Category: Professional Development

Categories
Professional Development

Summer Sabbatical

The Great Resignation has taken another victim — me. About a month ago, I left my job with nothing else lined up.

It’s a weird feeling. I haven’t been unemployed in 27 years.

Maybe the occasional 1- or 2-week vacation between jobs, but never just straight up unemployed.

So much has been written about people taking stock in their lives as the pandemic has impacted them. I’m no different.

While I didn’t get COVID symptoms, nor lose anyone particularly close to me, the anxiety and stress of wondering if you’re going to accidentally bring a life-altering virus back to your family after just going to the grocery store starts to take a toll.

You start wondering why you needed to visit a store in person, and eventually end up down the rabbit hole wondering why you spend the rest of your day doing things that seemingly don’t matter.

This resulted in some kind of (self-diagnosed) anxiety and depression.

I found myself being very snippy with my family. This was in large part to finding little enjoyment in my day to day at work. I was an executive at a health & wellness company. Literally making a positive impact on the world.

But I had the “Sunday Scaries” every night of the week, and I had never felt this before. (I’ll write more about this later.)

I’d spend all day in my office upstairs, in a brain fog, feeling like I wasn’t making any progress. Then I’d come downstairs, stressed, and be stressed, snippy and short with my family.

The ultimate catalyst to me quitting was one of my colleagues being diagnosed with a couple of very serious medical conditions. She has young kids.

Imagine the last thing you kids or friends know remember about you is you being stressed, snippy and short with them.

I didn’t want to go out like that.

Life’s too short to hate your day-to-day, so I quit my job and am taking a little break to enjoy the summer while I can afford it, my kid is young enough to want to hang out with me (but old enough to do some fun things), I’m healthy enough to enjoy the summer, and the job market is OK.

I’m spending this summer with my family. Going to the beach. Working on my Willy’s CJ3A. Training for a half-marathon. Playing lots of golf and video games (guilt-free). Making a significant amount of ice cream and BBQ (not quite guilt-free, but close). And talking to a therapist.

I’ve been “burned out” before, but I never did anything to deliberately address that. I’d take a week off here and there, but never totally shut down, so I’m not sure I ever hit burnout escape velocity and just hung out in low burnout for a long, long time.

All of that unhappiness, burnout and frustration was multiplied by being locked down for a year. My wife told me that I needed to prioritize mental health over work, and I needed to be OK with that.

But it’s not easy. Specifically, the hardest parts today are:

  • Not feeling worthless. So much of my self-identity is tied to my job, title, pay, etc… who am I if I’m not employed at some fancy company, or with a fancy title, or working on some fancy project?
  • Being OK being bored. We live near the ocean in the summer, with a little cash in our pockets. The world is our oyster, but I need to remember that this sabbatical is about recovery — not making up time for something. And it’s ok to just sit on the deck and do nothing.
  • Not rushing to find another job. See above.

So that’s what the summer is like.

I posted a thread about this on Twitter and go so many supportive, thoughtful messages that I know others are thinking about this. I’m going to continue writing about it here in case someone else needs a little extra help from the Internet.

Categories
Professional Development

Just Publish It and Move On

I need to get ideas out of my head.

Most aren’t good ideas, but they linger up there, kicking around, making me more anxious than neccessary. This specific post is a good example. I’ve written and re-written it a few times.

One thing I’ve noticed is that if the ideas in my brain never make it to the team, there’s less chance that they ever get acted on.

As a leader, this is a huge problem.

For private notes, I usually just spin up a new Note in the Notes app and do a small brain dump. This works well and lets me get the idea or spark out of my brain, and eases my mind a little bit. At least I did something with that, instead of letting it knock around up there and distract me.

It’s a little different for ideas that impact my team at work.

I work with a large, distributed team of product managers, designers, engineers and others. In a non-distributed team, you get the chance to pass in hallways, lean over to their desk, talk at lunch, etc.

Being accountable to so many people, and spread across multiple offices and timezones, I rarely have the opportunity for those random one-off conversations. We try to make up for this with regularly scheduled 1:1s and Zoom calls. It kinda works. It also kinda doesn’t.

