Danielle Leong Profile picture
Director of engineering, photographer, ex @github @twilio trust & safety @consentsoftware @feerlessapp. She/her. Yes I’d love to take your photo! 💛📸

Apr 8, 2022, 11 tweets

Strategic communication: creates understanding, drives agreement, and builds trust. “You’re all bad at it.” @skamille coming in strong with the harsh truth 🥲 #LeadingEngNewYork

Status updates are strategic updates. Good opportunity to provide reflection, education, and visibility. Good to do this regularly and have your teams do this. Useful record for promos and reviews too! #LeadingEngNewYork

Examples of good/bad status updates. Why is this update important? What context is needed? What did we do? What was the result?

As a senior leader, execution is even more important (but it looks slightly different). Are you able to keep your orgs aligned and focused? Do you know when problems happen early? Can you develop leaders outside your direct reports? #LeadingEngNewYork

Leadership meetings: weekly or every other week. They should be heavily participatory with cameras on. Don’t overstructure it. Topics can change with what’s important right now. Can include people who aren’t your direct reports like senior PMs, ICs #LeadingEngNewYork

Status update meetings: for real? For real. Don’t skip this!! Gives exposure, surface info, regularly scheduled, gives ICs opportunity to shine #LeadingEngNewYork

(I still miss the monthly all hands I ran in IAM 🥲)

Strategic planning: top down leadership is actually necessary here. What’s the themes of the org together (not from the individual teams)? Why are we working on this? What are we all doing here? Why is it important? #LeadingEngNewYork

There’s no one true way to do strategic planning, just do what works. OKRs, KPIs, 6 pagers 🤷🏻‍♀️. Be flexible and adapt to the business #LeadingEngNewYork

What do we want at the end of all this strategic planning? Stared understanding, objectives and measures (3-5 only!!), a sense of resources (people, money, systems, time) needed to achieve all this #LeadingEngNewYork

In order to get good outputs, we need good inputs. Current state of things, headcount, overhead, existing projects, variety of perspectives, and a retro of what happened last cycle #LeadingEngNewYork

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