Chris Whitman

So true! In my opinion, every effort, whether it's new features or services, should include the creation of proper data and analytics to measure its effectiveness and adoption. The necessity of a feedback loop through telemetry and analytics cannot be overstated. It turns data into actionable insights, enabling iteration and refinement of the offerings. Without this, we risk repeating the same errors or just offering the wrong solutions. understanding the customers and having a constant feedback look is a must!

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It has been interesting to learn how large corporations keep innovative small companies (like mine) from becoming competition by following these legal developments: https://lnkd.in/g-YUtmxC It's great to be a part of an organization that is not having it.

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Back in my volunteer days at the San Jose Suicide and Crisis Hotline, I stumbled upon a peculiar realization: our emotions are often reflective mirrors of those we interact with. Fast forward to today's remote work era, this understanding has proved invaluable as an engineering manager. In a world where Zoom meetings replace in-person interactions, it's easy to feel disconnected from your team. But, remembering my hotline days, I've learned to check-in with my feelings during remote 1:1's, sensing the vibe from the other end. If I'm bored, they likely are too - time to shake things up. If I'm anxious, they could be feeling the same - let's address it. This "emotional telepathy", combined with genuine curiosity about my team, regular check-ins, and consistent career growth discussions, has enabled me to build trust and maintain cohesion, even from afar. Sometimes, the past holds the keys to our present challenges. Looking to navigate remote leadership? Feel free to drop a message. Let's connect, share, and grow together. #Leadership #RemoteWork #EmotionalIntelligence #EngineeringManagement ----------------------------------- Check out the full article at https://lnkd.in/gmUUHFWX

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Isn’t it funny that 60% of engineering managers see a shortage of qualified candidates while 56% plan to increase headcount? The math is not mathin’. 🧮 Maybe it’s time to rethink what makes a “good engineer”. Skills are evolving with AI and machine learning, and our criteria needs to evolve too. The “passion engineer” coding all night is rare now, and that’s okay — maybe even better — because we can introduce more diverse skill sets, experiences, and problem-solving. Let’s evaluate our talent definitions, invest in training, and embrace diverse paths of excellence. ✨ For more insights like these, check out Jellyfish's 2024 State of Engineering Management report: https://lnkd.in/eKAJ5jZy

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One of my favorite acronyms in #SoftwareEngineering is WTF - Where to Focus. When you have a small team you should focus as much energy as possible on the pieces that make your business competitive and buy everything else. I guarantee your cost estimate to justify building a tangential capability over buying it is missing a bunch of hidden cost factors.

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The Unexpected Slack Hack You Need: 🦝 We’ve all been there: a Slack thread spirals out of control, and before you know it, people are lost in endless back-and-forth and you have a thread 70 replies long, or worse, multiple threads 🫠. The fix? A simple 🦝 emoji. Slack’s unique "raccoon" concept encourages users to shift off-topic or overly detailed conversations, here’s how it works: 1️⃣ 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗹: When a thread goes from productive to chaotic or has more than a few back and forth replies, drop the 🦝 to signal it’s time to regroup. 2️⃣ 𝗠𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗶𝘃𝗲: The raccoon tells everyone it’s time to move from typing to talking—whether it’s a quick Zoom call or a team huddle. Live conversations resolve issues faster. 3️⃣ 𝗙𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿, 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: The raccoon keeps things respectful, but serves a real purpose—it gets the message across without adding tension. 4️⃣ 𝗘𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗔 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗺: Make it clear in your team’s culture that when the 🦝 appears, it’s time to shift gears and solve the issue more efficiently. How do you keep Slack chaos under control? Tell me in the comments. ⤵ ---- ♻️ Repost and share these tips for improving slack communication. ➕ Follow me (𝗔𝘀𝗵𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗩𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗪𝗲𝗹) for more insights on productivity, leadership, and career growth.

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8 Comments

Appreciate seeing that App Store review time has roughly halved since the summer (down to about 4hrs compared to 9hrs). I can't help but wonder why starting a review for Testflight external beta is still at the 8hr mark (though I certainly understand that those should be lower priority compared to production builds). I +1'd the Google Play IN_REVIEW status issue and recommend others do the same! On the green goblin [Android] side of things, I've personally experienced a lot of variance lately, resulting in some unexpectedly [days long] reviews. I also see that Google recommends waiting for production reviews while alpha reviews are in-progress, citing longer review times. My experience has been the opposite, where the synchronous reviews results in a MUCH longer review cycle. The numbers point to improvement, but there's still further progress to be made, both for timing and consistency of policy enforcement.

