Don Commitments trade slower velocity for higher predictability. Is that what you really want?

commit based approaches trade slower velocity for higher predictability.

Mostly that it describes a poor way of thinking about delegation.

In this episode, we delve into the concept of task forces and their crucial role in addressing organizational challenges.

Can this ownership exercise improve how you work with others? | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Learn a handy exercise you can use to define boundaries between roles (and teams)

It should be a valid option to identify that one role owns an area of responsibility, but delegates that responsibility to the other role.

Use these tips to improve your executive presence | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Thirteen tips for improving your executive presence.

A trick I learned in an executive presence class is to focus on connecting with your audience. They taught me to look around the audience, and look at a different person as I make each statement. To my surprise, that eliminated all my verbal tics!

How to not screw up your product strategy | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership An overview of common mistakes people make while developing a product strategy, tips for creating a successful strategy, and how to communicate and execute on a product strategy.

I think one of the arts of implementing a strategy is knowing when to be fluid and adapt to incoming information and when to stay the course.

Completed staff work | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Describes complete staff work, a management technique that improves local autonomy, prevents going back and forth, and carves out greater responsibilities for yourself.

That back and forth may indicate that I haven't thought about things completely enough. Usually, the problem is that I haven't considered the bigger picture: how a particular change would affect the rest of the company.

Alex is someone I've learned a great deal from, and I invite you to do the same in this podcast!

Adding innovation labs | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Covers advice for setting up innovation labs in companies, pointing out a lot of the dangers and opportunities.

Labs: Think of yourself as the team that dynamites the way through the mountains, not lays the roads.

Coordinate your interviews with assertion-based interview plans | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Template and approach you can use to dramatically improve your interviewing results.

Before you start the interview, copy and paste the questions you're asking to search for bias in the questions you're asking. I often find I'm gender coding in a way that might exclude women -- for example, in a recent interview I used two masculine-coded words: "active" and "force". Usually remo...

Everyone lies to leaders | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Power can delude those of us that rise to leadership. Our environment starts to lie to us, and we start getting bad information. Describes how this happens and how to combat it.

Many people fetishize straight communication and feedback but don't understand what it takes to actually build a culture where it is safe (for everyone) to do that.

Tiny Thursdays | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership How to prioritize lots of small things FTW

The most valuable part of the definition of Tiny is this: "you can deliver it by the end of the day". One danger of Tiny Thursdays is that work can bleed into the next day or take several days longer. "Tiny == Today"!

Molly also shares her (provative, deliberate, rare!) approach to organizational design, executive team dynamics, and her experience giving a TED Talk on the topic of cliff jumping versus ladder climbing with your career.

Product management resources | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership I share some resources for product managers.

You can often find others to form a local group of people to meet up with.

Use holiday focus days to increase company focus and honor your team Describes a novel approach to company holidays which improves company focus, and makes it easier for people to take vacation on less common holidays.

I can't emphasize enough how meaningful this can be for people from other backgrounds -- their entire work experience has been workplaces ignoring their needs. When you make it easy for them to take their important holidays, that is very significant!

She's probably the best in the world at these topics, so learn from her perspective!

I’ve found that frustrating in the past. One hack I have sometimes found useful is to pretend there are multiple projects, and have the first project be more exploratory. You can estimate when that part will be done, and then he output of that project is the plan for future projects.

Should QA Exist

Should QA Exist

#HackerNews

https://www.rubick.com/should-qa-exist/

A detailed look at FaST agile -- a practice well worth your time | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership An introduction to FaST, describing how it works and what the tradeoffs of adopting it are

Moving teams is an expected, low-effort change. So what this means is that during the Collective meetings, there is a pattern of people recreating their teams, but the composition tends to not change as much as you might imagine.

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

Uplevel your managers with Mini-M support groups | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. I describe the practice.

In management, the concepts are simple and the execution is not.

Coordinate your interviews with assertion-based interview plans | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Template and approach you can use to dramatically improve your interviewing results.

The main problem is that there is no coordination.

Make your team miserable with one of these popular project-management anti-patterns | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Three anti-patterns are ubiquitous: task treadmill, million-meeting agile, and Gantt-aholic project management. Describes them and links to better alternatives.

They don't think about what can go wrong. They don't plan for learning. They don't think through the contours of the project.

We cover a simple process change that is the most impactful way I've seen to prioritize reliability work.

Reducing dependencies | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership At a certain size, organizational dependencies will kill you. Here

Dependencies are one of the main decelerants for your org -- make someone responsible for taking care of the org structure.

How security, reliability, and design teams can get other teams to do work for them -- the Objective Expert Model | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership Security, reliability, and design teams can use the objective expert model to get other teams to do work for them, in a scalable way that encourages good relationships with other teams.

The report transferred the responsibility for reliability to the teams that could do something about it. The reliability team then became the team that helped teams improve.

Engineering manager vs. tech lead -- which is better? | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership This post outlines the various ways people break up the leadership roles on engineering teams: engineering manager, tech lead, and single-threaded owner. It also outlines how some responsibilities are broken up between engineering leader and other functions.

Generally, a Product Owner will not do the job as well.

How to not screw up your product strategy | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership An overview of common mistakes people make while developing a product strategy, tips for creating a successful strategy, and how to communicate and execute on a product strategy.

If you and your peers aren't connected with customers, your company will eventually fail.

Macho leadership and bro culture | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership We explore macho leadership and bro culture, how to identify and respond to them, the risks they pose, and techniques for navigating these environments.

They come from a place where the individual is supposed to be tough, not where the environment is supposed to make it safe for people to be contrarian.

Make changes that people will embrace | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership How managers can make changes that people will embrace.

A diagnosis is the issue that is at the heart of the problem. This is the step most managers skip, and it's the most important step.