Keeping a team that size aligned is difficult. That difficulty is multiplied by at least 2x by being distributed.

In the past, I’ve relied on a number of techniques to keep teams aligned. The obligatory meetings (both “all-hands” and 1:1), stream-of-thought emails or Slacks, and lots of travel.

But the one I am finding the most value in is written communication. Publishing your thought in an editable, shareable medium that fosters collaboration with the team.

There is a lot to like about the written communication technique, and I’m not the first person to recognize this. Famously, Basecamp requires their employees to be great written communicators specifically to minimize distractions and improve alignment across a distributed team.

What I like most about it is that it forces you to slow down your thoughts and try to build a narrative (assuming that you type slower than you think). Almost always, as soon as I start to turn my thought into something that I know someone else is going to read, I start to see where the holes and gaps exist.

Now, here’s my personal rub: I am my own worst critic.

To make written communication valuable, it needs to be easily readible and digestible.

Making things readible and easily digestible takes time and effort.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Blaise Pascal in his Lettres Provinciales

While I would tell my teammates to just publish it, don’t worry about it being wrong, just get it out there so we can discuss … it’s so hard to do it myself. I can (and do) edit, tweak and hone for too long. Holding that idea in my head and not letting my team respond to it.

This is detrimental to our group because of the aforementioned timezone and physical separation. Without those opportunities to get in front of the team casually, my ideas never permeate the team, making it harder to become reality.

But I’m in a leadership position, and I want my team to think that I know what I’m talking about. I don’t want them to read a poorly written or formatted document and assume I’m incompetant. In the early stages of an idea or thought, they’re usually kinda half-baked and often-times just flat-out wrong.

This is something I’m working on in 2020. There’s no catchy title for it or anything, yet. But it’s kinda just “letting go”. Put the idea out there, in a way that lets people provide feedback on it, that is searchable later, and that is editable as new information comes in.

I’ve shared my three drafts strategy with the team, and mark the documents as such. This frees up my mind from thinking that it needs to be perfect, and lets the team know that this is an early draft (or not).

OK, now I’m just going to publish this thing.

Categories
Product Management Professional Development

Make Yourself Unnecessary to a Creative Team

To lead a productive team, teach them how to make the right decisions.

A good team leader makes themselves unnecessary. 1

It shouldn’t be necessary that you’re in every meeting. It shouldn’t be necessary that you leave an opinion on every Confluence page. And it definitely shouldn’t be necessary for you to make or approve every decision.

As “the single wringable neck”, you hold the responsibility for the progress of the project. But that doesn’t mean that you need to do all the work.

Some leaders like to consider themselves “deeply involved” in every aspect of the product. I’d argue that these guys are holding their teams back from being truly creative, and literally killing themselves in the process.

GSD(WY)

So, how do you make sure that the right things are getting done (without you), by the right people, at the right time – while not involving yourself in every decision?

  • To reduce responsibility confusion, set crystal clear role expectations: Does your engineering counterpart know exactly what you’re expecting from him in that role? Does the design team understand exactly what problem they’re solving, why it’s important, and when you want to see the next version? Does this business team understand what their involvement should be at this time, and when it’s likely to change? If possible, establish expectations on the very first day a new member joins the team. (And if that’s already past, cancel some meetings and do it today!)
  • To reduce priority confusion, over-communicate the problem: How often do you re-iterate the problem you’re trying to solve, and why when? Who on your team would (and wouldn’t) be able to recite it from memory? When everyone knows this, everyone is more likely to make the right prioritization call in your absence. Start regular reviews with the problem. Reiterate it at the start of planning meetings. It’s easy (and understandable) to lose sight of the forest for the trees, especially when it’s crunch time. State the problem as often as possible to help keep everyone focused.
  • To increase decision-making speed, make it OK to be wrong: If the goal of this is to get out of the way of your creatives, then you have to make it OK for them to make decisions without first consulting you. If not, figure out what information you have that they don’t and relay it to them.

