Five for Friday – June 12, 2020

In my last post, I tried really hard to focus on the message of employee reviews, and how that message shouldn’t be a surprise. I said things like: “I’m not a fan of the system…”, and “It doesn’t matter how messed up the system is…” – yet the mention of the dreaded-curve of the MS…

It’s March, and there’s still snow on the ground here in sunny (but cold) Seattle. Here are some things I found this week worth sharing. First off – the Unity blog has a nice article on the recent Unity Quality Week Here is a sensible article on measuring productivity in organizations Kim Scott (Radical Candor)…

I gave a short talk to an internal MS community this week. The topic of the day was “influence”, and I thought it was appropriate to talk about the value of building (and maintaining!) an informal network – and the impact of that network on influence. The advice to have an informal network isn’t new…

When serendipity strikes, I know it’s something I should try to write about. At least three times in the last week I’ve had discussions about vision, tactics, and the necessary balance needed between the two. Without vision, your daily work is just work – a grind that takes you in no particular direction at all….

Amazon just started sharing Nielsen BookScan reports to authors. Since I don’t get commissions for How We Test Software at Microsoft (hwtsam), I don’t generally see sales numbers, but I’m happy to see that people still buy the book (note for internal readers – orders through msmarket do not reflect in the BookScan ratings). Anyway…