Michael Rill – Page 4 – Einfach machen

OKRs and tools

March 3, 2022

by Michael

In the space of OKRs there is an unwritten rule: Once a team announces the introduction of OKRs they must face within five minutes the question of which software tool they will use.

This question is mostly glazed over in books like Measure What Matters or Radical Focus. For good reason: The biggest hurdle of introducing OKRs is almost never the OKR management tool, but rather understanding, socializing, and implementing OKRs as a tool itself. Techniques like pressure testing OKRs, outcomes vs. output or focusing on few but meaningful key results are a lot more important than the tool in the early stages, and it often takes a few quarters for a team to get good at OKRs and see results.

I used to be dismissive when I got the question of the management tool. My standard anecdote was:

Remember pickup basketball? You never worried about the person with brand new Jordans at the pickup game. But whoever was ready to play in whatever they were wearing? For sure they were going to be trouble.

I advised to use a simple shared document, spreadsheet or presentation, because ultimately OKRs are simple: Select a few objectives, find a small number of meaningful metrics to measure progress against those objectives, track progress. This should not be artificially complicated through a specialized digital tool.

For smaller teams that line of reasoning still holds true even as comfort with OKRs develops. Most OKR management tools are designed for larger teams. While well intentioned, they tend to distract in the beginning – not unlike productivity porn or tweaking a fancy IDE before learning how to code.

However, as a team grows and OKRs permeate the organization more people are getting involved. They all have their part in setting, tracking and reviewing OKRs. In that process multiple sets of OKRs emerge along the management hierarchy that need to align. Managing this through documents, spreadsheets and presentations starts to become unruly. I’ve been there. You start with a document to set OKRs, track them with a spreadsheet only to review them later with a presentation. And throughout the year you are endlessly cycling through those three artefacts. This is highly manual, error prone and massively annoying.

Once you reach a team size of a few dozen people, it is time to think about investing in software tools. None of them are perfect, but they do provide structure, control and visibility that help deal with growing complexity. Pragmatically, they help keep data consistent, avoid double entries, and help crush the general entropy that comes with growing teams. Ultimately, it’s an investment in a more inclusive and transparent culture.

Many thanks to Isaac Hepworth for many discussions about this topic, help with this post, and general encouragement.

Photo by Cesar Carlevarino Aragon on Unsplash

Companies are not families

February 19, 2022

by Michael

Leadership / Opinion

Good New York Times interview with the new Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy. Near the end he dropped a nice nugget:

And I say you’ll never hear me say we’re a family. We’re a sports team, and we’re trying to win the Super Bowl. And so we’re going to put the best players on the field we can. And if you go down the field, and we throw you the ball, and you drop it a bunch, we’re going to cut you.

We spend the majority of our waking hours at work and with the people at work. But I always die a little inside when I hear teams talk about being a family. While it might be an alluring thought, it is neither realistic nor appealing. Family is about being bound together and in the best of cases about shared values and unconditional love.

Work ultimately is always at the base level a transactional relationship. You work and get compensated for it. At work, you are replaceable. Everyone is. To your family, you are not. A workplace is replaceable. A family is not.

In that regard, I’d rather aspire to establishing a community at work. One that promotes values like caring, love, a sense of belonging, respect, empathy, joy, and fairness. These might all be attributes shared with families, but there should be a clear line separating work and family.

High functioning teams add layers on top of it like shared values, growing together and standing up for one another. But ultimately, it’s a loose band that last for a few years until it doesn’t. And that’s OK.

Staying Clear of Golden Apples

January 17, 2022

by Michael

Leadership / OKRs

Willem van Herp, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rick Klau once gave one of the most influential intro presentations to Objectives and Key Results: How Google sets goals: OKRs / Startup Lab Workshop – YouTube. It’s an evergreen talk and has gotten nearly 1.2 million views over the past nine years. He recently followed up with a post What my OKRs video got wrong. In that post he mentioned that one of his key learnings is “What you and your team say no to is at least as important as what you say yes to”.

It reminded me of a story that I often tell when introducing OKRs. It is about Atalanta, a heroine in Greek mythology. If you have watched Disney’s Brave you will notice similarities with Merida, the main character.

