Management
Management is a core business challenge.
Internal:
- Vision and values
- Goals
- Onboarding
- One-on-ones
- Coaching
- Feedback
- Decision making
- Communication
- Motivation
A Land & Expand Reading Program
- 1966 Peter Drucker: The Effective Executive
- 1982 Ken Blanchard, Spencer Johnson: The One Minute Manager
- 1983 Andrew Grove: High Output Management
- 1993 David Maister: Managing the Professional Service Firm
- 2019 Matt Mochary: The Great CEO Within
- 2021 Alex MacCaw: The Manager’s Handbook
Management Books
- 1936 Dale Carnegie: How to win friends and influence people
- 1966 Peter Drucker: The Effective Executive
- 1973 Peter Drucker: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
- 1982 Ken Blanchard, Spencer Johnson: The One Minute Manager
- 1983 Andrew Grove: High Output Management
- 1984 Eliyahu M. Goldratt: The Goal
- 1987 Timothy Lister, Tom DeMarco: Peopleware
- 1989 Stephen R. Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- 1993 David Maister: Managing the Professional Service Firm
- 1998 John C. Maxwell: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
- 2001 Tom DeMarco: Slack
- 2001 David Allen: Getting Things Done
- 2002 Patrick Lencioni: the Five Dysfunctions of a Team
- 2007 Michael Lopp: Managing Humans
- 2008 David Allen: Making It All Work
- 2013 L. David Marquet: Turn the Ship Around
- 2014 Jeff Sutherland: Scrum
- 2015 Jocko Willink, Leif Babin: Extreme Ownership
- 2016 Mark Horstman: The Effective Manager
- 2017 John Doerr: Measure What Matters
- 2018 Daniel Coyle: The Culture Code
- 2019 Matt Mochary: The Great CEO Within
- 2019 David Allen: The Getting Things Done Workbook
- 2021 Alex MacCaw: The Manager’s Handbook
Frameworks
Areas of Responsibility (AOR) and Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)
Process goal: clarify roles and responsibilities
https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/roles-and-responsibilities
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-responsible-individuals/
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Process goal: clarify vision, goals, and progress
https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/steps/introduction/
https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/okrs
RAPID
Process goal: clarify decision accountability
RAPID is short for Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide.
- Recommend: the person who proposed the Issue and Solution
- Agree: people whose input is required to make the decision
- Perform: people who will have to enact any decision and therefore should be heard
- Input: people whose input is worth considering
- Decide: the one who will make the decision
https://www.bain.com/insights/rapid-tool-to-clarify-decision-accountability/
Facts, Assumptions, Beliefs (FAB)
Process goal: align teams on foundations of work
TBM 46/52: (F)acts, (A)ssumptions, (B)eliefs Spotify Wants To Be Good at Failing
- Start a document
- List incontrovertible facts relevant to your work, with links to support these facts. (e.g., [Competitor] recently launched [Product])
- List assumptions relevant to your work with a level of certainty.
- List your beliefs.
- Regularly revisit document.
Outcome super prompt
Process goal: help teams focus on what they are measuring (instead of how they will measure it).
Right now we are working to improve the [variable_A] [variable_B] for [for who] which we could potentially measure by tracking [measurement].
The Tick Tock Doc
Process goal: strategy for sharing new information throughout an organization.
- Draft the most important and straightforward version of what you need to share with your team.
- (The what) I need my team to know ________.
- (The why) This change is happening right now because ________.
- (The who and how) This will impact ________.
- (The when) The timeline for this change is ________.
- Craft your talking points by threading together the key points from step 1.
- Create a new row per audience (an audience might just be one person, a team or function, or the entire organization)
- Prioritize audience order based on required input and impact.
- Assign a message, delivery medium, and communicator for each audience.
- Ask the other communicators for feedback and concerns about working, timing, and mediums.
- As you execute communication make notes of feedback and reactions and share with other communicators.
| Date | Owner | Channel | Talking Points | Feedback | |——|——-|———|—————-|———-|
Success and velocity metrics
Success metrics tell you whether you have achieved your goal. At any given time you should be able to measure your progress towards your goals using success metrics.
Velocity is how fast you’re moving. Your velocity should always be increasing, and if it’s slowing down then you likely have some significant problems.
Success metrics are many of the common metrics you likely use in your business today, including Revenue, MAU/DAU, Net Retention, and Churn Rate. You likely have goals right now that are measured by success metrics.
Velocity metrics measure the drivers of success. You always want to be more productive than you were last month, and velocity metrics are a measure of that productivity. Given the same level of investment, will you get more out of it in the future? Velocity metrics will tell you exactly that.
WBR (Weekly Business Review)
Process goal: Provide a heartbeat of the business for operators to know what’s going on.
https://www.holistics.io/blog/how-amazon-measures/
Improvement Proposals
Process goal: Source improvements and clarify decision-making accountability by removing uncertainty over roles or responsibilities for a decision.
ADRs (Architectural Decision Record)
Lightweight ADRs:
- Title
- Status (proposed, accepted, rejected, deprecated, superseded)
- Context (The issue motivating this decision or change)
- Decision (The change made)
- Consequences (What became easier or more difficult because of the change made)
https://adr.github.io/