How to sell your ideas, by Tom Bellinson
hint: expertise and explanations won’t do it. #AgileAndBeyond
Step 1: focus on their win. Find out what it is by asking questions.
if you can’t deliver on THEIR goals, move on. #AgileAndBeyond
your goal is to enter the other person’s world, so you can communicate with them.
figure out their communication style and use that. @tomsbigideas
motivation strategy: does this person move away from scary things, or toward new things?
maybe you need to tell them why what they’re doing now is scary. @tomsbigideas
Figure out the person’s convincer strategy. Do they need a story? data? repeated encouragement? @tomsbigideas
Help people change their own minds. Ask a series of questions to find out what the value is, and whether this is worth doing. @tomsbigideas
negotiation technique: Hot Potato. they throw you a “what if?” you throw it back. @tomsbigideas
None of this comes across as trickery, because it isn’t. It is connecting with a person where they are. @tomsbigideas#AgileAndBeyond
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I laugh at people who talk about “exactly-once delivery”
The specs that claim it have been proven wrong.
But we have methods (like idempotency) to do things well. @mjpt777#YowLondon
Make handover/resumption protocols.
“This is what I thought I sent to you last, did you get it?”
“Here’s what I got from you last, let’s work it out from there”
If we go from Idea to Behavior change to new Idea…
how quickly we can do that depends on the structure. @kentbeck
If we go Idea to Behavior to Idea to Behavior
as fast as we can,
it’s gonna get slower and slower and then the developers will get frustrated and leave and the new developers will be even slower…
So sometimes, we make a structure change before the behavior change. @KentBeck
SREs in the audience? (Dozens of hands)
Experienced SREs? (Like 2.5 hands)
We @RedHat used to ship products. Build a thing, package it, send to customers. Then it was their problem. Customer hires a consultant or figures it out.
Now we mostly ship services. Now it’s our headache, reliability and uptime etc. It’s different
The team deserves someone
who wants to manage people.
who is not bitter about meetings
who is interested in sociotechnical systems and nurturing careers
whose technical skills are strong enough to evaluate their work.