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- Posts from Awesome Folks #15
Posts from Awesome Folks #15
Emily Webber
June 17, 2022
Now, where does the week go and how it is Friday already?
This week has lots of awesome posts covering a whole range of topics, including some of my favourites: the value of building relationships through community and networks, bringing teams closer to users and continuous improvement of ways of working and your code base.
At the end of this list, I've included a podcast I recorded a few weeks back for Mastering Agility, where you can hear me talking about my specialist subject, communities of practice.
Happy Friday, and stay hydrated.
Emily
People and culture
“You never know when you need relationships, but when you do, you need them fast”
I am seeing many collaborations in and across communities pop up that are helping Ukrainians impacted by the horrific war in Ukraine. People who usually don’t work together are collaborating. Some teams formed within a few days. Some of the people had never met before.
Organisations and systems
Systems Theory of Change
Theory of Change (TOC) is an approach to understanding how activities create long-term impact and what are its potential pathways — from multiple activities to impact.
Setting and measuring goals
Using OKRs to Decide When to Kill Features
When you tell a stakeholder what you’re going to build, odds are they’ll get excited. When you tell them that you’re going to shut down a feature, they often get scared. “What if a customer is using that?” Fair question, particularly if you have 5 customers.
Using Fiction to Find Your Strategy
Trying to predict what the future will look like is doomed to fail. Yet this is what most executives do when they strategize. They — we — do this because we have been trained and educated to use trends and statistics to predict what is likely to happen and prepare accordingly.
Tools and approaches for teams
How to break the cycle of tech debt
It’s very common that a team’s output is slowed down in one way or another, perhaps in its tooling, older components, long-running pipelines, or something else. And because a team is slower, there's increased pressure to fix that.
Rerun: Using retros to create continuous improvement – Matt Walton on The Product Experience
Matt Walton was one of the founders of FutureLearn, where he scaled the product team and organisation from nothing to the significant player in online education that it is today.
Want to deliver more value to users? Bring engineers and customers together
In this model, customers and engineering don’t appear in the same line. But this is a missed opportunity! Here I’m sharing why bringing engineering to the (virtual) customer table leads to more satisfied customers, a more engaged engineering org, and greater company success.
Can this ownership exercise improve how you work with others?
When you’re working in a group, you need to know how to coordinate. Coordination requires a shared understanding of how everyone will work together. Most human groups define Roles. Roles help clarify boundaries and expectations for people working together
How to estimate and communicate timelines when building software
In my six years at Postlight, I’ve spent a lot of my time estimating software tasks, coming up with the amount of time and effort it will require to get something done.
Designing Your Time as a Leader
One of the biggest challenges you may face as a leader is managing your time. It’s so easy for this to slip out of your control, as meetings come and go over time, team size changes, and you constantly need to adapt and flex our calendar to keep up.
S03 E08 Creating Communities of Practice with Emily Webber
Developing, learning, and sharing knowledge is vital to the success of your organization. Training will get you so far, but creating communities of practice provides the chance to really set a sustainable path for development.
