Five for Friday – December 4, 2020
The year keeps puttering along – here are a few things I found interesting this week.
- I’ve been spending a lot of time recently learning about “FinOps” – the website has some information, but I’m finding a lot of interesting info as I scour the net (book reco coming next week. If you happen to be in this field, would love to talk.
- I’m…not good with photo editing (but working on it). One easy thing that’s helped is remove.bg for automatic removal of image backgrounds. I wish I knew about it sooner.
- I’ve been binging a bit on the Chaos Community video series. The episodes are quirky and informative.
- I’m working on creating more opportunities for self-organizing teams within my org, and this article on reimagining the org chart gave me a lot to think about.
- My leadership philosophy shifted the first time I read Lencioni when I realized that as a manager, my first team is my peer org. This article on first team has a great view on that concept.
On the subject of self-organizing teams and the concept of “first- team” I have over the years grown to lead my teams in a way that doesn’t confine them to their roles strictly defined by their titles or traditional definition of job function. While I have had the majority of my career managed QA folks they have rarely grown within that narrow definition. As a result of support cross functional working relationships I’ve managed to foster many engineers, engineering managers and event an engineering director. It’s healthy and productive for all involved.