday who does this every year, the word “alive” hit me like a ton of bricks as I thought about the year I want to have.

When I look back on the past year the moments that I want more of in 2024 are the moments where I felt truly alive, special moments with my family, going deeper with friends, adventures in far-flung places, working in a team that feels in sync with each other because they have a shared purpose.

I want to actively create more moments this year that are full of positive energy and I want to share my positive energy with others.

I want to inject some positivity, optimism and sunshine into a world that is changing from one that is in peacetime and full of abundance to a world that is in wartime mode. It feels like every side is fighting against each other, from the right and the left becoming increasingly polarised, to management setting themselves against employees through layoffs and return-to-office mandates.

Alive for me also means sustainably doing things. Not just short bursts of extreme and intense life but finding a sustainable way to be alive. I’m prone to overdoing everything I do, so the challenge for me in the year ahead will be to find a middle ground that works.

Favourable Conditions Never Come

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come."

― C.S. Lewis

As you might know, I’ve been trying to get this newsletter off the ground for some time, as well as several other projects. Just like this C.S. Lewis quote, I was always looking for favourable conditions.

At the end of 2023, I realised that favourable conditions never come and I would need to “enter the arena” even though conditions felt unfavourable.

Going Slow to Go Fast, Going Together to Go Far

"New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results."

― James Clear, Atomic Habits

As the year starts I’m going to try to go slower and focus on the most important things to me. Spend more time with family, invest in my health, and spend more time with the people who energise me.

My goal is not to find a job or make wads of money. While I would like to build a business at some point I’m not setting out to achieve any specific metric. I want to actively and consciously search for the work that I want to keep doing over a sustained period.

For the short term, I’m likely going to do some short-term contracts to make ends meet and experiment a lot with various ideas I’ve had for some time.

The work I get paid for may change over time, and it may or may not involve the things that I want to keep doing. But what I want to keep doing, such as mentoring and helping others who are earlier in their career than I am, writing, sharing ideas, connecting people, and having meaningful conversations, will make this all worth it.

So What Does This Concretely Mean for Me?

I’ve left my job at Dashlane.

I’m grateful for what I learned about myself, it sounds like a cliche but working at a startup is like working at several different companies in a very short period. I’ll be cheering the company on from the alumni stands. I’m SO grateful for the folks I met there and I'm happy for those who find joy and peace there.

I’m excited about what I’m going to learn and build next.

I’m going to invest quality time in my family, my friends, and myself.

I’m going to write more in this newsletter and see where it leads. I’m also going to explore some of the ideas I had around podcasting and video.

I’m open to short-term or part-time contracting opportunities helping organisations as a consultant or as an interim CTO or VP of Engineering.

I’m not closing the door to a permanent role but I’m going to approach that option thoughtfully to make sure the fit is right.

And What Does This Mean for You, Dearest and Most Loyal Reader?

This newsletter will resume its weekly cadence and I’m going to explore some other ideas I’ve had for a long time.

I also have a ton of useful tools that I've found and used over the years that I want to make available to folks.

I’ll get back to the original idea I had of putting out a podcast introducing you to folks that I think you should meet and I want to experiment with video and YouTube in particular.

Putting out a newsletter, podcast and YouTube videos sounds like a creator cliche. I know! 😹 I have some things in me that I need to share and these seem like the best ways to do that in 2024.

Thank You!

If you got this far down the page, thank you, I truly appreciate your interest. For me to write better I have to weave myself into the fabric of this newsletter and this one came out very personal.

I value each one of you, the fact that you follow me in my corner of the internet means SO much to me and I hope to be able to bring you some value in return this year.

Happy New Year to you, here is a wee Irish blessing for each of you.

May the road rise up to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
And the rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

💬 I would love to hear your thoughts via a comment below.

Issue No. 17

Writing this week's newsletter brought back a flood of memories, as I recalled one of the best jobs I ever had – a place where I experienced significant growth early in my career.

This ended up longer than what I aim for, I hope you like it!

💬 In this issue, I cover:

• My experience working in Accenture's cutthroat "up or out" culture.
• Why performance ratings suck and don't work.
• One alternative to performance ratings.

Accenture, a Walk Down Memory Lane

At Accenture years ago, I couldn't stand the annual performance ratings and promotion cycle. As part of the cutthroat consulting workforce, it was "up or out" – either get promoted within a set time or hit the road.

One thing that really stands out is the significance of the annual performance cycle. If you received the wrong rating during a promotion year, you could be stuck at the same level for another year. So, being on the right project with the right manager and career counsellor was essential. Without the proper conditions and support, you wouldn't move up, which could seriously impact your career.

The performance ratings process involved receiving a performance rating on a five-point scale. I can't recall the exact terms, but the range was something like Outstanding, Exceeds Expectations, Meets Expectations, Needs Improvement, and Unacceptable. These rankings were forced along a distribution curve.