Atalanta was a strong, independent woman, and she was the fastest runner in ancient Sparta. To her father’s chagrin, she did not care to get married. Her father did not agree to that plan and set up a contest in which young men would race to win her hand in marriage.
To keep her freedom, she asked to be allowed to participate in the race herself, i.e. race for her own hand. Her father, not thinking she had a chance of winning, agreed to the deal.
At the same time, there was a young man called Hippomenes, who fell in love with Atalanta a long time ago. The race was his chance to marry his love. He knew how fast Atalanta was, so he prayed to Aphrodite. Gossip and intrigue are nothing new, and Aphrodite didn’t like Atalanta. So, she gave Hippomenes three golden apples and told him to drop one at a time during the race to distract Atalanta. To her demise, she was so fond of those golden apples that she stopped to pick them up.
After each of the first two apples, Atalanta was able to recover the lead, but when she stopped for the third, Hippomenes won the race. It took all three apples and all of his speed, but Hippomenes was finally successful, winning the race and Atalanta’s hand.
Adapted from Christina Wodtke‘s Execution is everything

If only Atalanta had set clear goals and stock to them. She would have stayed single, footloose and fancy free.

Atalanta’s story is surprisingly timely. We all are running into golden apples every day. So much to do, so little time. However, unless we focus on a few things, we spread ourselves too thinly and what feels busy is actually distraction. OKRs help discern the trivial many from the vital few.

The most obvious example is the selection of key results. When introducing OKRs a lot of teams start with more than five key results for each objective, because those are the metrics they are tracking. Over the course of one or two quarters most realize that focusing on three-ish key results per objective helps them focus their energy and get more done by saying no to more things.

In other words: If at all possible, avoid the temptation of golden apples!

Image: Herp Atalanta and Hippomenes.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

There is something in the air

January 8, 2022

by Michael

Opinion

Ever since the whole web3 conversation gained momentum it feels like a renaissance of blogs is coming. I don’t know whether it is the explanation of web3 within the context of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, or the discussion of decentralization away from the big platforms, or something else. In his State of the Word, Matt mentioned that one of the most web3 things one can do is registering their own domain. He also recently asked people to write more. Others like former Blogger product manager Rick Klau picked up his blog again and Hunter Walk seems to be blogging more frequently these days. And OGs like rands, MG Siegler, Gruber and Kottke continue to blog like it has never gone out of style. It is just a gut feel, but like Vinyl picking up again, it feels like there is an underlying current of people rediscovering their love of blogs.

Make no mistake, I don’t think that blogs (and its many derivatives like Tumblr) will challenge current or future social media. At the same time, the number of internet users is one or two orders of magnitude bigger than ten or 15 years ago. And a small portion of a large number tends to be a large number. And that is awesome. Maybe we are even in for better tools for reading and commenting on blogs – RSS for blogs seems to be in stasis ever since Google Reader shut down.

I’m fascinated by looking at personal blogs from way back when. Florian, a friend of mine, started writing a blog back in 2005 when he moved to Ireland. He still posts a few times a year. That doesn’t seem much, but over the course of 17 years it adds up. Isaac started his blog in 2002, but unfortunately stopped writing in 2015. It is still wonderful to browse through his archive as moments in time. I even resurrected and went through my own old blog archive – I even found an old Blogger blog going way back to 2004. Nothing deep and earth shattering, but that’s not the point. Blogs document moments in time. Nothing more, nothing less.

My point is: Blogging might get another moment, it might not. Both are fine. There is intrinsic value of blogging in terms of sharpening one’s thinking, sharing ideas and documenting moments for my future self. None of that requires an audience, engagement or virality. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? If I blog and no one reads it, does it matter? Who cares! By the time I hit publish, I’ve already gotten a positive return on investment. And as long as I use open source software that runs on my own domain, that’s a pretty future proof investment.

Incentives and tools

December 22, 2021

by Michael

Uncategorized

Working together across multiple teams is hard. People disagree on direction and priorities which can be frustrating at times. It’s easy to attribute this to ignorance, lack of insights, malevolence or any other factors that are out of one’s control.

A more healthy way is to understand what people are trying to achieve. Two questions helped me in the past:

Incentives: What drives your bonus?
Tools: How can you influence that outcome?

The faster you can figure that out, the easier it will be to work within the complexities of multiple teams. It also allows you to realize when people have no incentive at all to support you in your mission (which is usually fine!). They might do it out of goodwill anyway, but an engineer whose bonus is determined by the uptime of a service might look skeptical at your suggestion to move fast and break things.

Of course, those two questions make for a weird ice breaker. But keeping those questions in mind when you get to know a person can turn an awkward coffee chat into a meaningful conversation. It is a great shortcut to working better together.

Adam Grant – How to stop languishing

October 2, 2021

by Michael

Asides

Earlier this year, Adam Grant hit the Zeitgeist with the word “languishing” (There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing). The word describes the feeling of being joyless and aimless that most of have been experiencing over the past 18 months. I remember receiving links to the article from all over the world – typically with all caps and exclamation marks (“THAT!!!”, “ME!”, “Must read!”).

From zero to 100 in one New York Times column

I’m glad that he followed his discovery up with a TED Talk on how to deal with that feeling. The short version is:

Master something: Find something that you like where you can make tangible progress.
Be mindful: Dedicate your time and attention to one activity, rather than playing time confetti and spreading it across multiple things.
Do stuff that matters to others: Don’t just do it for yourself, but make a difference for somebody else. This can be as little as spending time with somebody.

