- Posts from Awesome Folks
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- Posts from Awesome Folks #17
Posts from Awesome Folks #17
Emily Webber
July 01, 2022
Hello!
I've just spent a wonderful few days at Agile Cambridge, back in person after a bit of a break. It was so fun to catch up with friends I expected to see, bump into friends I hadn't expected to see and make new friends.
The conference was bursting with great ideas and great chat, all set in the gorgeous modernist architecture and 60s art of Churchill College Cambridge.
It has been lovely to see lots of chat both at the conference and on the blogosphere about cultures, environments and approaches that enable and empower people to do their best.
Happy Friday and happy July!
Emily
People and culture
Why Microsoft Measures Employee Thriving, Not Engagement
One thing is clear: None of us are the same people today as we were prior to 2020. So, as our employees change, the ways we can best empower them need to evolve, too.
Why does it feel good to do good?
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,” wrote Adam Smith, famously, in The Wealth of Nations, “but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.” True enough.
Three steps to successfully onboard junior engineers
When juniors fail, it’s often not their fault. And we can make failure far more avoidable by planning for their success. With the right foundations – environment, opportunity, and support – they can grow into great engineers.
Organisations and systems
Why on-call pain is a sociotechnical problem
Pager bombs, flappy alerts, false positives going off night and day, sleepless nights… Who can blame them? Small wonder that so many people develop a Pavlovian response to the sound of their Pagerduty ringtone. Alert goes off; adrenaline soars.
Setting and measuring goals
The problem-solver’s playbook: 17 questions to sharpen your thinking
If somebody had asked me years ago to distill product management in two words, I’d have answered: solving problems. Isn’t that our main job? Find out what the customer’s problems are and solve them. Bam, job done, give me the applause I deserve!
Tools and approaches for teams
Some thoughts on “5 Whys”
When faced with a problem, there’s a general tendency for people to only consider the immediate contributing factors. The “5” in “5 Whys” is a reminder to go beyond shallow attribution and keep exploring underlying causes.
My Product Management Toolkit (53): Giving and Receiving Feedback – Part 2
I know I’ve written about feedback before (see My Product Management Toolkit no. 30 for example). I know I’ve admitted that receiving feedback isn’t something that comes easy to me. And I know that I can definitely improve the ways in which I give feedback.
Celebrate Learning From Failures (With Champagne!)
We recently held a brainstorming session at our office for the newest on-demand course for the Academy—one about the concept of Psychological Safety. During the session, we discussed how one of the things you can do to create psychological safety is to embrace failure instead of avoiding it.
Other things
The Team Onion
I shared my Team Onion model in a workshop at Agile Cambridge this week. So I wanted to share it here too. The Team Onion is a model to keep teams small, break down silos and create shared responsibility across team boundaries.
