Category: Life

Qualities of introverts

Or: When extroverts don’t even recognize introverts. And how recognition helps with perception.

Recently, someone approached me with a statement: I’ve noticed that our best product managers tend to exhibit the traits of extroverts. I don’t think that one has to be an extrovert to be successful […]

Merely reading that, I almost exploded. After a few dasy of thinking, my response was this:

I disagree. This is the same as saying there are no women in tech simply because you are not female or don’t have a female in your team.

And I disagree again. There is at least one very extrovert person who championed an introverted person in your team towards well-recognized success (and that’s not the only example).

And yes, here’s where I agree. It’s difficult to recognize introverts. They are there when it’s quiet, showing up every day, building teams, and services that succeed. (Stereotypical) extroverts might feel more comfortable to fight fires. I wrote “The showman” about 1.5 years ago, which is slightly related to the reasoning you started.

I don’t think our company is doing a bad job compared to other companies, but we could handle “stereotypical introvert” better by setting a higher bar. A lot starts with recognition:

  • You get recognized by refactoring an API flawlessly, but you don’t get recognized to not even need that.
  • You get recognized to reduce your AWS bill by 10k, but you don’t get recognized to have chosen an economic infrastructure from day one.
  • You get recognized for a heroic effort of huge changes to bring security compliance to your services, but you don’t get recognized when it was just a little tweak to make that change.
  • You get recognized for excellent customer support, but you don’t get recognized to write clear UIs that don’t even need that type of support.
  • (The list goes on forever.)

My suggestion is to start changing who and what you recognize. Start today. Do this for a few months. You’ll see magic happening, at least within your area of influence.

And no, that doesn’t mean we should all be introverts. Same as we don’t want necessarily want a female-only organization. It’s all about individuals, recognizing their respective strengths, striving for diversity and embracing the resulting benefit, and giving everyone a fair share at the table instead of only to the loudest voice or tallest human.

Please, please do yourself a favor and look around. You’ll be amazed by what you find that will invalidate what you said.

Operations Teams vs. Engineering Teams

Or: How to use incentives to stop constant escalations

There are many differences between a team focused on operations and a team with an engineering approach. I could go on for hours (or likely, for days) with a rant. But let’s narrow it down to a few key aspects.

Effective vs. Efficient

Operations teams are highly efficient. They get a support ticket, they jump on it, they fix it, the declare success. They have KPIs on how quickly they solve tickets, how many tickets they solve. They have leader boards on identifying the hero of the week. Management supports this further by promoting the fastest. This is an incentive to beat these metrics. Operation teams actually script and automate every overhead to become more efficient. In short, they automate all the waste that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. This is true in all types of organizations, for example an operations-led data team or a customer support team.

Engineering teams on the other hand hate support tickets. They address the root cause. Was it a bug? Let’s fix it. Was it unclear documentation? Let’s clarify it. Was it a hard-to-use user interface? Let’s simplify it. They think in eliminating waste instead of automating it. They are not efficient, but highly effective in what they are doing.

Low vs. high noise level

Operations teams love escalations. Love when something is on fire. This is excitement. There’s something to jump into and start solving. Once it’s solved, this is often recognized in Emails reaching a large audience on the heroic efforts. And the worst? A week later they have another escalation for the very same reason!

Engineering teams are led by people who avoid escalations at all costs. And if they happen, they look into the root cause, address the root cause to solve them for the long-term. They will still thank their team for heroic efforts on a weekend, but they’ll recognize twice as much the work that was done to prevent the same thing to happen again.

Better vs. more

is a bit of a continuation of my rant. But it’s still a key aspect of a team’s culture. Engineering teams want to have better tools, better-skilled team members, better tests. Operation teams want more. They want more people on their team to handle even more tickets. More escalations to have more processes. In many companies, more often means more budget and more power on the decision table. One team puts the solution at the center, another one the team itself. It’s a very human reaction to want more, and for leaders who are human to incentivize more. Giving recognition for less is hard. But today is a good day for you to start doing this.

