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John Cutler

@johncutlefish

13 Sep

I am a huge advocate for visualizing work.

But there's one huge trap that I see teams fall into.

Start with the Why not the Way

Visualizing work is not the goal. ___ is the goal.

What do I mean?

1/n: Imagine if you emptied out all of your messy drawers just for fun. Well..

2/n: You would have succeeded in making a big mess and reminding yourself how messy you are, and how much you like collecting old subway cards, but you wouldn't have really achieved anything.

Now say you....

3/n: Started by committing to a powerful mission of making it easier to find things. You spend valuable time every day checking multiple drawers.

Or committing to a more public display of keepsakes and caring for your things better?

Read 6 tweets

John Cutler

@johncutlefish

11 Sep

I've met with ~70 teams in the last three weeks.

One thing that sticks in my mind.

Paradoxes.

1/n: you can have...

a mid-stage startup team that is highly dysfunctional

...but due to timing and early product/market fit, they succeed (by some measure) for years

2/n: you can have...

a team of incredibly thoughtful, experienced, people

...but due to disruption of the business model and the inertia of the legacy business, they go circles.

They're stuck.

3/n: you can have...

a bunch of new hire team contributors (engineers and designers) that are excited to tackle the new strategy

...but middle-management is severely underpaid, and burnt out by buffering "the teams" from "the biz".

The new hires leave quickly.

Read 11 tweets

John Cutler

@johncutlefish

4 Sep

was asked recently how I would go about "benchmarking self-service analytics performance".

Some thoughts:

1/n: You can't *just* look at the experience of the end-user. There are many humans involved in making self-service work. Their experience matters.

2/n: A great example is telemetry/instrumentation.

Someone has to figure out how to capture that data. What is the developer's instrumentation experience? What is the experience of deciding which events to track? How fragile is the process?

That's part of performance.

3/n: You can't measure performance by focusing solely on accessibility to the data or insights. Or even the timeliness of the data.

At the end of the day the goal is better decisions and business outcomes.

You'd need to include that...

Read 6 tweets

John Cutler

@johncutlefish

1 Sep

One of the highest leverage thing teams can do...

Is stop trying to optimize for developers "being busy"

...prepping work to give them

...doing small group discovery upstream from their work

..."topping up" every sprint (or quarter, or whatever)

The hardest part? ... 1/n

...often the push to keep people "loaded up" comes from the engineering org itself. People want to feel useful. People want to have something to do

Output is rewarded.

If there is "no work", that is the product managers fault. People get grumpy

So how do you address this? 2/n

For many teams, it may mean having a list of small things people are passionate about. Things that preserve optionality, and that are relatively quick and low risk

When you need slack, you can draw from this list

This helps for the ppl who don't care for doing discovery

3/n

Read 5 tweets

John Cutler

@johncutlefish

26 Aug

@Amplitude_HQ

product development super-skill:

making instrumentation/telemetry just "how we work" vs. some bolt-on process, telephone game, as-a-PM-I-can-see user story craziness.

I see this with super successful customers at @Amplitude_HQ . It is just how they work.

How do you do it? 1/n

First, you have to get the people who 1) understand the decision domain, 2) understand the customer domain, 3) understand the product surface area, and 4) understand "data" ... in one place.

Sometimes you get lucky and that is one or two people. Sometimes not.

Gotta do it 2/n

Usable data starts with domain knowledge!

It is so tempting to just instrument abstract clicks or page views and hope to clean it up later.

But instrumenting clean, understandable, domain relevant events from the start is SO MUCH BETTER.

Then...3/n

Read 8 tweets

John Cutler

@johncutlefish

25 Aug

some tips for eng leaders looking to "lower WIP"

1/n: First, the worst possible way to sell what you want to do is to preach about lowering WIP! No one cares! Lowering WIP is a Way not a Why.

People may nod, but deep inside they are saying "WTF is she talking about?". So...

2/n: You'll need to position this in a way that people will universally care about it. Like:

"I want to increase the sustainable flow of value creation through this system. Right now a rough way to gauge that is to look at ___, and I want to double that w/o hiring more people"

3/n: Yes, all measures can be abused. But you'll need some way to divert their attention from the Way, and give you the leeway.

To prevent abuse, add a...

"without adversely impacting X,Y, Z, A, B, C" with a mix of qual and quant

Read 7 tweets

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