So much depended on our annual ranking, from promotions to significant differences in pay. It was a messy process that led to politics, cutthroat competition for top projects, and brown-nosing to make sure we had the support of our manager and career counsellor. All of this jockeying for position was aimed at making sure that, during the "calibration" meetings, we'd rank higher on the ladder.

Often, those up for promotion were ranked higher than more deserving colleagues, as missing a promotion had severe consequences. As a result, individuals who had an outstanding year were sometimes ranked lower to accommodate those on the promotion track.

The whole process sucked, and of course, it didn't improve the performance of employees. So, Accenture (along with numerous other companies) ditched the process and adopted a continuous feedback culture.

The Big Lie 🤥

People Can Reliably Rate Other People

Years later I read the book "Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World" by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall and my experience of performance ratings at Accenture (and other companies since) resonated with Lie 6: People Can Reliably Rate Other People.

The truth is, in reality, none of this works. All the mechanisms and meetings – the models, consensus sessions, exhaustive competencies, and carefully calibrated rating scales – can't ensure that the truth about us emerges in the room. Why? Because they're all based on the belief that people can reliably rate others. And they can't.

In the end, our rating says more about our manager's personality or rating habits than it does about us or our work. People are simply incapable of rating others accurately.

Why does this happen? It all boils down to something called the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect.

The Idiosyncratic Rater Effect

The Idiosyncratic Rater Effect is a phenomenon that occurs when a manager's personal biases and opinions impact their evaluations of their employees. Essentially, it means that two different managers may evaluate the same employee differently based on their own unique perspectives and opinions. This effect can lead to inconsistencies in performance evaluations and hinder the growth and development of team members.

Research shows people cannot reliably rate others, and raters' patterns of rating do not change when they rate two or more people. Ratings reveal much more information about the personality of the rater than they do about the person being rated! Rating each other at a workplace may seem like a great instrument for measuring skills and performance, but the accuracy of these results has proved to be very doubtful.

Sociologists tried to minimize the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect by creating increasingly detailed scales, but they achieved the opposite result, showing that “the more complex the rating scale, the more powerful the influence of our idiosyncratic rating patterns.”

The book argues that humans are unreliable raters of other humans, making feedback more distortion than truth. People cannot reliably rate other people. 360-degree reviews and performance rankings are useless.

For me personally, these research findings are incredibly liberating. They explain what I've always felt but could never quite pinpoint. Staff rankings, talent reviews, calibration meetings, and 360 reviews are just plain useless! Why? Because these activities rely on fundamentally flawed data. Garbage in equals garbage out.

The Truth: We can reliably rate our own experiences, but not other people

So what is the truth? Well, it is pretty simple. People can’t rate others, but they can reliably rate their own experience.

In their book Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall reveal the simple truth that the image of you that your manager has is more important than all the figures presented by false tools. In this sense, team leaders can always rely on their own experience and ask questions about their reactions to each team member, so here's what the book suggests doing:

Rather than asking whether another person has a given quality, we need to ask how we would react to that other person if he or she did… asking the leader about what he would do, or how he would feel.

In other words, what matters more is your leader's own experience of how you show up at work.

As a team leader, what do I feel in the presence of this person? Would I promote him or her? Your subjective reaction may not be accurate, but it will be reliable because we cannot be wrong about our feelings.

In the end, you can only accurately and reliably rate your own experience!

The Top 4 Questions Every Manager Should Be Asking Themselves About Their Team

As a general rule, if you're after good data, be on the lookout for questions that ask only that you rate your own experience or intended actions.

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall suggest that these four questions are pretty good ones for a manager to ask themselves about their experience or intended actions for a team member.

1. Given what I know of this person’s performance, and if it were my money, I would award this person the highest possible compensation increase and bonus.
2. Given what I know of this person’s performance, I always want them on my team.
3. This person is at risk for low performance.
4. This person is ready for promotion today.

Each of these should be answered with a Likert scale (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree).

I've found that my answers to these questions, and my reasons for those answers, to have prompted better conversations than any performance rating system I've used.

Accenture Remains One of the Best Places I've Ever Worked

As I wrap up, I should mention that working at Accenture was one of the best experiences I've ever had. I grew so much in a short period of time and had many amazing experiences both in and outside of work.

Things changed a bit during my time there when they introduced the concept of "landing at a level," and I believe they have continued to evolve their organization.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

💬 What has been your experience with performance reviews and ratings in your workplace? I would love to hear your thoughts (via a comment below) and about any alternative methods that have worked for you or your organization.

Issue No. 16

I'm back from a hiatus of almost a year! Unfortunately, this project had to take a back seat due to a crazy period of work commitments and challenges on the home front. On a personal level, it has been a period full of challenges that have given me many occasions to reflect and, hopefully, learn.

