Decoding Leadership

In today's episode, we dive into the fascinating world of team health assessments with Brent Miller. Brent, who held the title of organizational architect and worked as a principal engineer at New Relic, shares insights on conducting team health self-assessments and their impact on organizational improvements. We explore the concept of team reviews, the challenges faced during initial implementations, and how self-assessments revealed critical patterns such as stakeholder misalignment and workload issues. Brent also discusses the value of an annual organizational retrospective, the role of leadership buy-in, and the potential for smaller, more frequent check-ins. This episode is a must-watch for anyone interested in organizational observability and leadership experiments.

In this episode of Decoding Leadership, host Jade interviews Jim Gochee, a seasoned expert in the software industry with a rich career spanning roles from engineer to CEO. They cover the controversial decision to ban the word 'prioritization' at Blameless, and go into some detail about how to get people to work well across departments. They discuss anti-patterns and common ruts in product and engineering interactions, the significance of clear goal-setting to unify teams, and the impact of understanding different roles within a company. Finally, Jim offers advice on leadership transitions, the role of curiosity and growth mindset in career progression, and the value of coaching and mentorship.

Jim and I sit down and talk about his successful engagement at New Relic, where he brought modern autonomous team approaches the company.

Jim shares how he has been doing it differently over the last few years, using an approach called Fluid Scaling Technology (FaST). We explore some parts of implementing FaST that I don’t believe are discussed anywhere else, such as how management works differently in an environment using FaST. And Jim shares how his recent engagement as a VP of Engineering has shaped his recent leadership work.

In this episode, we talk with Jayanthan Bhattatharapad. Jay has a very interesting way of introducing himself to his teams and organization, and I asked him to demo it to us. In doing so, he shares not only this interesting practice, but lots of tidbits about how he sees leadership. We had a fascinating discussion, can't wait to share it with you!

* Jay's career journey from consulting at ThoughtWorks to Expedia, to his recent role at Cisco.

* The importance of mental health and psychological safety in teams.

* Why Extreme Programming is harder (and better) than Scrum.

* The impact of lean principles on software development and tackling waste.

* The influence of cultural differences on communication and leadership.

Join us as we welcome Margaret Le, VP of Engineering at Facet, to discuss her experience from software engineering leadership roles at New Relic, Heroku, Slack, and Facet. We dive deep into the engineering leader's role in technical direction, and building teams and culture. Margaret shares her insights on defining and executing technical vision. She also explains how to cultivate a thriving work environment by clearly defining core values. She talks about the value of psychological safety, transparency, and vulnerability. 

In this episode, we delve into the concept of task forces and their crucial role in addressing organizational challenges. Discover when and how to employ task forces effectively, and learn from real-life examples, including a case at New Relic to rapidly deliver a complex feature in six weeks, and another involving a complex merger that spanned every department. I share actionable tips on how to set up a successful task force, including the importance of a solid kickoff meeting, selecting the right team members, and how to leverage the power of other leaders. 

Upscale was a large scale agile transformation at a 50 team software company. Brent and I were on the leadership team. The aim of Upscale was to address the gridlock problem with cross-team projects. Jade brought in James Shore, author of The Art of Agile Development, and he led us through a massive amount of change. Upscale was extremely successful, but there were missteps and challenges. We retrospect on Upscale, and talk through cross-team dependencies, and especially into the massive self-selection event, where most of the people in engineering got to choose which team they wanted to be a part of. The episode covers a lot of topics in organizational design, team autonomy, and change management.

Katie Wilde is an accomplished leader from Snyk, Ambassador Labs, and Buffer. She shares how she learned to be an effective director (and how challenging the transition was), and shares tons of insights into why it's hard to build a culture of reliability in engineering organizations. And she shares a bunch of wonderful approaches to make reliability fun and desirable. This episode was a delight, and I learned a bunch from it.

We often don't prioritize the tiny things that make exceptional products. I share a practice we adopted recently that helps us ship lots of little things every Thursday.

Ben is an experienced talent acquisition leader. We discussed how leaders can work effectively with recruiting, how he coaches recruiters to work better with their stakeholders, how to stand out in the current job market, and what he's learned about leadership himself. He also gives the controversial advice to not jump to hiring a recruiter!

I loved this conversation with Alex Kroman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at LivePerson. We dive into the topic of how to craft great leadership teams, balancing vision with execution, overcoming the hub-and-spoke management model, leveraging diverse skill sets, and improving decision-making quality. Alex is someone I've learned a great deal from, and I invite you to do the same in this podcast!

What can we learn from Paul Graham's "founder mode"? Mostly that it describes a poor way of thinking about delegation. It's not just for founders, and it can be dangerous for founders. But it's a useful tool to have in every leader's toolkit.

I interviewed the founders of Reclaim.ai, a successful startup that was recently acquired by Dropbox. Learn the unusual approaches they took to build a radically customer focused company. We cover how they gave up planning, selected leaders with unusual backgrounds, and kept their technology simple. And they share some of the decisions they made that helped them iterate on their approach and build a product I use every day.

We delve into the concept of "piles", and why it can be a useful tool for seeing how to optimize flow.

We cover a simple process change that is the most impactful way I've seen to prioritize reliability work. It's a rule called the "Don't Repeat Incidents" rule. In this short episode, we cover how we developed this rule, and why it made such a difference.

We discuss the inevitable challenge of being the bottleneck and how to get yourself out of this situation, mostly by growing and training your team. Learn approaches such as

1. Setting up indicators to preserve focus,
2. Using the concept of a leadership ladder to uplevel and evaluate your team, and
3. Using completed staff work to provide a standard for management work.

I also share

1. Practical advice for delegation,
2. How to use tenants to shape your organizations thinking, and
3. How to use the "gospel of I intend to" to improve coordination and allow your team to own more.

These are all important techniques for creating teams that can operate more autonomously!

One of the most important concepts in developing a strong organization is "organizational work". I describe the concept, how you can use it to drive lasting improvements in your organization, and how you can use it to build strong, collaborative leadership teams.

Let's talk about macho and bro-ish leadership culture! Macho cultures often exhibit aggressive and sometimes sexist behavior. While risk-taking and aggressive behavior isn't uniformly bad, macho culture can result in groupthink and result in poor decision-making. And it can drive away talent. We explore why these cultures emerge, often due to stereotyped views of leadership, and share techniques for navigating them. 

We discuss two related topics: fan out work and managing bottleneck teams. We first delve into fan out work, its causes, examples, and some of the problems it causes. We discuss a couple of approaches to reduce the impact of fan out work, such as having teams complete their own fan out work, and setting limits on such projects. 

We then discuss bottleneck teams. Every organization has teams that suffer as they support the most critical aspects of the business. We discuss common issues like stakeholder bullying. And we offer some solutions such as adopting self-service models, adding rotation roles, and redefining the responsibilities of the team. 

The format for this episode is an experiment -- I'm not interviewing anyone else!

John Hyland is an expert on making early career engineers successful. They led up the Ignite program at New Relic, which was an incredibly innovative program that was so good they expanded it to more senior levels. They go into some detail about how they set up and adapted the program. They also give lots of advice on hiring for both early career and later career engineers. 

After that, we did a retrospective on deconstructing a Ruby monolith at New Relic. It was a large, complicated project, and some parts of it didn't go as well as we expected. We dug into what we could learn from that that applies to all large, complex software projects. 

Finally, John brings up the Preventable Problems Paradox, and we discuss how to incentivize better behavior at companies besides just firefighting.