When it rains, it pours. A lot is going on in my life, and it’s been challenging to get through the past week. But with the support of people around me, I feel a bit better at the moment.
One particularly impactful piece of advice was on how to get out of my head and see things more objectively. I told them a story about how I was struggling, and they first listened carefully and suggested I list all evidence for and against that story. That listing technique made me see that it’s not all doom and gloom, and I’ve made (possibly wrong) assumptions about other people’s actions. While the doom story is still in my head, I know now how to move forward from this story.
Software Engineering ⚙️
Product Goal & Sprint Goals – A Simple Example and Definition of Done – Where to Start?
Even though I was part of a “Scrum” team for most of my 10-year career, I never learned how a good Scrum team behaves. I got a Scrum training through work and started learning how Scrum is supposed to work. I am usually skeptical of these types of classes from consultants, but I am excited to learn this time.
How we aligned 200 teams to monitor services with SLOs (Part 1, Part 2)
A multi-year program to change how people do their work takes courage, planning, and grit. My team is launching such a program and could learn a lot from this two-part series.
Using Min-Mid-Max Principles for iOS Design
I don’t work with the UI as much anymore. But testing the UI against the known minimum and maximum screen sizes would have saved a lot of my time testing against all different sizes.
People ❤️
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
Not that my job is as tricky as a CEO’s. But I still struggle to maintain a balanced mental picture of my performance. Caring enough to do my best work but not personalizing failures has been challenging.
Business 💰
Employee-VC Alignment
When we look to join a new startup, a sky-high valuation means the company has to work much harder to make our equity 10x valuable. On the other hand, as current employees, the new enormous valuation incentivizes us to stay since our equity is now worth much more. So it’s not as simple as this article suggests; the more tempered valuation may help recruit but hurt retention.
Success and Failure at Pebble
I once owned a Pebble too. I found it interesting to read how Pebble rose and fell from the founder’s perspective. This sentence stuck with me: “we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted.” How can we verify our assumptions before investing months of our lives?
youngk.im 