I'm sure that, like me, your life is super busy, so I want to keep my posts short with no fluff, with the occasional deep dive on a topic.

I've been reflecting back over the last year, one of the things that has happened is the explosion of "AI," or rather, Large Language Models and generative AI.

Like with any technology, it is already being abused. From crappy SEO-optimized product blog posts (they used to be bad enough when marketers wrote them) to whole books being generated and swamping digital bookstore shelves.

I worry that soon we are going to be wading into an even worse Internet than the social media-hyped version we are already in.

On the other hand, I'm a geek, not a Luddite, so I have been playing around a lot with this technology, and I believe it should be part of every knowledge worker's workflow.

Some of the applications of this technology will give those who use it a distinct and unfair advantage over those who do not use it (or who do not master using it).

One way to use generative AI is as a thinking partner to ask us questions and test our ideas before turning our answers into varying lengths of content, which we can then apply to our final edits.

In order to bring this to life, I think a short example might be helpful.

An Example of Using AI to Help You Think

One of the things I try to do, and which I coach my teams to do, is to focus on outcomes rather than outputs.

I also use a specific definition of an outcome - “a change in human behavior that impacts business results.” This comes from the book “Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success” by Josh Seiden.

What we try to do is to have every initiative, or "project," named using the language of an outcome - the actual human behavior we are looking for. Additionally, every increment or slice of those "projects" should also use the same outcome-oriented language for the name of the increment.

There is SO much clarity when you can give your work titles like this. First of all, we benefit from having clearly articulated the "Why" of the work we are doing. Secondly, even the least technical person can quickly understand the work we are doing and what the team is trying to achieve.

However, coming up with short, impactful outcomes for our work turns out to be pretty hard to do in practice! Especially for a very technical project or spike where it is much harder to identify the user and link their behaviour to the success of the business.

As they say:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
– Phil Karlton

In the case of coming up with short outcome statements, I have found generative AI to be super useful to ask me questions and summarise the results.

Here is an example of a prompt I'm still refining but I've started to use to be able to name and describe the work we do when I'm a bit stuck:

I'd like your help in updating some project descriptions to be written as an outcome.
The definition of an outcome is a change in human behaviour that impacts business results.
Each project description should clearly identify:
- the person or human or persona
- the behaviour change for that person
- the link to business results between their behaviour and the impact on the business
Please ask questions if needed and provide prompts to guide me so you can suggest an updated and short project description.
Do you understand?

Note: If you are using Chat GPT, there are radically different results between GPT 3.5 and 4. I have also found that there is a bit of variability in the results.

This helped me take a fairly technical feature

"biometric user validation"

In a minute with a few prompts, I had:

"Improved user experience and adoption through biometric user validation for passkeys"

Which I then edited to:

"Improve UX and adoption of passkeys by adding biometric user validation"

I know I could improve this with more time, but I hope you see how AI can help us when we're stuck and give us something good to use fast. For busy knowledge workers, this is really helpful.

And this is only one of the many uses of generative AI!

Best Practices to Use AI to Help You Think

Generative AI can be a powerful tool when used correctly. Here are some best practices when using it as a thinking partner:

1. Clearly define the problem or question you want to explore before using generative AI. The more specific and focused your question, the better results you will get.
2. Garbage in, garbage out - if your thoughts are flawed or incomplete, you will get subpar results.
3. Don't rely solely on generative AI for all of your thinking. It should be just one part of your toolkit.
4. Experiment. Use multiple iterations of the same prompt to generate different perspectives and ideas.
5. Don't sound like a lame bot. Edit and refine the output before sharing it with others or using it in a final product.

I believe generative AI can be an effective thinking partner and we are already starting to see it used for even more interesting use cases like my friend Tim's use of AI in their product, Stellafai, which helps teams manage goals and OKRs.

Don't worry, this newsletter hasn't pivoted to being another part of the AI hype machine! I've got some good content planned around execution and leadership coming up. I just couldn't ignore one of the biggest developments in tooling for knowledge workers we have ever had!

Issue No. 15

I hope this week's episode finds you well. I don't know about you, but it's been a busy few weeks on my end. I can imagine it has been the same for you. Sorry for the radio silence, I've had to skip a few weeks where I didn't manage to publish a post.

This week I'm following up my "Manifesto for Building High Performing Cross-Functional Teams" with a post where I try to describe what these teams look like in a great product organisation.

A Vision for Product Teams

I tried to capture what great product teams are like in one sentence:

Engaged product teams continuously creating impactful outcomes by learning and making decisions through their weekly interactions with users

Let me try to break this down.

Engaged

Team members believe in and feel energised by the mission and vision of their organisation.

They feel their work directly impacts the mission of their organisation.

Folks enjoy the work they do and the colleagues they work with.

People have fun together!

Product teams

The organisation comprises smaller cross-functional teams who build a product or a clearly defined part of it.

I prefer to call these "Product Teams" because they make a product together.

