Tactics for Tech Leadership (TTL)

 Let's imagine that you are just taking on an engineering organization. Maybe it is new to you or maybe it is completely new. What should you do to set yourself up for success? What are some of the important, or critical, aspects to think through, write down, nail down, or get agreement on? In a five-part series, Mon-Chaio and Andy look back over the long, and sometimes rambling, episodes of T...

 Let's imagine that you are just taking on an engineering organization. Maybe it is new to you or maybe it is completely new. What should you do to set yourself up for success? What are some of the important, or critical, aspects to think through, write down, nail down, or get agreement on? In a five-part series, Mon-Chaio and Andy look back over the long, and sometimes rambling, episodes of T...

Let's imagine that you are just taking on an engineering organization. Maybe it is new to you or maybe it is completely new. What should you do to set yourself up for success? What are some of the important, or critical, aspects to think through, write down, nail down, or get agreement on? In a five-part series, Mon-Chaio and Andy look back over the long, and sometimes rambling, episodes of Th...

 Let's imagine that you are just taking on an engineering organization. Maybe it is new to you or maybe it is completely new. What should you do to set yourself up for success? What are some of the important, or critical, aspects to think through, write down, nail down, or get agreement on? In a five-part series, Mon-Chaio and Andy look back over the long, and sometimes rambling, episodes of T...

What is safe about psychological safety? Do you really want everyone to feel comfortable all the time? Research tells us that psychological safety is a key component of effective teams and organisations. This week Mon-Chaio and Andy dig into the whats and wherefores of psychological safety. They dive into how it is measured, how it fits together with other concepts researched, tell some stories of...

What has Andy been reading recently? Where is Mon-Chaio? In this quick vacationcast you'll find out the answer to both of those questions. Andy studied kendo for several years at the University of Washington and at the Highline Kendo Kai in Seattle under Marsten Sensei. He hasn't practiced for many years, but hopes to get his life setup so that he can get back to kendo at some point and is...

You are a hiring manager and your organization has given you the green light to hire more people. What do you do next? Many people might feel the answer is obvious but for a surprisingly large number of companies, their hiring processes actively impede them from building great teams. Andy and Mon-Chaio pull apart conventional hiring practices to separate the wheat from the chaff and provide tactic...

What is the right way to have dev and ops work together? Is that different for data science? We look into ways these different specialities can be organised to foster collaboration. Development and operations has a lot of literature from the DevOps movement that gives us guidance for how to structure teams but data science has less written about it. Still, we have found some articles that shed lig...

A new project comes down the pike and Engineering asks for more heads to ship said project. Is this a reasonable request or are there other tactics we can use to "do more with less"? Mon-Chaio and Andy explore this common situation from both sides and offer specific diagnostic techniques to move the business forward, whether that's with additional headcount or without. Opening music...

Can you measure developer productivity? Prompted by an article by McKinsey and already reacted to by many, we ask if McKinsey is telling us to measure something that is at all useful, how to think about the problem McKinsey raises, and what you, as a technical leader, can do to address that problem better than what McKinsey suggests. Opening quote from The Psychology of Computer Programming by Ger...

Mon-Chaio gives a rundown of leadership books he's read in the past few months and pulls out interesting nuggets from each selection. References: Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't by Simon Sinek The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fa...

From stodgy corporate boardrooms to glacial civil-service offices, fast-moving technical organizations have long thumbed their noses at bureaucracies in their quest for speed and innovation. In this episode, Mon-Chaio and Andy unearth the forgotten power of bureaucracies and discover how they are still surprisingly relevant and impactful for software companies today. Opening quote from "Struc...

Is your feedback counterproductive? Mon-Chaio and Andy discuss a thought provoking article that says we've been giving feedback wrong. They tease out some truths, some tactics, and some insights into what it means to give useful feedback. References : The Feedback Fallacy - https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy Cynefin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework Confirmation Bias...

Andy introduces you to a paper on socio technical systems and muses about how it connects to the early days of software development. This is our first try at a quick format for when one of us is away on vacation. Please, tell us what you think! A Socio-Technical Critique of Scientific Management: http://moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvol2/37TRASOC.pdf

In the final part of this three-part series on Culture, Mon-Chaio and Andy delve into the forces that promote as well as resist cultural change. They share one of their own failed cultural change initiatives and uncover what Egyptian pharaohs and Spanish fire walkers can teach us about creating long-lasting cultural change. Opening quote from "Rituals are important to human life — even when t...

In part two of this three-part series on Culture, Andy and Mon-Chaio wrangle with the question "Is there 'better culture' to aim for?" Along the way they delve into bad culture, focusing on values or on outcomes, differences between what people say and what people do, burnout, and pillars of a good tech culture. Opening quote from "A Strong Market Culture Drives Organization...

 In part one of this three-part series, Andy and Mon-Chaio attempt to provide a research-supported answer on whether culture is important for your tech organization. They also dig into the details of whether a company should hire for cultural fit. Opening quote from "A Review Paper on Organizational Culture and Organizational Performance". References: A Review Paper on Organizational Cul...

Goals. We all have them, but should we? Mon-Chaio and Andy examine the literature on goal setting and discuss how to set good, challenging goals. Opening quote from "Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey". References: Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey: https://doi.org/10.1037/0...

Andy and Mon-Chaio give some background on their professional experiences and talk about how the TLL podcast is unique and why that's a good thing.

Mon-Chaio and Andy explore the research on trust and how to translate that into successful tactics for building trust in technical organizations ... including situations when strong trust may not be necessary for high-performing teams. References  Harvard Buisness Review's trust articles - https://hbr.org/topic/subject/trustworthiness Indian Matchmaking on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/tit...

Andy and Mon-Chaio talk about the dreaded request for team performance metrics. Rather than simply agreeing to start measuring, we explore a different approach. Opening quote from "Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion" References Explore, Expand, Extract - https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/fast-slow-in-3x-explore-expand-extract-6d4c94a7539 Commandos, Infantry, Police - http...

We explore delegation: why to do it and how to do it. The discussion ranges widely between the approaches the Prussian military used to command its forces to the ideas of the situational leadership model. Opening quote from page 189 of the book "The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay. References The Art of Action - https://www.stephenbungay.com/Books.ink Briefing and Backbriefing - https:/...

In this episode, we explore the ideas from the book Teaming about how to organise to learn. Organising to learn takes framing to learn, psychological safety, learning from failure, and crossing boundaries. The opening quote is from chapter one of the book "Teaming" by Amy Edmonson. References: Google 20% time - https://builtin.com/software-engineering-perspectives/20-percent-time Praisew...

Andy and Mon-Chaio contemplate how often team boundaries should change, what impacts changing boundaries has, and some tactics for making boundary changes easier. References Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development Amy Edmundson, Teaming - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Teaming-Organizations-Innovate-Compete-Knowledge-ebook/dp/B007M...

In this inaugural episode of the Tactics for Technical Leadership (TTL) podcast, Mon-Chaio and Andy discuss the BART (Boundary, Authority, Role Task) framework for analysing group dynamics and apply it to a situation that Mon-Chaio encountered with two teams. Referenced materials: The BART System of Group and Organisational Analysis: https://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/projektDV/ht09/BART_Gre...