Engineering Principles and other hard-won lessons

Leadership

Some of these come from conversations with Ales Holecek

Rule #1 - Prioritze

3 strikes principle

  First month do what you need to do
  Second month mentoring and coaching
  Third month: it's dysfunctional, so needs to be fixed (e.g. leadership change) 

Everything is matrixed. So you need leaders who can do product and technology
Which metrics do we want to move? - customer or business focused
Ruthlessly eliminate dysfunction
Go plant your flag!
Write down you principles
Work is to achieve my mission
provide an all-in moment

Making decisions

Expected value decisions: P(success) x reward - cost of failure

Running organizations

Get the culture and people right
80% of investment needs to be in the direct service of the customer
If I don’t believe your plan you don’t have a plan

“What is the speed of light” of a problem

  What are the *actual physics*. Work back from there.

Culture

You can’t have a cultural translation layer in the org (align culture at the top with culture in the middle with culture at the bottom)
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  E.g. Concept of family vs. professional sports team 
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Organizational design

Fix only dysfunctional orgs (because landing a new org take 6-9 months). Be steady-handed
Experts across the full stack needed to create a product have to be part of the team
Horizontal teams have the highest dysfunction (because they are disconnected from the customer)
L-shaped orgs (platform + customer facing scenario) keep everyone humble
Learning has to be part of the design because probability of getting things right the first time is so low
Measure NPS consistently

Project setup

Dependencies

A new product has to be dependency free, or only have dependencies that can be satisfied by providing a credit card (i.e. no people involved in getting a dependency commit)
Cross-geo dependencies within team ~= cross-team dependencies (i.e. hard)

Engineering methodologies

Premortem - things that can wrong
- Integrating two experiences - tight coupling between components drives down overall reliability
- Catastrophic failure of scenario #1 does not lead to catastrophic failure of scenario #2

Random life lessons

It generally doesn’t hurt to ask
Life is about making the most of your circumstances
Don’t assume the future will be like the past. Play scenarios.
- When ideating, choose 3 ideas to start with YouTube video
Don’t put comfort ahead of success
Managing my career is 100% my own responsibility
It’s time to take a single self-confident leap rather than a series of incremental steps that don’t lead very far.
The Four Agreements
- Be impeccable with your word
- Don’t take anything personally
- Don’t make assumptions
- Always do your best

An information diet: Kevin Scott’s 70/25/5 rule - Read 70% peer-reviewed long-form high quality - 25% to learn something new (from new sources) - 5% the rest

Engineering Principles and other hard won lessons