2017 year in review
I love this time of the year, it is my opportunity to look back and reflect on 2017. Last year I’ve shared my 2017 goals, in this post I want to review 2017 and share the 2018 goals.
Thank you
First, I want to thank everyone who was part of my year. Thank you to everyone — my family, friends, enemies, mentors, coworkers, peers — everyone. While life is largely a single player game, I know that I am standing on the shoulders of giants. I owe everything to those who have helped me make it this far. Thank you.
Main insights that worth sharing
2017 was a great year for me. I’ve accomplished a lot both in the work and also in my personal life. I feel that I’ve grown and really improved.
- Top down vs. bottom up — Top down approach is better than bottom up, it allows you to focus on the problem space rather than on the existing and known solutions.
- Visualization leads to progress — Don’t spend too much time throwing words in the air. They don’t stick. Write them down, fetch real data and sketch your ideas. Looking at them will lead to actual actions.
- Creating correlation between technical stuff to business goals — It is hard to explain complex technical things to those who are not familiar with them. In order to provide clarity, you need to simplify the technicalities and create correlation between them and what others understand, like user impact, product or business KPI’s, etc.
- Shut up and let others shine — Learn as much as you can and create a vision for yourself and your surroundings. Then share the standard, the practices and the state of mind, always walk the talk, repeat yourself and then shut up. Let others embrace it and act by themselves.
2017 -> 2018
I had some ambitious goals for 2017, now it is perfect time to review them and create new ones for 2018.
Writing
I had a goal of writing a post every month, 12 in total. However, I managed to write only 8.
My favorite top 3 posts are:
- Active Learner — How developers keep learning —This post was written after I gave a talk in the annual Geektime conference about this topic. This post is a summary of the talk and it includes all the key points, methods and tools that can help one learn and grow. Writing this post allowed me to articulate my thoughts and finally put them in writing.
- Fake door, the MVP before the MVP— This post describes a practice that I strongly believe in, MVP should be the smallest possible test to validate your hypothesis. Sometimes we forget that our hypothesis might contain sub hypothesizes that should be validating before we try to validate the entire package. A fake door allows us to validate in no time if the user has any interest or intent in our upcoming feature.
- Scrum? Kanban? It doesn’t really matter —Working 9 years in an Agile environment has taught me a lot. But the most important insight that I’ve realized was to understand the reason behind the principle and practices (planning together, continuous improvement, transparency, etc.) and let yourself adopt the method and practices in a way that works for you. Don’t stick to the books, stick to the principles.
2018 goal: I’ve written 10 posts about leadership, management, product development and also about technical topics.
In 2018, I want to complete the Localization series that I’ve started. I want to write more about my leadership and management style and experience. Last but not least, I want to increase the amount of technical posts. For that I need to find more time to practice coding outside of my confront zone. I need to learn a new language, improve my DevOps, automation and cloud skills.
That leads me to the second part:
Growing my technological stack and experience
2018 goal: I’ve learned a new programming language.
2018 goal: I master AWS cloud ecosystem and have improved my DevOps and automation skills.
In this year I’ve made several career jumps, I came back to management and returned to a team leader position. I’ve started to lead a team and in the last couple of months I’ve received responsibility over another team, so now I’m leading two great teams.
People are the most important part of my day. I think about them all the time, are they happy? How can I help them? How can I create growth opportunities for them? Besides that, there is also that managing part that, as you know, is pretty time consuming. Nonetheless I still find time to remain hands on, code, contribute and develop our product. There is no way that I’ll stop coding. However, I didn’t push myself enough out of my comfort zone. I need to learn new languages, new frameworks and new tools. I’ve contributed only once to an open source project and didn’t learn a new language.
In 2018 I want to put extra focus on developing new technical skills and increase my contribution in open source projects. I’ll need to create for myself more free time. Since there are still only 24 hours in a day, I’ll need to invest less time in other things. Like reading, which I always find time for :)
Reading
2018 goal: I’ve read 10 books about the lives of incredible people in different industries (business, sports, politics, etc.)
