Newsletter #33rd: How managers can lead with visibility, mobile developer experience at Slack and more
Welcome to the 33rd edition of Effective Software Leads– a monthly newsletter on software engineering and leadership.
Welcome to 33rd edition of Software Leads, a monthly newsletter on software engineering and leadership. It curates articles for tech leaders, managers, and senior ICs.
As we raise a glass to the new year, thank you for being a part of software leads’ newsletter. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2023 for you and yours!”
Below are my top reads for last month.
How managers can lead with visibility
Managers' roles and responsibilities come in different forms and shapes. However, managers have one universal goal: getting better outcomes from the people they lead. To get better outcomes from a team you lead, you need to understand what is happening in that team and how that team is building what they're building, especially if you manage from 2 layers away and not close to the team's day-to-day activities. In this post, I wrote about how you can gain visibility into how your team is building what they're building on time and within budget.
Removing uncertainty: the tip of the iceberg
A stakeholder asked me: "Why would it take so long to build such a seemingly simple feature like this one?". As simple as it was, we needed to work on things stakeholders didn't know existed to enable that feature.
How can you get your project off the ground when you need to spend 90% of your time underwater building the supporting infrastructure? And how can you prevent the team from getting stuck or producing no visible work for a long time? This post was one of my best discoveries last month. It laid down an approach for removing uncertainty and making your work visible, especially when you're working on projects that seem little on the surface but monstrous underneath.
Virtual team building: How to build trust in a remote team beyond games and activities
The pandemic made most tech companies shift to remote work. If you're leading a remote team, you may have observed that building trust in remote teams is not a walk in the park. But trust can be a blanket word, and something we casually toss around without precision. This post shed a new perspective on two types of trust you should be looking to build and how to build them in remote teams.
They are:
Affective trust constitutes a form of trust based on emotional bonds and interpersonal relatedness.
Cognitive trust springs from reliability and competence.
When leaders struggle with collaboration
It’s not uncommon for talented leaders to find collaboration unnatural. After all, rugged individualism set them apart and propelled their careers. And for many, that same focus on distinguishing themselves later becomes their demise. [...] It’s essential to realize that at higher organizational altitudes, success is achieved through integrated efforts – Collaboration. Concrete steps to collaboration with your peers are outlined in this post you would find useful.
Recognition is not always about the public 'kudos' channel
One of the factors influencing employees' engagement is recognition. If an engineer does excellent work, would she be recognized? Most leaders have realized the importance of recognizing engineers doing great work. However, recognition goes beyond public kudos, and you must first understand how each team member wishes to be recognized for what they're doing. Additionally, recognition need not always be given from the top-down (i.e., from manager to reports) but should also happen between peers.
The most important characteristics of high-performance teams
Why do some teams perform better than others? What sets these teams apart from the rest? How can you build outstanding teams? This long post provides answers to these questions.
A 1-on1 document template you’ll actually use
One-on-one meetings are one of the most important “tools” to build out a trusting and productive relationship with your direct reports. There is no one strategy that works for everyone but having templates ready can make the process smoother. I hope there are things you can incorporate into your 1-on-1s from the template provided in this post.
Achieving clarity and focus as a leader
Leaders should build competency in four domains in the leadership model presented in this post.
Leading with Vision – focuses on strategy, innovation, and inspiring the team.
Leading with Drive – provides the team with clear direction and is focused on achieving excellence.
Leading to Deliver – strength lies in planning, follow-through, and accountability.
Leading through People – focuses on coaching and developing the team and creating win-win partnerships.
I hope you find something that inspires you in this post as well as helps you assess your competency level in the four areas.
Mobile developer experience at Slack
At scale, investing in developer experience is crucial to enable your team to deliver value faster. As you scale your product and teams, engineers will face cross-cutting challenges that cannot be pinned down to a specific product team. If you're working in a DX team or leading a DX team, you will find a lot of insights and learnings from this post.
James Samuel
Cheers
Illustration by Julia Kuptsova from Ouch!