Tag management

Measuring Patterns To Boost Productivity

Today the most common way of getting feedback is via peer reviews. Some companies do it annually, some bi-annually. This helps employers to reward the most promising employee through promotions, salary raises etc. One disadvantage of the above format is that the feedback is essentially an evaluation by peers of past performance. So it’s already too late to possibly course correct. The next time around the peer review could be done by someone else, with different internal yardsticks of evaluation.

How To Do 1:1 With Your Team ?

One on Ones (1:1) with your team members may be the single most important tool available to a manager. But it’s often not done properly and consequently its benefits are not realized. But first… NOTE: This post talks about 1:1 from an engineering manager’s perspective. But it should map to other domains as well. What’s a 1:1 ? A 1:1 is a recurring time slot deliberately set aside so that a manager and a team member can sync up and discuss successes, challenges, personal goals, product roadmap etc.

How To Prioritize Tasks ?

Shipping products is hard. What makes it hard is that typical products involve multiple teams and multiple dependencies. Navigating these challenges is non-trivial. There are technical challenges to overcome, but those are typically not the biggest blockers. (There are enough smart people in the room to take care of that, unless its some greenfield domain like AR/VR/Self-Driving etc), Then there are the procedural challenges; what should be done when and by whom.

Risk First Assessment

We are all familiar with the usual way how software project deliverables work: requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring… However, how many times do we do a risk assessment of our projects? We always seem to focus on the steady state where most of the things work. We don’t spend as much time in thinking about failure scenarios / risks to our project. I differentiate this from say a threat analysis / matrix.