Spending time at the intersection of these three will help you address the feeling of languishing. This very much resonated with my own experience. Over the past winter I got back into chess, which addressed the first two buckets. But chess became a lot more meaningful when I started playing with a friend every Tuesday. It suddenly became a lot more meaningful as it helped us maintain and nurture our friendship despite him being on the other side of the US.

But have a look at the entire TED Talk. It’s 16 minutes well spent:

24 hours

August 25, 2021

by Michael

Asides

The blog of a wealth management firms is an unlikely place to find a meditation on the wonders of parenthood. It’s not always obvious and being in the phase of “terrible twos/ threes” provides plenty of growth opportunities on both sides of the parenting equation. I read it a few months ago and it’s still stuck in my head.

They say the “days go slow but the years fly,” and as I sit here stewing in my worries, I can’t help but reflect on just how fast my life is going.

My 20s were a blur. I met my wife and we got married. As we entered our 30s, we knew we wanted to start a family. After that period of time, it seems like someone pushed fast forward.

If I could map my life from the moment my son was born to its end and compress it into one 24-hour period, it would probably look like this. […]
24 Hours (rwbaird.com)

I get easily caught up in the day-to-day exhaustion of parenting and forget to take a step back to see the beauty of kids right in front of me. That being said: I have to go and play with my kids.

FancyZones – bliss for ultrawide displays

February 13, 2021

by Michael

Tips and Tricks

The older generation might remember Microsoft PowerToys. Microsoft released it first for Windows 95 and then later for Windows XP as well. Back in the day, they gave us a few extra settings to customize Windows and a few tools like an image resizer. Two years ago Microsoft decided to resurrect PowerToys. Even better, it made it a open source utility collection for Windows 10.

I find FancyZones indispensable as it fixes one of the biggest flaws of Windows: Window Snap. I might be a bit dramatic, but it has horrible keyboard support and moving windows is pure guesswork. It is that little mental friction which gets exhausting over time. FancyZones allows us to create custom window layouts with overlapping zones. The tool can remap the standard Win+Arrow shortcut, which makes it very intuitive.

I’ve recently got an ultrawide display. FancyZones transformed this hunk of screen real estate into a highly effective canvas. The setting that made all the difference is

Override Window Snap shortcut (Win + Arrow) to move windows between zone

If I’m not mistaken, it’s turned off by default – I highly recommend activating.

PowerToys is actively maintained and every few weeks new features are popping up. It’s like multiple mini Christmases throughout the year. Thank you, open source community.

Scaling yourself

November 1, 2020

by Michael

Tips and Tricks

Scott Hanselman gave a talk in 2012 called “Scaling Yourself ” about personal productivity and not burning out.<footnote>As I learned today, he since has given a variant of that talk dozens of times and it probably has improved. However, I saw the 2012 version.</footnote> I would say it’s more relevant today than it has been then.

A lot of us have been working from home since early 2020. We’ve had to re-arrange childcare, supervise remote learning, take care of family members and adopt new protocols such as social distancing – all against the backdrop of a global pandemic, an economic downturn and social unrest. We are not just transitioning to work-from-home, but rather dealing with multiple severe crises that force everyone to stay at home while still trying to work.

While Scott’s talk does not solve global healthcare, he has a few actionable suggestions that might lighten the load. Below are more notes:

There is a fundamental difference between efficiency (reducing the effort to get things done) and effectiveness (doing the right things). Efficiency will come with time and experience. Effectiveness can be improved immediately.
Each week set aside time to define the work that needs to get done. That makes sure that you are working on the right things.
Say no/ drop things off your todo list. We can only do so many things and even fewer things really well. Give yourself permission to say “no” or re-negotiate your commitments.
“Being busy is a form of laziness”. Instead of taking care of everything as if everything is of equal importance, invest the time to triage work, i.e. make some upfront decision about if this needs to get done, whether you are the best person to do it and by when it needs to get done. Don’t just jump to the conclusion that add it to the top of your todo list.
Save your keystrokes: When writing longer instructive emails, consider putting them in a document or a blog post instead. That way you can share more broadly with others and don’t have to repeat yourself.
At the beginning of a day or a week, pick three things that you want to get done. As work and life now blends it is even more important to set boundaries and set yourself a bar for success to make sure you don’t end your day without guilt. If you don’t set that bar, your workday will never feel done and you will continuously carry the psychic weight of unfinished work with you.

Scott does a much better job at telling stories around these concepts. Give it a shot, it’s only 30 minutes that will pay off later: Scaling Yourself – Scott Hanselman