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"The core art of Operations Management is observing the messy, human chaos of business and applying order to it." The Operator's handbook is a great guide to the various operations disciplines like #businessoperations or #bizops, #revenueoperations or #revops, #financialops or #finops,#legalops, #marketingops, #peopleops and #productoperations / #productops that have emerged as a result of shift from hardware to software-based value creation (see my previous post too --> https://lnkd.in/gwNWwkNh?). Great introduction, though I find it lacking as it did not include factory operations, supply chain, store operations that rely far more on offline-online interfaces. For any operator out there, process, analytics, metrics, cadence, solutioning and execution are the key concepts to apply.

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If you think that the Trump assassination attempt somehow only affects Republicans, know that for some reason Bernie Sanders also cancelled his rally in Portland, ME for this Friday. The problem isn't that there aren't other candidates with better ideas--there are. The problem isn't that people are dumb and don't want a better future for the planet--I think they do. The best candidates are seldom the ones on the ballot. The higher you go in politics this is true: it is often the richest and oldest that are eligible for Presidency, and those with archaic ideas and that support the status quo, and those that serve for self gain. So once again, I'll be voting for the US Presidential candidate, whichever one is on the ballot whose ideas are more progressive. I will vote for the candidate not trying to topple government as we know it, or shake the hands of the Dictators whose hands snuff out the life of dissent. It was a Historic Meeting when Donald Trump shook the hands of Kim Jong Un, because he shook the hand of a despot that murders his own people for consuming the culture of other people, like the 30 teens North Korea recently executed for watching South Korean shows. Similarly, we must express our outrage at China's treatment of the Uyghur population. The Chinese government has detained hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Uyghurs in what they call "re-education camps." These camps are nothing short of modern-day concentration camps, where people are held without trial, subjected to political indoctrination, forced labor, and even torture. The world cannot stand idly by as an entire ethnic group is systematically oppressed and their culture erased. I get that some folks think we should just respect their Vote, but look, even Hitler and Putin were elected and that's just shit to think someone would vote for that, yet alone enough to normalize it. So this November, Let's Vote! Let's vote not to become America the Scared and Punished; lets not vote for camps; Lets not roll back the clocks of social progress when the hands of the Science clock will not be turned back by such rhetoric. No, we must work together to accomplish the impossible, if we want a future for our Grandchildren and their children on this planet.

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Want a preview of what I'm going to be talking about in my keynote for RubyConf? You can catch a glimpse of it here!

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While the corporate culture and return-to-office policies differ "markedly" between the three companies, the similar effects of the RTO mandates suggest that "the effects are driven by common underlying dynamics," wrote the authors of the study. "Our findings suggest that RTO mandates cost the company more than previously thought," said David Van Dijcke, a researcher at the University of Michigan who worked on the study. "These attrition rates aren't just something that can be managed away." Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina, said executives haven't provided much evidence that RTO mandates actually benefit their workforces. "The people sitting at the apex may not like the way they feel the organization is being run, but if they're not bringing data to that point of view, it's really hard to argue why people should be coming back to the workplace more frequently," Ployhart said. Senior employees, he said, are "the caretakers of a company's culture," and having to replace them can have negative effects on team morale and productivity. "By driving those employees away, they've actually enhanced and sped up the very thing they were trying to stop," Ployhart said. https://lnkd.in/gWntKQF2

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For the past couple of weeks, I've been revisiting the insightful book, “The Goal,” by Eliyahu Goldratt. This business novel on the “Theory of Constraints” was a recommended read during my MBA at UCLA a decade ago. The story follows Alex Rogo, a manager tasked with saving a failing manufacturing plant, who receives guidance from a physicist named Jonah through Socratic questioning. In this post, I’ll explore one concept from this book and share my thoughts on its relevance for a manager of managers. Read more at my Substack

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There's an oft-cited stat from Pendo that 80% of software features are rarely, if ever, used. While it's impossible to know the accuracy of that, it's not hard to believe. I've been part of multiple feature factories, where emphasis was put on new features to 'claim' rather than taking time to ensure we've actually solved the desired problem before moving onto the next. If you're a Product Manager/Leader in the Indy area, join us on August 14 for a conversation around best practices for measuring product success. We'll have food, drinks, and hopefully some great learnings! (Registration link in the comments)