What’s next?

To round it up a bit, terms like “DevSecOps” got invented to build development, security, and operations into the team’s responsibility. But it’s actually much more. Product ownership, requirements engineering, project management. We actually need a new name that captures the broad aspects fo a team’s work, but I leave this for another day.

Stop calling them direct reports

Or acting like a coach is a choice.

The word direct report sounds hierarchical. That she has to deliver a report I can sign off. That I’m in charge of her. That I am the authority of her actions. This might to some degree be useful in a process-oriented manufacturing shop floor (and even there it starts to be outdated). But it’s far from what should happen in an office full of creative work, where people are measured by the creative value-driven output and not by the number of hours they show up.

Creativity needs diversity in thoughts and approaches. Reports deliver the opposite.

Creativity is where humans shine compared to robots. Authority from a manager over a direct report treats them like robots.

Creativity needs flexibility of where, when and how the work is being done. Reports ask for standardization, like passing a test.

Stop being a career manager who treats the team like a crowd of direct reports. Choose to be a career coach so they can grow their very own personalized progression. Matching their needs and aspirations.

Who will you coach to success today?

A boring place

Or how to spark creativity.

Recently, I wrote about A calm place. A place without hectic, without weekend work, in a well-aligned team. Obviously not everything is perfect, but still: What’s next?

Continuation of above. Have no team changes, no big changes around your goals and mission, and simply show up and execute well. Do this for over half a year. Repeat and repeat. Become boring.

And eventually, a first voice raises. What’s next? How can I strive? How can I advance? What will the team be doing in a year from now? Questions you hoped to hear a long time ago are eventually asked.

If it’s boring, kids start playing with the simplest things available. The same for your team members. Boring places allow for thinking time. And then, individuals start to question the status quo. They start to think about their next moves. Creativity is born.

A calm and boring place allows for creativity, for experimentation, for failure. It’s now time to explore this territory again. Back then, it was a reactive failure mode. This time, it’s a proactive, adventurous exploratory mode.

Be surprised what curiosity might bring to you and your team.

Promotion by PowerPoint

Or how to avoid killing people with your slides

Earlier this year I came across the blog post Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people. Not only dramatic, but sad reality in companies today.

Here’s a typical encounter: At the end of the meeting, the meeting owner asks the fearful question: “Who wants to summarize?” Silence. Avoiding eye contact. After a few silent seconds that feel like minutes, a shy hand goes up. The new employee. Ah! Still innocent.

Two days later, a link to the meeting notes arrive in the inbox. Keeping it there. Unread. Postponing clicking on it until 5 minutes before the follow up meeting. Time passes. On the way walking to the meeting, swiping through it on the phone. Shocked.

The new employee took initiative. By creating something that wasn’t just a report. Something that wasn’t meeting the existing low standards. It was establishing something new. A new way of thinking. Taking initiative by interpreting the meeting. Making suggestions. Drafting solutions. Stating decisions.

The whole “report” ended up as the baseline of the new project. How it was done. What was done. Who works together. After a few minor tweaks, everyone nodded. Key decisions usually taking hours of discussion were taken away in a few slides. By the new employee!

It’s your chance to change culture and influence your team. Make bold and clear statements in executive summaries, team reports and presentations.

Ethics as technical solution

Or how to avoid another GDPR meeting

I recently blogged about Regulations as bad. And how regulations help big corporate. However, also big corporate is being challenged, and the usual solution is to hire a team of lawyers and have them schedule endless meetings across the company.

Regulations are one thing. They demand the absolute minimum with an abolute maximum of bureaucracy. This is an opportunity to take an engineering approach. To find purpose. To do better than demanded. And also to do it right from a technical standpoint.

So, what can an engineer do?

Start with asking the question. Asking the question of the one person who is not at the meeting table. The customer. Your customer. What would she think if you’d discuss how to find a loophole in the regulation instead of taking care of her desire to treat her data with respect and the deserved respect and privacy?