Product managers, designers, and engineers work alongside supporting roles such as researchers, test automation and docs.

Each team has the skills needed inside the team to build their product autonomously with as few dependencies as possible on other teams.

Continuously creating impactful outcomes

These teams aim to deliver a continuous flow of value to their users which creates impactful outcomes for them.

Thanks to Josh Seiden and his book “Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success” I see an outcome as a change in users' behaviour that has a direct impact on the top and bottom line of an organisation's results.

Learning and making decisions through their weekly interactions with users

All teams need to make decisions every day.

The best teams are teams where everyone is learning and growing. How do they do that? By creating a safe space for making decisions and reviewing the results.

The best teams talk and interact with their users weekly because they aim to make decisions based on as much user input as possible.

If a team is only talking and interacting with users every month then they will end up making a month's worth of decisions without user input.

That is all for this week folks, have a great week!

Jeremy (he/him)

Don't ignore your dreams, don't work too much, say what you think, cultivate friendships, and be happy.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Issue No. 14

This week's newsletter is more of an experience report of something I've been trying on and off for a year.

I've been experimenting with working in virtual reality!

After reading "Working From Orbit - VR Productivity In (or Above) a WFA World", I was super intrigued by the idea of working in VR.

So I went crazy and bought an Oculus (now Meta) Quest 2 headset.

Here is my experience report 💬.

Getting started with working in VR

I tried many apps to get my computer screen into my VR headset. After trying most of them, Immersed has turned out to be the best for my use case.

Immersed even has Linux support. However, using it on Linux was a hassle, and it works better on my Mac.

Things were pretty sucky initially because it was hard to see my keyboard and trackball in VR. Immersed had a solution that sort of worked - they could render your keyboard in VR by getting you to press different keys on it and then detect where the keyboard was. But, unfortunately, that didn't work well for me because I use an ortholinear keyboard.

You would think this wouldn't have been an issue for me because I can touch type, but I occasionally glance down at my keyboard. You can try this for yourself. Just put a tea towel over your hands on your keyboard to see what the experience is like for you. Not really usable, IMHO.

So I stopped using the app for a while, and most of my VR  time was spent playing games.

There were other issues with my experience.

Being in VR takes time to get used to. Honestly, my face was red at the start, my eyes didn't feel very good, and I had to take regular breaks. However, things are much better now that I'm used to VR, and I've found a good head strap (see tips below). I can sustain much longer sessions in VR because the headset isn't being pressed against my face as hard as it needed to be before to have a good fit, with other straps to get a good fit.

The Immersed app was buggy. I spent most of my time in VR yak shaving, trying to get the screens set up just so, then something would happen, and I would lose my setup. So frustrating. Immersed is a small startup, and I wonder whether it will continue to exist. Thankfully they continue to make improvements. (I still worry for their future as they tried to pivot to sell "virtual land" in their app - that move feels pretty bizarre to me!).

The resolution isn't excellent. I've done some hacks (see my tips below) to make things usable. Still, even then, the resolution of my virtual monitors is not super amazing.

Hand tracking didn't work well when I first started out. Trying to move a screen around in VR was a pain. So I went back to the controllers. But then I was regularly fumbling around for the controllers to change something. It wasn't ideal.

The app drains the battery of my Quest super quickly, so my sessions were short.

So does working in VR suck?

If we were to stop there, I would simply tell you that VR sucks and isn't ready for work unless you are super motivated to stick at it.

Then Meta released the passthrough API that allows you to create little windows into the real world. This upgrade finally let me see my keyboard and trackball perfectly (as well as my cup of coffee or a drink).

Gamechanger.

Meta's improvements to the Quest software haven't stopped there either. Hand tracking is way better, and they seem to be moving forward with improvements with every release that makes a difference. Although, as a user, I always wish they went faster!

With each improvement in the Quest's software and the Immersed app, I've found myself going back and trying it more often.

I can concentrate better in a spaceship circling the earth than at my desk in our spare room. I can now type away for a couple hours on a newsletter post in the evening with some chilled beats in the background and feel less distracted because of the environment that I'm in.

My tips to get the most out of working in VR

The experience with a stock Quest 2 can be significantly improved with a few modifications.

Here are my tips to get the best out of working in Immersed on the Quest 2:

• Change the facial interface - I have this one (affiliate link) from VR Cover.
• Change the head strap - I think the BoboVR (affiliate link) is the most comfortable and has a battery that allows you to significantly extend your sessions.
• Hardwire your computer to your network (you should be doing this anyway, as it makes a massive difference for video calls).
• Get a WiFi6 wireless router (ideally 6E so you can be fully future-proof).
• Get SideQuest and tweak your settings. For example, I've turned my CPU and GPU to the max and turned off Fixed Foveated Rendering Off. These settings seem to give me a better experience.
• I tried having lots of screens around me, but I found the whole experience to be laggy with extra screens, so nowadays, I just have one (sometimes two or three) in VR. If you try this yourself, you can try different approaches to see what works best.
• ptom or Paul Tomlinson, who wrote the article that got me into all of this, also has good tips in his article, and the Immersed Discord is a good place for recommendations.

