Originally posted in CTOCraft. In my previous post, Stop scheduling meetings without the 3Hs and 5Ps, I detailed practical solutions to increase meeting quality and decrease costs. …

Poorly planned and facilitated meetings are one of the biggest annoyances I’ve had to deal with in my career (second only to indecisiveness). A lot has changed in terms of technology but the amount of “bad” meetings I’ve had to go through has stayed relatively the same. …

A primer on high performance There’s a lot of talk in the industry about building high-performing teams. Everyone who has come across Accelerate [1] and DORA [2] knows that “Elite teams are twice as likely to meet or exceed their organizational performance goal”. — Accelerate A successful engineering team achieves and exceeds organisational performance goals…

This article was originally published in CTO Craft. What does a manager do? “Organisations are living systems, being composed not just of capital goods and technology, but of people. […] Differently adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits and loyalties.” …

The first thing I want to know about a team is who they are as people first, software engineers, product managers, designers, QA/Es second. I do this synchronously, in 1:1s, and asynchronously, with User Manuals. What are User Manuals? A User Manual is a simple survey to be completed individually. It’s inspired by the…

This article was originally published in CTO Craft. In the previous post, I wrote about capturing user happiness in metric form with SLIs and SLOs, with the end goal of providing the optimal level of software reliability that maximizes user happiness. In this post, I’m writing how Error Budgets can…

This article was originally published in CTO Craft. Companies want to capture user happiness in metric form to provide the optimal level of reliability for their software that maximises user happiness. …

This article was originally published in CTOCraft. Recent learnings in my startup and a great book titled How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use have sparked my inspiration to write a BAD ADVICE guide on how to mess up Product, Design and Engineering. If you disapprove of self-help…

This story was originally published in the CTOCraft blog. “It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.” — Stephen Covey Outline · What is Feedback? · Why is Feedback Important? · What Does Good Feedback Look Like? ∘ Good directionality ∘ Good…