Weeknotes #16
The nine months of work for three weeks of focus one
Weeknotes
Longform ✍🏻
Tuesday’s planning marked the third week in a row that my team have been focused and collaborating on the same epic. It’s a significant milestone because it’s the first time in a long while they’ve had a sustained, shared focus, and significant for me personally as it heralds the first visible results of a lot of hidden work behind the scenes. At the 9-month mark of engineering management, I finally feel like I’ve achieved something meaningful.
When I joined them, one of the first things I heard was how painful the constant context switching had become. During the observation phase of my 30-60-90 plan, this surfaced again and again, not just in what people said but in the decisions I saw being made each day. The team knew it was a problem, but seemed to be stuck in a pattern that kept reinforcing it.
One of the core drivers was the classic ‘divide and conquer’ approach that can often be found lurking in teams that own multiple services. Folk become deep experts in one or two areas, write docs and runbooks, maybe organise the occasional knowledge share to bridge the context gap. But however well-intended, it often backfires and the team quickly becomes a collection of individuals working in parallel. Once you factor in incentives, it’s easy to understand why there’s often a reluctance to change how the work gets done: if you’re rewarded for personal delivery, you’ll keep optimising for it.
I touched on this in my recent “Reflections from 6 months…” post:
Unlearning old performance mindsets is hard. Shifting from individual incentives to shared accountability takes time and needs to be championed, recognised, and rewarded in calibrations. People will only believe this change is a positive for them if they see it reflected in the way their work is recognised.
We can’t expect ways of working to change if we don’t recognise and celebrate the shift
A lot of performance review processes in tech still incentivise individual work. Most of us have either been burnt or rewarded by a “promo project”, the opportunity to lead a workstream and prove to the calibration jury that we’re ready for the next level. It’s no wonder, then, that this type of system creates kingdom builders and technical debt. If visibility trumps quality it’ll inevitably filter down to the ways of working level, favouring short-term wins over consistent delivery.
So when it came to the share-back phase of my 90-day plan, it felt like a hard sell to suggest to the team that they were in part contributing to their own context switching - not out of negligence, but by continuing to optimise for individual ownership and visibility. A rational response to a skewed system.
At the start of this year, I promised to shift the team’s highest priority commitments from individual to shared goals, laddered appropriately across all levels to support shared growth and accountability. My first opportunity to formally recognise this shift was in recent mid-cycle calibrations and it’s encouraging to see this start to filter into our weekly planning.
What I love most about these past few weeks is that the change has happened sort of organically. That’s not to say I haven’t been championing focus (I’m a former Agile Coach, after all!), but the catalyst was an unexpected team absence. With fewer people around, the team decided that a handful of tickets centred on the same thing would be more than enough to be getting on with.
Anecdotally, feedback in 1:1s suggests this shift has been received broadly positively, with the reduction in context switching noticeable.
Another reduction it’s inadvertently led to is our team’s contribution to the weekly Tribe “Show & Tell” call. Not long ago we would share a varied list, whereas recently it’s just been one short and sweet update, something that has intrigued a couple of the other teams still caught in the “divide and conquer” cycle.
On a recent course I attended, someone described the role of a manager is to:
“Create positive and sustainable change in the performance of the organisation”.
It’s easy to make change for change’s sake. Real progress comes from sticking with something long enough to make it better.
Pretzels 🥨
Moving up to 2nd place in the work F1 Fantasy League
Shifting language to a “weekly focus”, rather than a “sprint goal”
Another migration project appears
Tagging people in documents is not collaboration
“Assert with permission”
When a training course doesn’t teach you anything new, but reaffirms what you new already
“For a horrible moment, I thought you were going to tell me to lean in”
Being a manager is like “being a gardener” 💡
“I don’t always want a shit sandwich, sometimes I just want the bread”
A fun Slack thread on the best opening tracks on a debut album
Listening to
Reading
Eating
