Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Leadership

Journal: This Month I Learned (2023-April)

I learned that it's important to take breaks and practice self-care to avoid burnout. It's also important to communicate with colleagues and managers about workload and prioritize tasks accordingly. Finally, getting hands-on experience with different aspects of the business can be valuable for personal and professional growth. OKRs review The results of the OKR review should not directly impact performance appraisals. Key Results should be straightforward measurements of Objectives, not just a to-do list. They should also be related to daily work, rather than separate topics. There are two ways to review objectives: "Completion" or "Rating". The status should be balanced among objectives and used to adapt to current efforts. Member reassignment How to find a good fit between business and personnel growth: Salary costs increase year by year. It doesn't make sense to increase customer billing year by year. Burnout counter: Engagement I engage to work close

Think like a Engineering Manager

Off-boarding Members can leave the company for various reasons, and as a manager, it is important to take action. Hoping for the best is not a strategy. In the case of a low-performing member, I can kindly issue an official warning, set clear objectives for improvement, and re-evaluate the results. If there is a conflict between members, I need to be mindful and go beyond the situation to list our expectations with corresponding actions. Finally, if a member has a big chance to grow at another company, I can have an honest discussion with that member about the trade-offs. Balance at Work As an engineering manager, it is important to balance involvement in meetings and getting your hands dirty on some topics. The goal is to become a companion to teams. Here are my two actions to deal with the situation: Dedicate time for important-but-not-urgent tasks and prioritize them daily. Categorize work into four lines including management, project support, OKRs, and self-study. Management Conduc

Scrum eventually is also a tool to grow the team

Agile is a fit for our company business. We use Scrum practices as our Agile framework. Eventually, Scrum is just a framework that helps us work together to develop, deliver, and maintain our products. Moreover, it is also a tool to grow the teams. By practicing Scrum long enough, we will gain the great following values: Commitment Focus Openness Respect Courage --- [1]. https://agilemanifesto.org [2]. https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

Mindset at work

Fansipan mountain As a mentor, I always give to my new members the following practices as my advice for mindset at work. “A over B” means while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Solution   over Technology We should approach to solve the problems rather than depending on technologies. The technology limitation should not our excuse to reduce the quality of the feature. For example, we’re strong at React, but we are willing to learn a new framework Meteor due to customer needs. We are software engineers, we are good at problem-solving. Technologies are our toolbox. Contribution   over Complaint When we encounter and find pain-in-the-ass issues such as lacking documentation, old frameworks/libs, lacking testing, etc.. we try our best to resolve them! Refer to The Boy Scout Rule: “Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” Collaboration   over Following Sometimes you even need to consult customers to bring great customer value rathe

Fulfilling Your Contribution Needs

Human resource management motivation Managing human today is quite different from the industrial age which treats people as just "chickens". Rather than people now are very important to the success of an organization. People are an organization's special resource. They should be encouraged to grow to contribute their effort and creativeness to their beloved working environment because the contribution is one of their most needs in life. Training people: getting rid of the ineffective model and adopting the new one The ineffective model of training people: Hiring new people --> giving them a crash course once --> expecting them working effectively.  That somehow makes sense but you're about to expect a luck because you do not really spend your effort for mentoring them. If they can work effectively, well...lucky you! Otherwise, you will blame that these people are ineffective and you let them go and hire the new ones. What a waste of time! The new effe

Retrospective with Sailboat

Have you ever got bored with the Retrospective meeting? I have, sometime. Most of the times, this meeting just goes traditionally by answering three questions: "What good things have we done? What bad things have we done? And, what actions should we improve?" Ever and ever again! My team found a way to make it a little bit more exciting. The idea is that each member - not only our Scrum Master - will become a host. If a meeting is hosted by a memeber, the next meeting will be hold by another one. Yeah, I used "Sailboat" pattern in my turn. So, I just want to share with you guys how it was. I started the meeting by telling a short story that I hoped everyone in my team could recall the meaning behind of Retrospective meetings: There is a group of people trying pick up trash in a park. At the first look, the park seem not to have a lot of trash because they are spread out all over the place. However, these people continuously found trash when they sta