These changes allow you to have the most comfortable and least laggy experience using Immersed.

Would I recommend this to most people? No!

Would I recommend this to fellow geeks who want to experiment and try new ways of working? Sure!

I took a recording towards the end of writing this article so you can see my experience while I've been drafting this article while seated in my spaceship that is circling the earth.

As you can see from the video, hand gestures aren't always perfect (gesture recognition seemed worse while I was recording the footage than usual). Also, you need to resize your screens when you change the environment (Immersed allows you to have different presets). However, I have to say I really like the spaceship environment, and I don't really change much. However, I also like the cave environment (not in the video).

So things are not perfect, but they are usable!

Things that still suck for the basic solo Immersed experience:

• Joining a zoom call from VR - Immersed has a virtual webcam that shows your avatar from any angle in VR, but it is a poor experience. Hand gestures come across on the video, but the technology isn't there for eyes or facial expressions, so it is a bizarre experience for everyone else to talk to you. I've tried it only once because the experience is too odd for other folks.
• Multiple screens - your mileage may vary. Still, I found many screens to be laggy and slow, so I prefer to use only one screen (similar to my regular desk setup these days).

Is the future of work in VR?

It might sound weird to say this, but I think more and more of us will end up working in VR and AR (Augmented Reality). VR is crossing over into the mainstream, and it will enable better ways of working together in the future.

Most of this article has been about my solo experience working in VR. VR could give remote workers the sense of community and connectedness currently missing when you aren't in an office face-to-face with your co-workers. VR has the potential to bridge this gap. We aren't there, but I can see a future where we regularly interact in "the office" over VR. VR has the potential to allow us to have workshops as intense and creative as the ones I've experienced when you get a team of folks around a whiteboard with a bunch of stickies. We just need the hardware and software to develop enough to allow that.

I don't think we will all be in VR 100% of the time, working and playing together. However, I believe we will start spending more time working in VR (and AR) as technology makes it a more accessible experience.

Some things that still need improving to make this fully accessible:

• A high-speed link with almost no latency between my computer and my VR headset. It took a while (and a router upgrade) to get my setup to where it is (around 4 milliseconds latency). A wireless dongle would be great (spoiler alert, there is one on its way).
• Higher resolution displays and much upgraded graphical rendering - honestly, the resolution in VR is nothing compared to my laptop's screen. I have to move my head around a lot because the way these headsets work, only the centre of where I'm looking is rendered in detail.
• Full-colour passthrough in high definition - currently, we only have black and white passthrough, which is not ideal.
• Automatic IPD adjustment - IPD is the distance between your eyes. Quest 2 only has three settings. I've never been convinced that the setting I have mine on is perfect. The IPD of my eyes sits in between the settings.
• Eye tracking would make a big difference for presence and rendering where I'm looking in higher resolution.
• Face tracking - like eye tracking, I think face tracking plus photorealistic avatars will be a game changer because you won't have to leave VR to join a zoom call.

And a lot more, but the list above will get us to a place where I think we can consider giving out VR headsets instead of monitors for employees who prefer to work in VR.

The Quest Pro is just around the corner, and it looks like it will address quite a few of the items on my list above, so I'm excited about what the future has in store for working in VR.

That is all for this week folks, have a great week!

Jeremy (he/him)

Don't ignore your dreams, don't work too much, say what you think, cultivate friendships, and be happy.

PS Yes this issue of my newsletter was written in a single three hour VR session!

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Issue No. 13

I believe teams are the fundamental building block we should optimise for in all organisations. It is your day-to-day experience inside your team that determines if you are an engaged employee or not. It is the team who do "the work".

Knowledge work fundamentally requires great collaboration to solve problems, especially in a complex and ever-changing environment. Since collaboration and problem-solving happen mostly inside teams, I think we should optimise for building high-performing teams first and foremost inside any organisation.

💬 TL;DR:

• We should aim to build long-lived high-performing teams composed of competent multi-disciplinary people and specialists.
• Instead of moving people to "the work", we should move "the work" to the teams we create.
• Think of highly trained SEAL teams with different missions that are used to working together after years of training and combat vs mercenaries assembled for an assignment.
• I hypothesise that this approach results in stability (less churn of people in and out of teams or in and out of our organisations) and greater efficiency and quality because team members will be engaged, and their team will constantly improve their ways of working the longer they work together.

Attempting to define a long-lived product team.

