As Technical Program Managers (TPMs), we often end up as meeting note takers. While TPMs are not just stenographers, note taking is a valuable exercise, and thus taking notes is something to be encouraged. It is OK for note taking to be TPM led, as we often are the best suited to distill down complex, cross-functional, and cross-organizational topics. However, the reality is note taking is meant to serve a purpose, and all meeting attendees should be encouraged to partake in their own way to ensure maximal value of the exercise.
This lightweight post simply defines a best practice around collaborative note taking, where the note taking responsibility is shared across all members of a meeting.
As tech layoffs continue, including Return to Office (RTO) mandates which cause attrition by design, there has been a very real pressure to focus on “efficiency” in 2023 that I am starting to see carry into 2024 plans. Meta went so far as to dub 2023 “the year of efficiency.” This focus makes sense given the macro economic state and a pace of rising interest rates not seen in 40 years. *But how?*
Coupled with the focus on efficiency, the general industry sentiment is that engineering teams are getting slower. And to that I would say: they are right. We seem to have forgotten what we know from Mythical Man Month, which I will summarize as “the fastest way to slow down a project is to add more people to it.” Despite this, the software industry has grown immensely. For example, Meta’s employee count has an exponential growth shape. While rounds of layoffs will cut this number for 2023, the shape is still exponential and the size of organizations have increased tremendously; it is due to this size increase that the sentiment of slower engineering teams arises. *So, what are we going to do about it?*
Read the post and find out!
Now that I have introduced the credit card game – and all of the necessary precautions about it – it’s time to dig in and start teaching how to play it. Whenever folk engage me wanting to get started, they typically ask the same first question: “if you could have one card, what would it be?”
And to that I have a consistent reply: “It’s not a single card, but a single account: Chase. Then, two Chase cards, where only one needs to be in your wallet at a time: the Chase Sapphire Reserve and the Chase Freedom Unlimited.”
“You cheated, but fine. Why both?”
Read the post to find out!
Here is a post explaining how to get out of credit card debt if you have any. To reiterate what I said in my last post: “The first rule of the credit card game is that if you ever carry a balance, no matter how small, for a single month – stop. Take all of the cards out of your wallet, put them in a drawer, and do not continue playing until you are not paying a penny in monthly interest payments.”
I say this as credit card interest rates are insanely high, and thus paying them off is incredibly challenging. So, this guide is a hack to help those that need it, and it’s required before I can get into explaining all the parts of the game. So, if you’re not ready to start playing, or if something happens mid-game and you need help with credit card debt: this post is for you!
I am starting a new series around different credit card systems here on my blog. Yes, this is still a blog about the software industry primarily. No, do not expect me to only write about one topic in any particular order; I do this in my spare time and write about what I am inspired to write about in the moment. While this post is more of an “intro post” to this new series, I need to kick off with some finance 101 before I start diving into the credit card game itself.
When I shared my post about the value of writing weekly summaries months ago, I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I had a follow-up on it. Well, here’s the first follow-up on it!
An article that I was reading the other day triggered the inspiration for this post. While I struggle with many articles written by people without direct experience, I want to highlight a particular part of this article: “[Atlassian VP] Dean pushes Atlassian employees to keep 50% of their day open for individual-focused productivity.”
This quote spoke to me, as 50% is exactly the target I held myself to in my first two years at Zillow. Why this target? I made it up; it felt right for me as a TPM. While you are free to adjust the target, perhaps for other roles or levels – just don’t let picking a target get in the way of you getting started.
And what medium did I use to track this? Well, my weekly summary, of course!
So…how does one get started? If you look at your calendar, it might make you feel sick right now 🤢. Well, there’s good news! We all start here, and this is why this post is necessary. Even better news: you already did step 1.
As a follow-up to a previous post “Please, Stop Quarterly Planning: It’s Just Waterfall in Disguise,” I want to share what to do instead. I touch on this at the end of that post, but it felt worthy of its own, more detailed post. For details about why I don’t like quarterly planning, see that first post. But if you want solutions to replace it with, well, this post is for you.
So, what should we do instead? Two things:
1. Embrace a more flexible planning process, such as Kanban (just-in-time), and
2. Drive accountability through recurring business reviews every 2-6 weeks.
With these two things, you transparently cover the desired feedback cycle that quarterly planning provides while remaining truly agile. In other words, you create a simple, sustainable two-step flywheel. Let’s break these two components down.
Open LinkedIn – seriously, do it. I bet it’ll take no longer than five seconds to stumble upon a post with the word “strategy” in it. And I bet you’ll read it and go – “huh?” The example I found was along the lines of “just do these 10 easy steps and you’ll define everything you need for your entire company.”
I admit, this line from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy hits home: “A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.”
Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you need more than one sentence to describe what a strategy is, you’re doing it wrong. This post will help you do it right!
I keep seeing Return to Office (RTO) news in the tech industry and the cultural divide it is causing. In general, people fall into one of two camps:
1. Everyone should return to the office full-time to maximize collaboration, brainstorming, and morale.
2. Everyone should be permanently remote forever; we’ve proven we can do this during the pandemic.
The compromise then assumed by companies is that a mandatory RTO 2-3 days/week strikes the balance between the two sides. But this is a bad compromise that comes out of a false dichotomy. As there is a third option, one I argue most people want: to be permanently remote, but have optional office space to be used when needed.
Throughout my career, I have seen this process called quarterly planning become more and more popular across multiple companies for reasons I don’t understand. At a high level, quarterly planning could not be a better example of the now-antiquated waterfall methodology. What’s the issue with that? Well, keep reading.