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Interesting... Nir, Jan Leike isn't alone: his departure followed Ilya Sutskever’s recent departure as I suspect due to the very same reason. And they’re not the first nor the only ones - many people have been expressing deep concerns about the dangers of the AGI for a long time. E.g. Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari and others. I recognize Isaac Asimov as the brightest intellectual of the modern times. Many decades ago he predicted advancements that are happening now and yet to happen. It was for a very good reason that at the very early stage of Asimov’s career he introduced the 3 laws of the robotics. And in his last interview, although he was extremely fascinated with his predictions, he also expressed deep concerns that human societies wouldn’t be ready for the fast pace of these advancement (while he considered them inevitable). Are Leike or Sutskever pioneering this type of behavior? Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist invented a megaton hydrogen bomb and “since the late 1950s Sakharov had become concerned about the moral and political implications of his work.” I’m obviously not a prominent AI researcher, yet let me join the cohort of the concerned people. IMHO, the question isn’t if but when and how ("Terminator", "Matrix", Stephen King's "Trucks" or something else). And if you prefer to believe AI let’s ask ChatGPT “what are the dangers of AGI”. The first in the response's list doesn’t surprise me: “1. Existential Risk AGI could pose an existential threat to humanity if it becomes misaligned with human values and goals. If an AGI were to develop objectives that conflict with human well-being or survival, it could pursue those objectives in ways that are harmful or even catastrophic for humanity.” #AI #NotJustTechDiscussion

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Cut Down Your Platform Engineering Org By 50%. Your Business Will Be OK! If you are a large enough tech company, you have a bloated platform engineering team! A couple of decades ago, Joel Spolsky coined the term 'Architectural Astronauts'—engineers who create grandiose, abstract designs that often fail to address real-world problems. Unfortunately, this issue has only worsened, especially in platform engineering. One of my biggest career regrets? Not fighting hard enough against these platform architects. Forced top-down architectures could have been replaced by simple open-source frameworks. I remember it taking over a year to build a self-service API because of a top-down, inversion-of-control framework forced upon all engineering orgs. Read about what killed popular products like Digg, Orkut, NetScape etc.  You can trace it back to bad engineering thought leadership. The amount of platform engineering waste is staggering. Most large tech companies are a graveyard of abandoned platforms and frameworks. Most in-production frameworks have one tenant and are on the deprecation path. The engineering 'thought leaders' who build these systems got promoted and will still rationalize their decisions by passionately talking about edge cases that will never happen. Almost every tech stack begins with off-the-shelf standard frameworks and platforms, mostly open source. But no two businesses are the same. And companies often start building their own platform pieces. As these platform teams grow, they become out of touch with the actual needs of the business. Led by powerful, disconnected engineering leaders, these teams wield more power than they should. Their solution to an inadequate platform? Build a new one, rather than improving the existing one. Unfortunately most of your IP & patents are from these platform teams. Most of your top engineering brain power is working on these platform teams. You will be warned how you will lose the top talent when you question these investments. If you have a 100+ people platform engineering org, cut it down by 50%. Your business will be OK.

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On becoming a manager…for the first time...and the best first lesson as a manager. After leaving Apple to follow a Director I really liked working for, I got the chance to officially be a tech lead for the first time. We had a web team of three at the small public software company I was working for. It was the first time I had to really manage workflow and project intake and be responsible for technical design and execution of the team. We made some really good decisions like investing in a redesign of our relational database and application layer; integration of our marketing lead-gen system into Salesforce; and integrating our customer support system into the web front-end for managing customer tickets and issues. We introduced dev, staging, prod systems and some level of engineering rigor. At some point, we were going to add more humans to the team and I was seen as a reliable and trustworthy tech lead and sponsored to become the manager of the team by my Director. But, she didn’t just throw me into the deep end. And, it wasn’t like a BigTechCo, where there was a structured program for moving from tech lead to manager. She sent me to manager training. At manager training, I learned one super-useful thing to put into my toolkit. I don’t remember anything else from the session, but it was mostly boring “how not to be a terrible manager” type of stuff. But, there was one real nugget I picked up. It is a way to frame feedback into a coachable moment. Here is how it works: ✅ This is what happened. (factual) ⚡ This is the impact it had on the team/tech/business. (factual) ❓ Do you understand the impact? (empathy) 💡 What would you change next time? (ownership) I’m really grateful my director invested in that training for me. I ended up using that coaching conversation almost immediately with our first intern and have gone back to it many times since.

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Transitioning from IC to EM is incredibly difficult for many software engineers. I'm no exception to this - becoming an engineering manager after being an individual contributor was hard. This is especially true for EMs that still are expected to be delivering code. Finding the right balance is hard. You're used to your individual impact being what showcases your abilities. But your impact is now represented by your ability to empower your team on their deliverables. 👇Check the comments for the full video!👇 ---- 🎬 Check out Dev Leader on YouTube for multiple full-length videos weekly! 🗣️ Share with your network! #CareerChange #SoftwareEngineer #EngineeringManager

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Lesson learned tonight is that list helm releases itself is not enough you has to list those helm releases are stuck in uninstalling state. And you have to delete a secret to unblock these process. These MF cost me 3 hours.

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