I love to read. This is my number one source for knowledge. I love blogs, articles and books. I’ve kept my record and I’m still the top 1% reader in the pocket community. Pocket helps me to read all the online stuff that I encounter along the day. Sometimes I read it in the same day, and sometimes weeks later. Either way, I know that everything is there.
Having said that, my favorite way of reading is books. Physical books, I love when I first hold a new book in my hands, open it and start reading. Kindle is just not the same.
In 2017 I’ve read 15 books! That’s a lot! Most of them are pretty big books, 300 pages and more (as always, you can find the full reading list at the bottom of this post).
As much as I love reading, I want to create more time for other things, like learning new technologies. I can definitely decrease the amount of time I spend reading and still be able to read quit a lot. So for next year, 10 books will be just fine :)
Extending my horizon
2018 goal: I’ve met people who are experienced in sales, marketing, startup funding and investments and learned about their challenges and experiences.
In 2017 I’ve put a lot of my focus in creating deep understanding in the areas of product development, team building, company culture and leadership. I’m very attracted to these topics, I’ll keep investing in creating more depth, knowledge and skills around them.
However, I also want to get familiar with new areas, which I don’t really know. Startup investments, funding, sales, marketing and strategies for running a company. All these topics seem very interesting to me. I want to have at least basic understanding of them. I plan to meet many people with expertise and knowledge in these areas and learn from their experience. And of course, read about it.
Public speaking
2018 goal: I’ve spoken 3 times in a local conference and at least once in an international one.
In 2016 I’ve spoken in small local meetups. In 2017 I wanted to have at least 4 public appearances both in meetups and conferences. So, I have spoken in 2 major Israeli conference (Geektime, Agile Israel). In 2018 I wish to keeping presenting in meetups and local conferences, but also I wish to make a leap forward and give a talk at at least one international conference.
Mentorship
2018 goal: I’ve successfully mentored other managers by helping them create the culture and standard of continuous improvement.
I feel that I made huge progress in this area comparing to last year. I mentored my team who are incredible and super talented people. I have a vision in my mind and I try to create the culture that will lead to the standard of ownership, sharing, challenging the status quo and continuous improvement. I didn’t succeed by my own, I give full credit to my team who constantly challenge me and let us grow and evolve together.
One of the hardest things that I’ve practiced, in order to achieve this standard was to shut up. Let the people around me understand the problem and reach to a solution by themselves using the culture and the mindset that we’ve created together. I still have a long way to go, but I definitely feel that I’m on the right track. In this year I want to mentor not only my teams, but also friends and colleagues, who are also managers in different companies and startups. I want to help them create the culture and the continuous improvement standard.
Sports
2018 goal: I’ve ran half a marathon.
By the beginning of the year my knee has finally healed. I returned to long distance running and few months ago I’ve participated in a 15km race. In this year I want to take myself further and hit the half marathon goal. I also want to create a routine around my gym excises and regularly playing tennis.
So my 2018 goals are around sports, reading, writing, extending my horizon, mentorship, public speaking and growing my technological stack and experience.
Happy new year everyone, may you achieve all your goals and dreams! May this year hold new beginnings and opportunities for you and me.
2017 Reading list
I’ll start with the top 3 books I’ve read in this year.
#1. Made in America — Sam Walton
Sam Walton is the creator of Walmart and this is his autobiography. He shares his personal story. How he started with nothing, how he opened his first small store, his creative ways to attract customers and the evolution to the giant Wallmart company. This is a really inspiring book and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in entrepreneurship and startups.
#2. Good to Great — Jim Collins
This is a must read for everyone who cares about creating great culture and driving your organization towards success. In this book Jim Collins covers over 200 companies which hit rock bottom and managed to rise and shine again. His team conducted a huge research to identify the key elements that separate the good companies from the really great ones.
#3. Relentless. From to Great to Unstoppable — Tim S. Grover
This the story of the legendary NBA coach Tim Grover, who trained the best players in the game (Michel Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and dozens more). He shares his training philosophy and how he develops the “killer instinct” in his players to make them truly great. This is also a very inspiring book that helped me to go through some tough times and find my inner strength to keep going and eventually “win”.
And here are the rest:
