Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout, and I had no energy left to absorb the typical sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled change poorly, and I picked up the reputation for being difficult to manage. I’d like to say that I learned from my mistakes directly, but the honest version is that I came to...| lethain.com
A few weeks ago I bought a piano. It’s a digital piano, which I’m quite excited about for a few reasons: I remain haunted by forgetting to water our piano as a child, it was a ninety pound package that I could install myself rather than a standard piano’s seven hundred pound stature, and most importantly it actually fit in the available nook. One motivation was that our son loves music. If you put him near a piano he will bang on, and on, and on. I’ve also been feeling a bit of a hole...| lethain.com
Fork this template on Google Docs As your company gets larger and more complex, it’s easy to become embroiled in supporting incoming asks from other teams. That’s important work, but it’s also important that your team is operating effectively and prioritizing your goals in addition to the goals of other teams making requests. If you’re getting mixed signals on whether your team is doing the right work, the Business Review Template can help cut through the confusion.| infraeng.dev
Fork the org growth template and the org design template. Having been involved in quite a few budget and headcount processes over the years, one thing that continues to surprise me is how often folks make major headcount requests without having done any organzational design of those those requested heads will compose into an organization. The good news is that the high-level sort of organizational design required for headcount planning is abstract, low granularity, and it’ll likely only tak...| Infrastructure Engineering