[2/3] The Engineering Executive's Primer (Category Management)

Continue. zero-post and first With a review of the book, I would like to talk about the following chapters.

5. Creating Useful Organizational Values In this chapter, the author talks about organizational values and how they affect the work of the company. He recalls his work at Uber and specifically the cultural principle of "Let builders builders." (People must be empowered to build things)“, which enhances the diversity of the technological landscape. Each of the engineers believed that this principle is that they can do what they want:) Read more about Uber in "Super Pumped" told. Further, the author talks about what problems organizational values solve, whether they should be common to all organizations or the engineering part should have some values. I like Villa's criteria for how to test how much value is articulated in a way that benefits:

• Reversible: It can be rewritten to have a different or opposite perspective without being nonsensical.
• Applicable: It can be used to navigate complex, real scenarios, particularly when making trade-offs.
• Honest: It accurately describes real behavior. Interestingly, I have seen a list of values in my life, each item of which did not pass by one or more of the above criteria.

He goes on to say, “Identify the opportunity, document potential options, involve stakeholders early to build buy-in, test before finalizing to avoid folks feeling trapped, and iterate until it’s useful.” And then separately you need to build changes in hiring, onboarding, ladder grades. And continue to highlight compliance with new values during work. Finally, the author gives a list of values that seem useful to him.

• Create capacity (rather than capture it).
• Default to vendors unless it’s our core competency.
• Follow existing patterns unless there’s a need for order-of-magnitude improvement.
• Optimize for the [whole, business unit, team].
• Approach conflict with curiosity.

6. Measuring Engineering Organizations The author begins this chapter with a list of measurement approaches in engineering organizations, and then he talks about his approach to measurements, about patterns and antipatterns. And to begin with, he divides the approaches into measurements for himself and measurements for staincholeres. In “measuring for yourself,” he talks about measurements for planning, execution, optimization, and inspiration. In terms of measurements for stakeholders, the author talks about measurements for the CEO and the board of directors, for the finance department, for strategically peers. (product, design, sales), for tactical peers. Next, the author proposes an algorithm for measurements

1. Some things are hard to measure, so only try to measure it if you really plan to consider it when making a decision. If it is not, then just try something simpler, like proxy metrics.
2. Part of the measurement is very simple, so there is a desire to make these measurements to build trust with stakeholders:) And here often the desire for measurements and the effort put into obtaining them are more important than the actual result:)
3. If possible, add one dimension at a time, because if you try to make too many measurement changes, you can screw up. Next, the author gives a list of anti-patterns for measurements.

• Focusing on measurement when the bigger issue is a lack of trust.
• Letting perfect be the enemy of good.
• Using optimization metrics to judge performance.
• Measuring individuals rather than teams.
• Worrying too much about measurements being misused.
• Deciding alone rather than in community Interestingly, this list overlaps well with the anti-patterns from the book "The Tyranny of Performance." ("The Tyrany of Metrics")Which I mean. told earlier

Continuation in the following posts.

#Engineering #Management #Leadership #Processes #SystemDesign #SystemThinking #SystemEngineering