It is probably helpful for me to define what I mean by "long-lived product team". For our teams to work well, we need to ensure they are imbued with specific characteristics:

• Have a clear mission, vision and strategy aligned with the company.
• The core team comprises 5-9 full-time people (what I would call the pigs rather than the chickens). It would be even better if they were on the smaller end of this scale.
• Long-lived - team members need to know that the team they are part of will be their primary working environment for an extended period. This allows the team to "gell together, " creating higher performance. Over time the team evolves, and its ways of working change.
  Think of them like high-performing sports teams - they need time to go through the stages of the Tuckman Model.
• Clear roles and responsibilities - especially between Product Manager, Tech Lead and Engineering Manager.
• Freedom & autonomy to operate - The team is self-organising (no external inputs needed). They can operate autonomously in their environment because they demonstrate ownership of their outcomes. Decisions about what to do are made inside the team, not outside the team.
• Cross-functional - the team has all the skills to lifecycle their product (or features) from discovery to release.
  Product
  Design (ideally)
  Research (ideally)
  Engineers
  Testing (ideally)
• Adheres to common standards - it is only through standards that we can have genuine autonomy and self-organisation. Otherwise, we have anarchy. Here are some standards which I believe are useful in an organisation:
  Shared operating principles
  Common Practices
  Standard APIs for how teams interface with other teams

Or to summarise, a long-lived product team is a group of people executing a strategy toward a shared mission over an extended period (many months or even years).

Why long-lived teams?

• Long-lived teams collaborate better. Relationships and good working agreements take time to build inside a team. These are the foundations of good collaboration, which result in psychological safety and clarity, leading to a learning and growing environment for team members.
• Long-lived teams have stable, predictable delivery through best practices and working methods developed over months and years of working together.
• Long-Lived teams have greater ownership of outcomes. Because they know they will own a product or area for the long term, they are deeply invested in avoiding tech debt and solving their users' problems.
• Long-lived teams develop deep knowledge about their users and their domain. Team members immersed in a problem area for an extended period become experts on their customers and the problem space they operate in.
• Long-lived teams retain a historical record - long-lived teams maintain a thread throughout their history of the problems they encountered and why they chose specific solutions. They form alliances and know who to work with to achieve their goals.

In the organisations I lead, I try to optimise for:

• Employee engagement and
• Accelerated delivery of quality work

I think leaders should focus on performance at the team level rather than purely focusing on individuals. In fact, a high-functioning team will automatically correct the behaviour of an individual without the need for external intervention.

That is all for this week folks, have a great week!

Jeremy (he/him)

Don't ignore your dreams, don't work too much, say what you think, cultivate friendships, and be happy.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Issue No. 12

I hope this newsletter finds you well. Unfortunately, I'm writing this week's episode in a time crunch today! (A sure sign of a good weekend).

This week's newsletter is about Open Space Technology, a way to run a meeting for small groups up to very, very large groups. However, it is much more than that. Open Space Technology is even being used as a mechanism for change in organisations of all sizes.

Last week's newsletter was about matching your change mechanism with the organisational culture you want to create through your change. Or, to put it another way, the means must match the ends.

This week I wanted to share one of the change mechanisms I have stumbled upon, Open Space Technology. This approach is compatible with decentralised, bottom-up organisations.

What is Open Space Technology?

Imagine all your best "hallway track" experiences from conferences or "water cooler" moments in the office bundled into one conference or meeting. That is the best way to describe an Open Space Technology event. It is a format that turns those moments into the main event.

For an event like this, it is worth checking out some videos. Here are a couple of my favourites. This short video explains the concept well, and this longer video gives you a real taste of the experience itself.

Each open space has a theme, task or purpose. The format allows participants to create and manage their agenda, resulting in parallel sessions related to the event's theme.

The results that I have experienced from running events like this are powerful. People feel more connected to each other. Initiatives already happening in the organisation (often under the covers) accelerated. New initiatives get kicked off. Events like this unblock a lot of passion and creativity and, given the right conditions, can move folks from learning to doing, from participation to action.

It works for groups as small as five and up to events with over two thousand people. I've used Open Space Technology with groups of over a hundred people.

My First Experiences with Open Spaces

I first experienced an event based around Open Space Technology in Cameroon. I decided to live there to start a company and startup incubator. One of the things we did was to launch an instance of BarCamp called BarCamp Cameroon in 2009.

This is a picture of the agenda from one of the second BarCamps we ran in Cameroon (this was the second event we ran).

I can distinctly remember the feeling of nervousness before the start of our first BarCamp. Lots of thoughts were rushing through my head.

"will folks come prepared to present?"

"This is not something people are used to in Cameroon. Will it work?"

Of course, all those fears were for nothing. The events we organised were a success and helped a grassroots tech movement that had already started in Cameroon gain momentum.

I dug up this old Flickr album of the same event.

How I use Open Spaces

Since my early experiences with BarCamps, I have used the format at Red Hat for a meeting for over a hundred folks at a leadership breakout, sales kick-off events and the quarterly team meeting for the EMEA Open Innovation Labs team.

