Managing Humans

# PART I: The Management Quiver

# Don't be a Prick

Managers are not actually pricks, but they are often mechanical and disconnected
A great manager is someone who can make a connection regardless of the relative positions in the org chart
See the people who work with you
Understanding different needs - chaotic, beautiful snowflakes
It is your full time job to listen to your people and mentally document how they are built
Silicon Valley is full of widely successful dictators in spite of being world-class pricks
Companies are messy and chaotic, constantly shifting.

# Manager Summary

Where do they come from? Everywhere: engineering, sales, product
How do they compensate for their blind spots? recognize personal weaknesses
The job is to figure out how to scale the skills they have.
- Accentuate their strengths; reinforce where they are weak
Does your manager speak the language?
How does your manager talk to you?
How much Action per Decision?
- Does problem definition & discussion lead to action?
To scale you need to delegate, but pure delegators become irrelevant as they are removed from the loop
Real work is visible action managers take to support their vision for the organization.
- Does your manager make something happen?
Where is your Manager in the Political Food Chain?
What happens when they Lose their Sh!t?
- Behavioural shifts between when things are going great and when they are terrible
Your manager's success is your success

# Stables & Volatiles

Launching version 1.0 splits the development team into two groups: Stables and Volatiles
Stables happily work with direction, appreciate plans, calmly assess risk and mitigate failure, and tend to generate process
Volatiles have issues with authority, seek a thrill in risk, build a lot but nothing stable or beautiful, aren't reliable, and leave a trail of disruption
Volatiles turn into Stables by building process and carefully describing how things should be done, because they have the scars and experience
These new Stables hire people who are familiar, who are predisposed to be Volatiles, which in turn leads to new disruption.
A Stable's choice of disruption is within the context of the last war, while a second-generation Volatile will remind you "there is no box."
As a leader, you need to figure out how to let the Volatiles disrupt, while constantly negotiating a temporary peace treaty with the Stables.

# How to Run a Meeting

2 people talking => it's a conversation
3+ people talking => it's a meeting and needs rules so people know when to talk
Alignment meetings are regular meetings with tactical communication exchanges
Creative meetings focus on solving a hard problem
Agenda: answers the question of how can everyone get out of the meeting so that they can get back to work
The referee has to make sure the meeting accomplishes the requirements of the agenda and the expectations of the participants
The referee identifies attendees who aren't engaged
- Anything other than listening is not listening; re-engage these people:
  - a question relevant to the current state of the topic
  - referee silence
  - change the scenery
Improvise:
- let someone ramble who is onto something
- cut a meeting short because progress is blocked
Listen to stories (incomplete & single POV), map them to your own experience, and ask questions and demand specifics when they trigger your intuition.

# Lost in Translation

Beginners are not burdened with the complexity and depth; they shine brightly with enthusiasm until The "Fall"
The first question you want to be able to answer about an employee: "What does this person want?"
Start with WHERE they want to be, then focus on HOW to move them there
If you feel communication is suspect: clarify.
- You make a statement that might be ambiguous => ask "What did you hear?"
- You listen and the topic or intent isn't abundantly clear => restate "Okay, what I heard was..."
Agenda Detection
Informational Meeting: talkers and listeners; there is no problem to be solved other than the transmission of information
Conflict Resolution Meeting: some problem needs to be solved, and agenda detection is more complex
Players want something from the meeting; Pawns are components of the meeting
If you can't identify any Players, the meeting is doomed - get out!

# Information Starvation

For each piece of information you encounter, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that information to do their job.
Gossip: (1) what is actually being said; (2) what informational gap is being filled by this gossip.
Biggest loss of essential information is when managers rely on their brains as to-do lists.
Your team is always going to tell you what they need to know. Employ some aggressive silence to bring it out of them.

# You're Not Listening

The most basic rule of listening is: If they don't trust you, then they aren't going to say anything.
Eye contact is the easiest way to demonstrate your full attention, and it's also the easiest way to destroy it.
Keep asking stupid questions based on whatever topics until you find an answer where the other person lights up
To stop on a point, repeat their last sentence by saying "What I hear you saying is..." and repeat your version of their thought.
When you can't find the question, segue, or words to bring out what the other person wants to say, disrupt the conversation with silence.