The Ultimate Test: Disappear

You can test how unnecessary you are by marking yourself as Away on Slack for a few days. There’s a cognitive blocker to sending someone a message on Slack while they’re away, which usually results in that person making a decision or getting the answer somewhere else. Use this to your advantage to see how your test reacts when you’re not around.

 

Categories
Product Management Product Roadmap Professional Development

Creating an Environment for Creativity

To best foster your team’s creativity, focus less on the solution and keep talking about the problem.

You know the feeling of a new idea. It’s exciting to think about, to wrap your head around, and to whiteboard ideas for.

We all want to be part of a team just like that: high-functioning, high-output, and creative. Product leaders play an important part in the psychology of a team. And as a product leader, we are incentivized to be concerned not only with what we’re building but how we’re building it.

Our roadmaps, our backlogs, and our discussions are usually focused on the solutions: build this API, extend the UI this way, create this landing page, add this button, etc.

We like talk about solutions because talking about solutions is fun. It’s exciting to be part of a conversation that ends in a bunch of fun projects with fun codenames.

But think back to the last time a project or initiative went wrong. That retro is almost always full of the same themes: unclear expectations, ever-changing priorities, or the super-helpful “communication issues”.

What happened with all that excitement from the beginning of the project? This time was supposed to be different! Here’s exactly when it happens:

At some point, we stop talking about the problem and only focus on executing the solution.

The same solution that we designed, estimated and planned weeks (or months!) ago has been in motion for a while. At some point, we start nitpicking UI or over-thinking micro-optimizations.

We lost focus of the original problem and started polishing. That’s when the problem solving ends, when the creativity slows way down, and where the fun ends.

A team does their best work when they’re in a creative environment. To bring the creativity back to software development, bring the problems back into focus:

  • Your roadmap should be a list of problems to focus on, not solutions.  Your roadmap should reflect a list of the problems your team is going to try to solve. Keep talking about the problems and their relative priority, and be able to clearly communicate why they’re ranked the way they are.
  • Repeat the problem more than the solution. To get the most out of your team, make sure that the problem is well understood by the team. Be sure the whole team can communicate what the problem is, why it’s important to address, and why it’s important to address now. I find it useful to kick off grooming and planning meetings by re-stating the problem and our current progress. Then let your creatives discuss how it gets solved.
  • Be stubborn about the problem you’re addressing, but be flexible about the solution. There’s a reason the problem is prioritized on your roadmap, so changing the problem you’re attacking should be painful. However, discussing and embracing new solutions is part of a healthy creative process. Challenge the team to explain why “this new solution” is the best way to address the problem, especially when taking time constraints into consideration.
  • Agree on how to measure the solution before you start building it. The objective judge of a solution is the impact it has on the problem. Figuring out how to measure the solution is sometimes as hard as figuring out how to solve the problem in the first place. Before you write a single line of production code, discuss the metrics you’ll use to define success, what tools you’ll use to monitor those metrics, and any work the team will need to do to facilitate accurate reporting. (I like Mixpanel)
  • Your problem should have a clear “re-assesment date”, not a “target ship date”. The team can’t read the future, so you realistically don’t know if the current solution is going to solve your problem. For every problem on your roadmap, you should be able to communicate how long you’re willing to invest in solving it. Whether this is purely for planning an coordination (for example, a user conference in November) or for financial resourcing, make sure there’s a date in which you will re-evaluate the problem’s priority if it hasn’t been solved.

Increase the time your team spends talking about the problems you’re trying to solve, and you’ll start seeing more creative solutions immediately.

You should follow me on Twitter @SparkleClarkle

Categories
Product Management Professional Development Workplace Culture

What is Micro-Management?

Leaders are managers, whether or not they have direct-line responsibility for the people on their team. And part of being a great leader is understanding how to take advantage of the experience that the creative members of your team have.

But nothing kills a creative soul more than feeling micro-managed.

“Micro-management” is a phrase that get thrown around a lot – especially by younger, inexperienced teams.

The problem is: most of the time, the team isn’t being micro-managed. They’re just being managed… but don’t want to be.