Since leaving Red Hat, I have used it for the annual onsite event at Traveldoo, the quarterly Product and Tech all hands at Ocus and the first workshop with my team in my current role at Dashlane.

Open Space Technology has become my preferred format for quarterly team all-hands events. I tend to run a two-day event every quarter for the teams I've been leading. Surprisingly (or not), it works well as a virtual all-hands event.

Open Space Technology and transformation

I've seen so many positive changes emerge in an organisation through Open Spaces. Used well, it is an awesome mechanism for sparking and sustaining change in an organisation.

Interestingly Open Space Technology has started to be used as a tool during organisation transformations. For example, check out Open Space Agility which uses Open Space Technology alongside Agile transformations. Daniel Mezick's Open Space Agility inspired Silke Hermann and Niels Pflaeging. They created Open Space Beta (disclaimer, I proofread the book), which focuses on organisational change.

Creating your own Open Space

Running a free-form event like an Open Space for your next meeting doesn't mean organising your event will take less effort. On the contrary, the best events take almost as much work as a typical meeting of a similar size. The difference is that you do more of the work up front, and the folks attending don't notice the structure. The open space creates a sense of flow you don't experience in a traditional conference, except in the hallway track.

I will write a future post about running an Open Space based on my experiences doing this at three different companies with all sorts of participants from sales and marketing, consultants and product and engineering.

That is all for this week folks, have a great week!

Jeremy (he/him)

Don't ignore your dreams, don't work too much, say what you think, cultivate friendships, and be happy.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Issue No. 11

I'm back after taking a break over the summer. One of the things I love about living in France is how seriously people take their holidays. Rightly so too. France is a fantastic place to be on holiday.

It wouldn't be a proper holiday for me if I couldn't read a few books. So, thankfully, I read a few great books while I was off, and I can't wait to share what I learned with you in a future episode of this newsletter.

This week I wanted to talk about something I struggle immensely with and which I care about massively, "how to help an organisation change".

As an engineering leader, the thought, "How can I build healthy, empowered and autonomous teams that deliver outcomes for our business", keeps me awake at night. I've been trying to build organisations aligned with these principles for a long time, and I'm still learning what it takes.

Thankfully I have worked with some great people, and one of the things I heard that has stuck with me is:

"Your mechanism for change must match your desired end state."

or said another way

"The means must match the ends."

If you want autonomous self-organising teams, enforcing a framework of how you expect them to work, such as Scrum, will not work. Or, to put it another way, you cannot impose a democracy but instead use participative design.

One of the places this idea comes from is the first of nine socio-technical design principles in a paper by Albert Cherns.

Principle 1: Compatibility
The process of design must be compatible with its objectives [...]
If the objective of design is a system capable of self-modification, of adapting to change and of making the most use of the creative capacities of the individual, then a constructively participative organization is needed. A necessary condition for this to occur is that people be given the opportunity to participate in the design of the jobs they are to perform. In a redesign of an existing organization, the people are already there.

In my experience, this principle holds.

I've struggled with this. I guess I will always wrestle with it. Whether you are building an organisation from scratch or trying to change an existing one, you will struggle with this too.

When you are trying to help a hierarchical organisation full of learned helplessness ("this is just how things are around here"), your first instinct as a leader is to rush in and try to move everything into the right place. Plus, your boss hired you with high expectations, and the weight of that is on you. So you have to deliver results fast.

The problem is that quick results and lasting change are not usually the same. If you push in new changes top-down and then market these "early wins", you can probably put in place quite a few changes and then prop them up through your position as a leader. However, if your goal was also to build an autonomous self-organising team, you missed the mark!

Hierarchical, top-down methods are usually much easier to deploy and feel more natural for a leader. So, if your desired result is a Tayloristic feature factory, go right ahead and use them.

On the other hand, if you are trying to build an agile "sense and respond" organisation, you will have to try different methods.

The approaches needed to encourage a bottom-up organisation to flourish are counterintuitive; they don't feel natural to us, and our instincts can work against us.

The good news is that these approaches do exist, and the changes, when they happen, won't be tied to you as a leader. Instead, they will spring up and self-replicate from person to person.

I'm still learning my way around all of the ways to create generative organisations.

Next week I will share with you one of the change methods I have used with great success from small groups up to hundreds of people!

That is all for this week folks. Have a great week!

Jeremy (he/him)

Don't ignore your dreams, don't work too much, say what you think, cultivate friendships, and be happy.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Issue No. 10

I've settled on writing these newsletters on a Sunday evening and shipping them on a Monday morning. This rhythm suits me better than trying to send the newsletter out on the weekend. And Sunday evenings writing sure beats ending the weekend as a vegetable watching something on the TV.

That said, this week's newsletter is coming to you a day late because I took a long weekend off with my family.