I’m glad we agree. Let’s dive into simple technical solutions: End-to-end encryption (in transit and at rest). This might have been hard a few years ago (remember self-signed certificates in a local intranet?), but in todays world of cloud-computing there are no excuses of not using HTTPS with a free certificate or enable the option for encryption at rest of storage, backups or databases.

Use an external authentication provider to authenticate access to your systems. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Auth0, Facebook Connect, Azure AD and many more have long solved OAuth and SAML authentication and can be connected to directory services for federated logins. Most 3rd party systems support that, and custom services should leverage those systems and just deal the straight forward call of validating JWTs.

Encryption and authentication alone don’t solve the privacy problem, especially if everyone working in your company has access to the data. Tokenizing data containing personal information is moving it however to a next level, especially for central log or analytics systems. Those system often contain the full contact details of a customer. But why? Why do you want to expose your analytics system to data breaches that can be executed with a simple “select email from customers” query? Why isn’t it enough to just store the postal code and country, and potentially a token to assign a useful primary key without personal information to the customer address?

And finally, there are still regulatory requirements you need to meet, such as having a data protection officer assigned. But hopefully that’s just a small administrative overhead to everything you already do. All the things you do much better than regulation demands.

Disclaimer: Above is a simlification trying to make a point. There’s more you can and should do from a security and privacy standpoint. And there are a few more things you must do for aligning with regulatory authorities.

Regulations are bad

Or how they help big corporate. And how to navigate them as a small company.

I don’t think it comes to a surprise to anyone. But regulations are a hot topic recently. They are created with all the good intent. But in the end, they only help the largest corporations, and sometimes destroy the smallest companies.

So, let’s start with a popular example. GDPR. And there’s one very visible side-effect of it – the cookie consent banner that pops up on most websites these days. Adding this banner is relatively straight forward from a software engineering perspective, but it’s either mission impossible or an expensive exercise for small companies. Small companies (outside the tech world) don’t have much idea what a cookie is, what privacy implication it has, but they still run a website. Often leveraging WordPress or Shopify etc. It was easy to setup those websites self-service. But all of a sudden they have to choose between million of plugins that claim to have the best cookie consent banner for their small website. And once they activated the plugin, they won’t know whether it even complies. Or they contract a software engineer, and all their margins of the past month are gone for a few cookies. With all the good intents, the small can only lose.

Let’s move to food. Labels are popular. From sustainable fishing to organic food to socially responsible sourcing. Labels have good intent. They help to identify a standard quickly. Example fair trade. The fair trade price is meant to pay the world market price plus a premium. A premium that should reach the producer, or better the worker at the farm. The deal is, that the premium must first be used to improve work conditions so workers benefit in a way that can easily be audited. Sadly, the premium isn’t a lot, and often the certification process and keeping authorities happy for renewals is more expensive than the premium alone. So for the smaller ones it could actually mean less money for the workers. And the very small can’t even afford the certification in the first place. The small can only lose.

Big corporate love regulations, and their complexity. They have the lobby on their side so regulations are ending up being highly complicated, the lawyers to find the right loophole, and the money to actually work within those regulations. And they have independent lawyers on their side who try to find the small who don’t (or better can’t) comply, simply to make money from them. The small can only lose.

So, what’s your choice? Regulations cover the minimum only. Loopholes included. Then there’s ethics. It’s what should be done. It’s way above regulations. Write them down for yourself as your principles. Make decisions following these principles. Your customers will understand them when being consistent. And they’ll be loyal as long as you stay true to your principles.

Glamour in Business Analytics

Or how mindset and attitude are most critical hiring criteria

If you need access to data, you usually go through some central entity. The department of Global Business Analytics. Their main skill is to be a guard keeper on who is allowed to send data, what data should be sent, how it’s transformed, and who has the right to gain access to data. Additionally, technical complexities around building on-premise data cubes required hiring highly skilled database and server admins.

It’s an exclusive club of professionals. They are in the center of the world. They are looked at in awe. Lines are queuing up every day to get a slice of their data for the next presentation to the CEO.

