-
From HR to People Ops: When and Why To Start a People Team - by Courtney Seiter at Buffer. Covers when to start a People team, and what to consider: team size and/or growth rate, start before you need one, and your reasons. Four why's to start a team: to change the world, increase diversity, succeed, and allow your teammates to succeed.
-
How HR Can Become Agile (and Why It Needs To) - by Jeff Gothelf. Takeaway: "In an agile organization, HR needs to provide the same services it’s always provided — hiring, professional development, performance management — but in ways that are responsive to the ongoing changes in the culture and work style of the organization."
It’s hard to get these right. Just b/c they work for one org doesn’t mean they’ll work for yours.
-
On Being A Senior Engineer - by John Allspaw. Focusing on attributing "Senior" to "Mature". Covers aspects of being social. Mature engineers are at least aware of their ego, able to take into account the feelings and egos of their fellow engineers, and work through them all to achieve great things. This tends to make them engineers that other engineers want to work with.
-
Open Source Culture - by Camille Fournier. A post on Rent the Runway's engineering ladder, by the company's now-former CTO.
-
Programmer Competency Matrix - by Starling Software. Great for tech skills, but would need substantial work to capture what it means to be a well-rounded dev ("client focus," "product ownership," etc). We like it for what it is ("technical only"). You'd need to add the other sections.
-
Sharing Our Engineering Ladder - by Camille Fournier. Rent the Runway's famous engineering ladder, in spreadsheet and text/doc formats.
-
Technical Assessment Rubric - by Kate Heddleston. Takeaway: Different people have different trajectories. Tailor goals to target weaknesses in a category (confidence, communication, code quality, etc.).
-
Thoughts on the Technical Track - by Dan McKinley. Thoughts on how the different ways developers become technical managers, including randomly and ad hoc. "I don't think that proceeding with the assumption that leaders will just naturally emerge produces the best results."
-
Truth and Consequences of the Technical Track - by Camille Fournier. Takeaway: "I think the idealistic goal of management is to help teams live up to their talent potential. The realistic experience of management is often an abstraction layer between upstream and downstream, to help flow information, each layer helping to make a finer-grained set of decisions and adjustments to keep the overall company moving in the right direction."
-
How to Set Team Goals: Notes from a Conversation with Joe Goldberg and his Colleague, David Wolpa.
- Deciding on a goal: Why do people choose to join your org/team?; What goals has the team really rallied around in the past? Why?
- Look at "paired metrics" from High Output Management, e.g. output + quality-measuring outcomes ($, billable hours), not inputs (utilization, "time spent on tickets")
- People should have role in determining the goal and setting the target (which should be stretch but be realistic)
- To what degree is achieving the goal directly under team's control?
- Communicating a goal: Explain why goal is important to business, esp. when there's a disconnect from day-to-day. Need to do that repeatedly throughout the goal-measurement period. Naming/ritual gets people bought into it (e.g. fundraising thermometer)
-
Lightweight, Continuous Goal-Setting - notes by Joe Goldberg. Takeaway: Set, evaluate and adjust goals on a regular basis. This doc contains goal-setting objectives, steps, tips, and a quarterly email template.
“We see things not as they are but as we are.” Giving reviews is a place where bias lurks. Understand the cognitive bias cheatsheet and mental models list and you’ll at least acknowledge that we’re all biased.
-
360-Degree Feedback - Wikipedia entry on the process for collecting feedback from a person's reports, peers, supervisors and self.
-
Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet, Simplified - by Buster Benson. Takeaway: The four condundrums that lead to biases are too much information, not enough meaning, not enough time and resources, and not enough memory.
-
Decisions: What Makes Someone Have “Impact” Anyway? - by Camille Fournier. Takeaway: Expect people to make impact within the scope of the level they are operating at, so talk about impact and scope almost interchangeably. No matter what level: Good decisions → Trust → More responsibility → Impact.
-
Employee Reviews – Tips to Use Them as Motivation - by kate{mats}. Takeaway: keep them more positive than negative; attach constructive suggestions to negative points; ensure feedback is accurate and continuous; set clear expectations and guidance on how to achieve different ratings; round up when in doubt, end positively.
-
How to Be a Better Manager by Remembering 5 Simple Phrases - by Lighthouse. Takeaway: They are, “...that sounds important to you, let me write that down” (helps you keep your promises, and is a signal that you value what they said); "...what can we each do by next time to make progress on this?”; “Yes and...”; "...tell me about the last time that happened"; "...together...”
-
Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful - by Gabriel Weinberg. A comprehensive list of mental models to make you aware of biases and assumptions.
-
A Note on Feedback - by Andrew Spittle. Takeaway: How to use the 3-2-1-Oh performance feedback chat, "a mix of a team member writing a self-assessment and a team lead writing a review. The conversation centers around answers to these bullet points: What are 3 things you’ve done well? What are 2 areas or skills you’d like to develop? What’s one way your team lead or Automattic itself can support you? And, oh, can you write a sentence or two about how you see your career developing?"
-
Scaling Culture with Feedback - by Chris Savage. Takeway: Ask specific questions to see if people are living out your values.
-
Three Axioms Engineering Managers should use for Meaningful Performance Reviews - by Oren Ellenbogen. Takeway: Before giving perf reviews think about how the employee can work anywhere, what they're great at, improvement areas, how to help them grow, books/blog posts to recommend, and what else the company can offer to help them grow.
- Running a Manager Feedback Cycle - by Cate Huston. Provides a structured, transparent process for getting feedback as a manager. "It’s hard to get feedback as a manager, the hope was that people would be more candid if they 1) submitted feedback anonymously 2) to someone else. Because we tend to amplify negative feedback, there was a benefit to having someone else go through it, find trends, and repackage it for the recipient."