GOTO - The End of Engineering’s Blank Check - Accountability in Software Leadership - Laura Tacho and Charles Humble
05:30 - the “micromanagement spiral of doom”
A deficit of practice of giving difficult feedback and setting clear expectations leads to the desire to not be a micromanager of cycling between failures of achieving objective/goal based direction and needing to give prescriptive based direction.
They don’t recognize that pattern, and they’ve actually never been taught how to set a really clear expectation so that people do what you need them to do on the 1st try without you having to intervene.
There is no magic fix - what needs to be done is context specific. The maturity is around successfully moving on past everything that got you to this point (technical skills, rewards, etc. )
12:20 - slow feedback loops and accepting the meetings are the work.
DORA - https://dora.dev/ - showing software delivery practices statistically correlate with organizational performance SPACE - https://space-framework.com/ - understanding the multidimensional nature of developer productivity DevEX - https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3595878 - measuring friction points that are limiting output Core 4 - https://getdx.com/dx-core-4/ - mix of the other 3 frameworks with a focus on what to measure for org level answers
30:00 - reiterating that as a leader you’re a business leader. The need for ROI to be articulated - especially “technical debt”
Because once we think about paying down technical debt as serving your internal customers of people who are developing on your platform, we can start to draw some parallels between a customer, you know, external customer facing thing, internal customer facing thing and calculate the ROI.
36:00 - Whichever framework or metrics you use you need to think of them as a product your audience pays for with attention and use.
This means - which metric/framework depends on audience. Eg. Teams - DORA, but board/org more likely to be Core 4
Who are they for? What information are they looking for? What questions do they have to answer? What decisions do they have to make?
39:00 - mitigate gamification by having multiple metrics (the frameworks), be open and transparent, and communicate early on what the product (metrics) intends to do and how this information is protected (if necessary)
42:00 - bonus AI adoption question. Tl;dr - clear rules on what is acceptable and not makes a big difference. Training on prompting and non generative uses.
45:00 - reminder of managing up and skip level check ins.
GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech - The End of Engineering’s Blank Check: Accountability in Software Leadership • Laura Tacho & Charles Humble
https://overcast.fm/+AAroyGfyT70
https://gotopia.tech/sessions/3904/the-end-of-engineerings-blank-check-accountability-in-software-leadership