It's the holiday season, some of you might already be off, and I hope the rest of you have some downtime planned with your friends and loved ones.

I love to read on holiday. So when we go away on holiday, I always try to have some time for myself to read (increasingly hard with a three-year-old!).

This week I wanted to recommend one of the best books on leadership that I've read. It comes with some of the best advice and principles I've read and a built-in cautionary tale, which I'll get to at the end.

Setting the Standard of Leadership

The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh [this is an Amazon Affiliate link, think of it like a tip for me that costs you nothing to use].

Running a football franchise is not unlike running any other business: You start first with a structural format and basic philosophy and then find the people who can implement it. – Bill Walsh

I know nothing about American football, yet I got so much out of this book. Bill Walsh took the 49ers from being the worst team in American football to the Super Bowl (the biggest event of the year) in less than three years. This book is jam-packed with relatable stories of Bill's successes and failures.

This book sets the standard for what leadership is all about by someone who "introduced twenty-first-century playmaking and management in the NFL two decades before the new century arrived – starting in 1979."

Bill's Secret

What was the secret to Bill's success? The core of Bill's approach was to teach what he called the Standard of Performance. I've touched on this already in my post on "How to grow a Manager of Managers?". I'm sure I will come back to this again and again in my career and writing.

Bill's Standard of Performance was comprehensive: From how the receptionists should answer the phone. What skills a player needs to master for each position. How players were to hold the ball. His standard included where each player had to be on a play, down to the inch.

Bill believed that "your ultimate assignment as a leader is getting those on your team totally ready for the battle. After that, you have to let winning take care of itself".

By maintaining your Standard of Performance, success will take care of itself, whatever it is for you.

Bill's flaw, a cautionary tale

I admire Bill deeply. He was a man of character whose values, standards and principles drove him.

This book also gives you glimpses into the man underneath. The torment underneath. He needed to prove himself and discredit the naysayers. But, he had a chip on his shoulder or a monkey on his back that he couldn't shift.

He also sacrificed all of himself for his craft.

During my years as head coach both at Stanford University and with the San Francisco 49ers, I believe it is safe to say there was no single individual in the organisation - player, assistant coach, trainer, staff member, groundskeeper, or anyone else - who could accurately say they outworked me. Not on. I can state that with no fear of contradiction. Some worked as hard - nobody worked harder.

In the book, his son, Craig Walsh, writes:

His ability to do that [getting his team ready for battle] contributed to his success; his inability to do that, increasing as the years went by, forced him to leave the game as an NFL head coach.

and

By the sixth and seventh year of his decade as head coach with the 49ers, he was showing the price being paid emotionally. [...] his mind-set was not what you'd expect. Late at night, we would sit there in that hot tub. Father and son. If the 49ers had won their game that afternoon at Candlestick Park, he would have a sort of blank look on his face; if they had lost the game that afternoon, he'd have the same blank look. I kidded him about it once. He said ruefully, "This is what happens to a man, Craig" He wasn't talking about fatigue from a day's work. I felt bad for him.

The lessons Bill shares in this book are some of the best you will read on leadership, and the book also tells a cautionary tale - what to do and what not to do.

I want to be like Bill, just not entirely. I have the same tendencies of overwork and obsession as he had. This book reminded me that I do not want my son writing this about me after I'm gone.

If you find yourself staring into the distance with a blank look on your face feeling numb to the moment, I strongly encourage you to seek help.

Bonus: Be a Leader - Bill's Twelve Habits Plus One

A defining characteristic of a good leader is the conviction that they can make a positive difference - can prevail even when the odds are stacked against them. A successful leader is not easily swayed from this self-belief. But it happens.

In addition to expertise and knowledge of the specific competitive environment, I believe a leader must also have certain habits that contribute to their effectiveness, that create and cement their winner's edge. In my view, a truly effective leader must be certain things.

Here are Bill's thirteen habits for leaders.

1. Be yourself.
2. Be committed to excellence.
3. Be positive.
4. Be prepared. (Good luck is a product of good planning.)
5. Be detail-oriented.
6. Be organised.
7. Be accountable.
8. Be near-sighted and far-sighted.
9. Be fair.
10. Be firm.
11. Be flexible.
12. Believe in yourself.
13. Be a leader.

See pages 84-87 of the book for more details.

In Conclusion

The Score Takes Care of Itself is not a once-and-done book. You can revisit its pages time and again. I find myself going back to various sections. I plan to re-read it regularly and incorporate Bill's lessons into my leadership style.

Leaders should try to be like Bill, just not completely.

Take care of yourself folks! Have a great week!

Jeremy (he/him)

Don't ignore your dreams, don't work too much, say what you think, cultivate friendships, and be happy.

PS If this book is not your cup of tea. I highly recommend O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins [another Amazon Affiliate link] for a riveting read about the birth of the state of Israel.

📌 Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter.