Over the past several years, as I’ve been helping teams and organizations improve their ability to deliver software products that are desirable, viable, and feasible, I have been experimenting with a Behavior Framework that has proven to be rather effective. And I’d like to share it with you in hopes that you find it useful and that you provide me feedback on your experiences with it.
My plan is to write a series of blog posts all related to the behaviors framework. Some of them will be about a specific behavior. Some of them will be about tools or techniques that help teams express one or more of the behaviors. Some of them will be my own experiences. And some will be damn near complete fiction.
In this excerpt from Escape Velocity, we take a more in-depth look at Velocity and try to answer (at least in part) the question, “What Is Velocity”?
This article focuses on using Chain of Command as a means of reducing cyclomatic complexity in our code. Along the way, we also create better adherence to SRP.
I recently worked with a team on a fairly significant refactoring. I paired with different team members each day over a three day period as we moved code around, pushing responsibility into other classes, reducing complexity, and make the code more expressive. On the fourth day, I put together some notes on the things we saw and general guidelines for the team to keep in mind. Nothing herein is new to the community, but it might be new to you.
In the past few years, we at OnBelay have had the honor of working with companies who are looking to improve their engineering culture.
One key tool we use today is the Experiment Canvas. My partner, Diane Zajac, and I co-developed the canvas. It is based heavily on our experience with A3s. It is still a work in progress, but I want to share with you where we are to date. Please feel free to use it and give us feedback.
Dinner together as a family was a key part of how we raised our children and how we kept our family so tightly knit for years. No matter what you had to accomplish in a given day, you did your damnedest not to miss dinner. I often left the office, came home to share a meal, and headed back into the office.
There were no boundaries at the dinner table. There didn't need to be. We talked about everything.
A hat tip to Tyler Jennings for the title of this post. He and I were in a meeting some time ago, along with a lot of other interesting people from Groupon Engineering. We were sharing our thoughts on team leadership and the role of managers. There was talk about how decisions need to be made close to the work and how managers need to not just seek advice, but actually provide others the opportunity to make decisions.
I was recently contacted by a colleague looking for a bit of advice.
C: "We are thinking about merging two teams together and we're not sure how to message the change."
D: "What do you think will be your biggest challenges?"
C: "Well, for one, we're not sure how the funnel flow team will respond to being folded into the purchase page team."
Some time in mid-January, I was thinking about various organizational patterns and how companies run. I was thinking, in particular, about the idea of a "leadership team". I tweeted that leadership teams may be an indication of dysfunction.
I got a few different responses, all of which amounted to "please say more about this."
I think I saw Daniel Pink's TED Talk on "The Puzzle of Motivation" for the first time in 2011. I'd been reading some about leadership, management, and organizational psychology up to that point, but Pink's talk and his distillation of these complex concepts into a simple framework (Autonomy, Connection, and Excellence) inspired me to read more on the topics. Over the course of the next couple of years, I consumed a decent amount of material. You can view my Goodreads account to see what books I was reading. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to share all of the scientific articles and other sources I also consumed.
It is not only the things we reward that shape culture, but the things we allow. Perhaps the easiest way to shape a culture is to do nothing at all.
When a rockstar employee yells at, denigrates, or refuses to help teammates and you let it slide because the rockstar is valuable, you are shaping a culture. When a teammate tells a racist or sexist joke and you say nothing because nobody present is a member of the target group, you are shaping a culture. When an executive abuses power, when a coworker engages in gossip, when a team cuts corners to make deadlines and you decide it isn't your problem, you are shaping a culture.
We have an application internal to Groupon called the "Love Monster". It was written, in large part by Devin Breen. There are other contributors, but Devin is the one that made it happen. He didn't do it because it was on a roadmap or because it's part of our quarterly objectives. He did it because he and others wanted something like this to exist. So he willed it into existence.
In 5 Tips for Building Trust | Globoforce Blog, Darcy Jacobsen suggests the following steps for building trust within your organization:
I've worked for essentially two types of companies - those that have clearly defined job ladders and those that don't.
A clearly defined job ladder provides people a clear picture of what they need to accomplish and what skills they need to display in order to move into a new role. A clearly defined job ladder provides a baseline for performance appraisals. Everyone in the organization knows what is expected of people in each role. Are you displaying these attributes with a level of proficiency requisite for the role, or are you not? Job ladders make the expectations of progress and the opportunity for advancement clear and consistent.
About 15 years ago, I started a simple practice with my fellow co-workers and employees. Every so often, we'd meet to discuss stuff and things. Nothing too formal, just a touch-point to make sure we were staying connected. I called the sessions "touch-point meetings". Over time, I made adjustments to the format of the meeting as various structures proved more or less valuable.
