You can’t manage what’s not measured
The start of a new year is an excellent time to take stock of where you and your team are at. You can look at how your environment, systems, and processes are set up. You can re-evaluate business objectives. Consider where you stand and where you want to go this year. As a leader, don’t do this alone. Involve your team in the assessment and the planning.
One of the best tools for evaluation is a review of any long-term metrics you’ve been tracking. Some teams use DORA metrics to check their software delivery performance. Others use the SPACE framework for understanding developer productivity. Regardless of the framework, or the actual numbers, our advice is simple:
- Decide what is important for you to track
- Discover the relevant current conditions
- Track those metrics over time
- Pay attention to trends, not points-in-time
This last point is vital. Is deploy time getting longer or shorter? How about the time to consider work done? Or time spent on correcting failure demand? The trend can teach us where the team is at, how team morale is, and what we should focus our attention on.
The next step is to make one small change and then go back to monitoring how it is tracking. Smaller changes are easier than big ones. If we aim to for incremental improvements, success is only a small step away.
~ Elle
What’s been happening?
Welcome Sebastian
We are thrilled to announce Sebastian von Conrad joined the Blackmill team at the beginning of this month! Sebastian is a long time friend, with more than 15 years experience in engineering leadership. He has worked in senior roles at tech companies such as Culture Amp and Envato. Sebastian is a thoughtful and empathetic leader who loves to work with others and help them reach their full potential. He’s working with us on materials for future workshops, amongst other things, and has already taken on three new coaching clients. If you’re interested in 1-to-1 coaching with Sebastian, get in touch!
Welcome, Sebastian. We look forward to learning and growing with you!
Strategies for saying no
Saying no doesn’t come naturally. It is often challenging, even more so saying no to your boss. But there are things you can do to help.
Join our presentation and Q&A session on Strategies for Saying No for one hour on Feb 2nd at 12pm. You will take away valuable lessons and tools to use the next time someone tries to put more on your plate and you will have the confidence to say “no”. For more info or to grab yourself a ticket, head over here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/strategies-for-saying-no-tickets-514639218757
Workshops
Tickets for our popular Leading Engineering Teams workshop are available to purchase for Feb 27th–March 2nd! Make this year better and become a more effective engineering leader. Tell your boss, ping a friend, and secure your spot before they sell out!
Office hours
Starting this February, we will be opening three slots per month of our popular Free Office Hours! Whether you have trouble with a re-org, team scaling, or just want some leadership advice, we can help. Bring your problem, questions, and a cuppa, and let’s thrash it out together. Blink and you’ll miss it. Watch out for an announcement next week.
Q2 Donations
Each quarter, we give back to our communities by donating part of our profit to a charity of choice. For quarter two, we have donated to Kids Under Cover. This not-for-profit organisation aims to prevent youth homelessness. “Living conditions can make it intolerable for a young person to remain at home, often young people feel they have no choice but to leave, with nowhere to go.” Kids Under Cover provide education scholarships and studio accommodation in family backyards. Please donate if you can, or learn more about what we give.
What are we reading?
- Measuring Continuous Delivery and DevOps — since we’re on the topic of measuring for the sake of improving
- 3 Frameworks for coaching and personal growth — coaching models, when applied with the support of a coach, act as tangible growth lattices to help people grow through those pesky challenges.
- New year’s reflections by Brenda Storer — an example we can all follow, from a close friend
- Tolerated failure implants learning better than success — training should include practical situations, make room for failure when planning, and push project learnings into real time.
A cuppa with Debbie Madden
1. What do you do? And what do you like about your work?
I’m the founder and Chair of Stride Consulting, an agile software consultancy. I love many things about my job, one of the things I like the best is the Stride team - we are technologists, and we are also teachers, so we all share humility to know we are still always learning balanced with the courage to know we have something to teach others.
2. What aspect of your work do you find most challenging?
Right now, I find it challenging to be remote. Many in our industry really enjoy being remote, but I thrive on being in person with others, so working remote is something that’s tough for me.
3. What are you passionate about?
Scaling Stride in a way that enables great culture to shine.
4. What are recent accomplishments you are happy with?
On a personal note, my oldest daughter just got accepted to college! What an amazing feeling!! That was more her accomplishment than mine, but I still am proud and happy. For me, I recently got a board of advisor position that I had really been wanting to get, and it took quite a while to get it, and it’s really amazing.
5. What is one mistake that you will never make again?
Haha! How can I tell if I’ll never make the same mistakes in the future? One that I hope to avoid - working so many hours that I didn’t reserve patience for my children.
6. How do you manage stress?
For me, running and biking get the stress levels down. I also am getting better and better with real balance - which is something that ebbs and flows over time. Some weeks I work more and other weeks I work less, and I am getting better at listening to my body when it needs rest and exercise.
7. What is the best advice you can give?
One thing that has always driven me is to create what’s called a Painted Picture - a very vivid, descriptive narrative of a specific date in the future. So for example January 1, 2026. Where do you live, where do you work, etc. Imagining an ideal future has always helped me focus on the right big picture priorities over time.
8. What one thing would you change about our society?
Lots. One thing I really love about living in NYC is that it truly is a melting pot, lots of different people living on top of each other. As a result, even though NY’ers are known as being rough around the edges, we are actually quite good at getting along with all different types of people who are completely different than ourselves. I wish more places could be like this.
9. What are your goals or aspirations for this year?
One big thing for Stride for 2023 is growing into a nationally recognised tech brand. It’ll take us a few years but it’s really exciting!
What are we cooking?
Sweet potato and miso soup
Ingredients
- A little bit of oil
- 1 onion, chopped
- 4 garlic cloves
- Ginger, grated
- 2 carrots, chopped
- 900g sweet potato
- 750g (3 cups) veggie broth
- 400g (1 can) coconut milk, or almond milk
- 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- Miso paste, to taste
- Salt and pepper, to taste
- Flaked almonds or crushed hazel nuts, for garnish
Instructions:
- Heat oil in a big pot, then add the onion, garlic, and ginger, and fry for a few minutes. Add a touch of water to prevent them from sticking to the pot or burning.
- Add the carrots and sweet potato and continue to cook for a couple more minutes. Then add the veggie broth, milk, vinegar, and miso paste. Turn the heat up and cover the pot. Bring to the boil and then lower the heat. Simmer for 15-20 minutes.
- Turn the heat off. Set the soup cool for a few minutes before processing into a smooth consistency.
- Season to taste and and garnish with almonds or hazel nuts.
And we’re out
Thank you for showing an interest in our newsletter and we hope that you enjoyed the read. Feel free to contact us if you have any feedback, a burning question, or just a recipe that you would like to share.
Until next time, keep learning!
Everyone at Blackmill