Business Analytics needs personalities who need this glamour.

There is an alternative way. Supported by technological advancement that make it easier to democratize data. Technologies that are cloud-based, focusing on ease of moving data, and delaying complex data transformation towards the end of the chain. And supported by organizations that believe in democratizing and decentralizing access to data.

It’s a way that removes the glamour from the Central Business Analytics team. It merely becomes an engineering team. Just like any other software engineering team. With technical challenges, interesting client interactions and a publicly visible roadmap to execute on. No glamour, no fuss, just work. Interesting and challenging work.

Embrace technology and start hiring for the right mindset.

The organization that shouldn’t exist

Or how to rethink your next org-chart.

Refactoring code is straight forward. I don’t have hard feelings deleting code. Potentially even enjoy it. This is different with organizations. While organizations must evolve, change and adopt, the speed and flexibility is still limited with regards to people.

So it’s critical that organizations that shouldn’t exists don’t start to exist. And I continue seeing it happening. And then people are surprised of a re-org once someone notices the problem. They are everywhere:

The software engineers maintaining a legacy system that are tasked to also re-invent the future instead of radically under-staffing the legacy system and truly focus on the future.

The DevOps team not believing in the company’s principles by holding on to a central, gate-keeping mindset and related staffing while it could focus on engineering, trust and enabling autonomous teams.

The project management office with a heavyweight, central quarterly planning process involving 10.000s of hours and imposing non-suitable processes to teams instead of working along simple principles and objectives leading to autonomously operating teams.

The system admins that believe in the past and continue hosting servers and building racks for virtual machines instead of embracing the cloud.

The security teams that continue purchasing expensive firewall hardware and worry about USB sticks being put into computers instead of following the more secure and lightweight zero-trust concept.

Embrace change. Be radical. Trust in people. Think of the future.

From pipe dream to a small company

Or: How my wife created The Small Batch Project, a company that’s importing award-winning chocolate into Switzerland.

Let’s start with some context. Seth Godin lays out a concept to revoluzionize school and education. If you care about the next generation, then Stop Stealing Dreams is a must read (or at least a must watch of the 20min long TED talk).

This idea, the fact that everyone can excel, and that the best education can happen online, anytime and independent of location made me and my wife discuss a lot. It was a time when she was looking to quit her day job and start an adventure on her own. And then we found the altMBA, an investment of roughly 4’000 USD and 1 month of intense workshops. Signed up. And it all happened in August 2018.

So, did it help? My wife started the year 2018 with a pipe dream of building a company which would have cost probably more than a million to start, and likely years to execute. Ideas we all have in our head, but never get to execute. Simply, it’s too big to even start. The coaching, the constant feedback of peers and the intense reading mainly simplified “mission impossible”. There are no guidelines, no instructions. Just feedback from peers, constant coaching pushing you to make a leap and convert your dream into an executable project. All of a sudden ideas like “start writing a blog” or “do workshops” were discussed. Zero or close to zero capital investment, easy to test, easy to pivot and also not a full crash in case of a failure.

With that, she started her idea to import award winning bean-to-bar chocolate from around the world to Switzerland, online available at The Small Batch Project. She started with visiting a chocolate fair in September 2018, got a company incorporated and a website based on Shopify up and running in October 2018, had an appearance in a market stand in November 2018, another one in December 2018, her first chocolate tasting event in January 2019, and well, a few month into starting the adventure learned a lot, made interesting connections, received broad support from her friends and got positive and re-inforcing feedback from all corners, including an alumni of the altMBA contacting her with some suggestions to improve her marketing strategy.

So all the altMBA did was simplifying a huge business idea into something actionable? Dare to jump? Dare to take action? Kind of. At least it did the most scary part. There was no point anymore of saying “that’s impossible”. Almost no point of going back. And most of that by following the philosophy of doing something good in this world and making it happen.

With all that, my new job title is “professional chocolate taster”.