There’s one, simple difference between being managed and being micro-managed:

  • Management: identifying and assigning the problem. Someone assigns you a problem, a goal, and asks you to figure out how to get there. An example of management: “Increase SEO traffic 2% in 30 days”.
  • Micro-Management: identifying and assigning the problem and the solution. Someone assigns you a problem, a goal, the solution, then tells you to do it. An example of micro-management: “Increase SEO traffic 2% in 30 days by building blue landing pages that match this mock-up for these 150 long-tail phrases.”

That’s literally the entire difference. If someone is assigning the problem and dictating the solution, that’s micro-management.

But before you send this article to your manager, consider your role on the team for this project: You may actually be in a tactical or execution role.

  • On a marketing team, you’re a “specialist” or “assistant”. Your role is to execute the SEO strategy and tactics defined by management. You get to decide the most efficient way of doing it (Squarespace site, hand-built HTML, etc.), but you need to get these landing page designs up in 30 days.
  • On a landscaping team, you’re the apprentice. Your role is to put the dirt over there, as prescribed by the site foreman. You get to decide the best way of doing it (truck, shovel, wheelbarrow), but you need to put that dirt over there before you leave today.
  • On a development team, you’re a junior developer. Your role is to build this feature. You get to decide the best way of doing it (Rails, React, hand-built HTML), but you need to get this feature live in two weeks.

But even in those cases, you still have the flexibility to decide how to get the thing built. You’re not being micro-managed – it’s just that your scope on the team is different.

Having the problem identified and assigned to you is not micro-management. It’s how aligned, efficient teams work well.

Categories
Product Management Professional Development

5 Short Tips (and 1 Bonus) on How to Write a Good Email That Will Get Read

  1. Make it easy to open. Think about what shows up in a desktop notification or Gmail preview.
  2. Make it easy for them to respond on their phone. Ask for one thing: a call, a yes/no, their advice on something specific, etc.
  3. Make it short, 200 words or less. The longer you ramble, the more chance you have of shooting yourself in the foot.
  4. Make it easily scan-able. Line-breaks and bullet points do this well, a block of text doesn’t.
  5. Make it interesting-ish to read. Don’t start every line with “I”.

Bonus: Make them answer. Follow-up! In my experience with these tips, it’s harder not to reply.

Categories
Professional Development Workplace Culture

Learning From Amazon’s Culture

Amazon has been in the news lately about it’s treatment of employees. One of my current obsessions is the impact of a leader’s personality on it’s workforce, and how it is reflected in the company’s workforce, so I’ve been reading everything I can about this.

FastCompany published an article breaking down the six fundamental motives that create a culture. Specifically explaining why people work:

While all of us could list hundreds of unique reasons why we do virtually anything, our research shows most of them can be neatly grouped into six fundamental motives:

  1. Play
  2. Purpose
  3. Potential
  4. Emotional pressure
  5. Economic pressure
  6. Inertia

The first three boost performance, the latter destroy it. Amazon offers a great case study to witness almost all of them play out.

While it doesn’t directly offer a solution, it’s an interesting article that adds fuel to my hypothesis that a company personifies it’s primary leader’s personality.

Categories
Professional Development Work Hacks

Excel: Remove Everything After a Character (like a question mark, comma or underscore)

If you’re looking to use Excel to trim off everything to the right of a question mark, including the question mark (useful for trimming query strings off of URLs), you can use the following formula:

=LEFT(A1, FIND("?", A1&"?")-1)

A1 is the cell that contains the original string.

If you want to use this for a non-URL string, replace the ? with the character you’re looking for.

Read Next: Alexa: The Ultimate Guide to Amazon’s Virtual Assistant

Categories
Professional Development Work Hacks

How to Make TextEdit Open With a Blank File by Default

At some point, Apple made TextEdit start with an Open dialog. This is annoying if you use TextEdit as a quick way to jot down notes (like I do).

The workaround for this is a simple Terminal command. Paste this into Terminal, hit enter, then restart TextEdit:

defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false
Categories
Professional Development Tech Work Hacks

The Absolute Best Gmail Setup

I feel like the world needs another link to this article: How to use Gmail more efficiently

It only took a couple of minutes to setup, but it changed the way I process my work email.