# Saying No

When the team no longer questions the decisions of a manager, that manager feels like his decisions are always correct, which is statistically impossible.
Saying no forces an idea to defend itself with facts, and for your manager to stop and think.
Saying no is saying "stop"; when everyone thrives on movement, the ability to strategically choose when to stop is a sign of a manager willing to defy convention.
Don't be paralyzed by the fact that you're one big, bad decision from being out of a job. Embrace the confidence of being "the boss."
You are responsible for making great decisions, and the best way to do that is to involve as much of your team as possible in those decisions.
By including your team in the decision process and creating an environment where they can say no, you're creating trust.

# PART II: The Process is the Product

# The Process Myth

Engineers don't hate process. They hate process that can't be defended
Don't create or defend process created as a means of control. Focus on building documentation of culture and values for the next employee
HR is good at defining process and bad at explaining the culture. Process should be written by those who are also experts in the culture
When cultural bellwethers leave, so does their cultural context and understanding of the root pain that defined all the bullet items in formal processes
A healthy process is required to stand up to scrutiny, and when a process fails to do so, it must change.

# How to Start

3 phases of starting:
1. worrying about starting
2. preparing to begin
3. you've begun
Stress is a creativity buzz kill. When you're stressed, you're in survival mode, but elegant solutions require offense
Mornings have the gift of optimism because nothing has screwed up your day yet
Evenings are dark, repetitive reminders that no matter what you do, time is going to pass and you've likely wasted some of it
Mornings allow you to flex the creative side of your brain; evenings, when you're tired, allow you to flex the logical side
A hard thing is never done by reading a book or an article about doing it; a hard thing is done by figuring out how to start

# Taking Time to Think

Schedule a brainstorm meeting and a prototype meeting in the same week, so that no one forgets everything over the weekend
Assuming you have an idea of what to talk about, invite those with an educated opinion; otherwise invite people chosen at random
Avoid inviting "obstructionists" who map every new idea against previous experience and then declare the idea "unoriginal"
Leave the first meeting with five hot topics that people want to address. Create prototypes, wireframes, etc. in the second meeting
Red flags as weeks pass are constantly revisiting decisions, the same list of attendees, people venting for too long, and the to-do list always growing
These meetings will slowly die off as you move from design to development. In general, questions should be getting answered, not created

# Hacking is Important

Hacking creates new things which is a disruptive act, which scares the reasonable people who represent the majority.
Those who are responsible for maintaining and building on success will not understand why hacking is important.
A healthy product company is a contradiction: it seeks normality and predictability but must also build something new to disrupt the desired consistency.

# Entropy Crushers

A project manager is responsible for shipping a product
A product manager is responsible for making sure the right product is shipped
A program manager is a combination of both that handles multiple interrelated projects, such as an operating system.
Each new person on your team increases the cost of communication of ideas, making decisions, and detecting and fixing errors.
If you're a full-time engineering manager of growing team, but you're also serving as a project manager, then you're half-assing one of those jobs
A good project manager will measure, control, and crush entropy. They own execution of the machine ensuring that everything gets done.
A good engineering manager will promote entropy in strategic areas and ignore others. The challenge is differentiating them.

# PART III: Versions of You

# Bored People Quit

Boredom is not initially catastrophic. It shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat, making it both easy to address and easy to ignore.
To detect boredom, look for changes in daily routines, ask if they are bored, or they'll tell you and you just listen
Every second someone is bored, a second passes on an internal clock, and after some amount of time they give up and quit
For each person on your team you must be able to answer:
- Where are they going?
- What am I doing to get them there?
If someone doesn't have a project that makes them light up, let them experiment. Your job isn't just building product, but building people.
Share the crummy work fairly. Be aware of who's doing it, communicate that you're aware, and tell them when they're going to be done.
Promising productive and creative time that is only taken away by urgent tasks only accelerates the boredom clock.
Remove daily distractions that pull people away from their work. These are more costly than they appear from the overhead of context switching