Fragile

Identity and Narrative – Managing Change

neilj — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:17:23 +0000

People hate change, and the reason they hate change is that they really hate change, and that change is hated because they really hate change…….

I’d love to know who said this

All teams are subjected to continuous environmental change, but it tends to be gradual and hard to perceive at a week by week level. I want to talk about the sharp, often unexpected step changes and go into some strategies to guide a team through the worst.

Before diving in, I want to introduce a model for characterising teams. There are two attributes that I consider critical in determining a team’s ability to function.

Identity – Who the team perceive themselves to be, what they value.
Narrative – Why the team exists, what value they bring.

I’m unaware of anyone else talking specifically in these terms but similar thinking appears in Daniel Pink’s ideas of Autonomy, Mastery (both mapping to Identity) and Purpose (narrative) as well as echoes in the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Ordinarily, definition of identity and narrative is straight forward. The team will arrive at their own identity over time, while the narrative, for the most part, comes from the commercial arm of the company. In times of change there are no such guarantees. I’ll look at each in turn.

Identity

As an individual, our identity is in part context specific and a function of those around us. The same is true for teams. This means that when the environment changes quickly, it can be difficult for a team to define itself. Definition means identifying the skills and attributes that set it apart and most importantly what it values when compared to those around it.

A manager can help speed this process. They have a birds eye view, they know how their team have defined themselves in the past and have more opportunities to interact with the broader business. The manager ought to be able to spot and highlight specific points that will go and form part of the team’s new, long term identity.

Additionally during upheaval it is for the manager to contextualise the actions and focus of other teams/departments. It’s all too easy to enter into a spiral where ‘everyone apart from us is an idiot’. A team needs to understand how they are different, but they also need to collaborate and work effectively with those around them.

Narrative

Narrative is interesting in that it should be easy to identify. The business is willing to invest in the team for some purpose and that purpose ought to be the team’s narrative.

During times of upheaval this is not a given, and it could take months for a clear narrative to emerge, as the dust settles and the business redetermines the best way for the team to add value.

But waiting months for the new vision is not an option. Put bluntly, if the business cannot provide a compelling narrative quickly then the team manager must arrive at one. Once again it is time to make use of the manager’s elevated view of the organisation to sift through the confusion and draw out something tangible that resonates.

Conclusion

All teams need a sense of identity and a sense of narrative in order to be productive. During times of significant change both of these characteristics come into question. It is up to the team’s manager to act as the catalyst, as the team aims to arrive at new definitions.

Sew Make Do – A Lean Startup Experiment – Part 2, Metrics

neilj — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:30:04 +0000

Mrs Fragile recently bought a hand made lamp shade online and was disappointed with the results, as a keen crafter she wondered if she could do better, and perhaps even sell some of her own creations.

In doing so I thought it would interesting to incorporate ideas from the Lean Startup Movement as popularised by Eric Ries and document progress through Fragile. The project is named Sew Make Do.

Metrics

A key idea in lean startups is that metrics ought to be actionable. On his blog Ash Maurya defines explains Actionable Metrics

An actionable metric is one that ties specific and repeatable actions to observed results.

The opposite of actionable metrics are vanity metrics (like web hits or number of downloads) which only serve to document the current state of the product but offer no insight into how we got here or what to do next.

Tracking sales is of course an obvious thing to do but it is a very coarse measure. A more interesting metric is to look at how easy it is to convert a potential customer into a real customer. Over time we not only expect sales to increase but also expect to get better at selling such that our conversion rates also increase.

In an ideal world I would like to perform Cohort Analysis. This means tracking individual user behaviour and using it determine key actionable metrics. While more commonly applied in medical research in order to study the long term affects of drugs, common examples in the context of Lean Startups might be tracking user sign up and subsequent engagement over time. If it can be shown that 2 months after sign up users generally cease to engage in a service, it provides a pointer to what to work on next, as well as a clean means to determine if progress is being made.

The in-house analytics provided by Etsy do not provide the means to track the habits of specific users, but they do allow for aggregations of periods of time. This means that some level of analysis is still possible, though cannot be describes as true cohort analysis.

I’ve modelled my funnel like so:-

Of those that viewed the shop

What percentage favourited the shop or a product. There is no reason to assume that someone buying the product will also favourite it, though at this point it is reasonable to assume some level of correlation.
What percentage bought a product for the first time
What percentage are returning paying customers buying a subsequent item.

As you can see from the graph, there is not a lot of data. Throughout the process our absolute views and favourites have increased, though it is interesting to see that our favourited percentage has improved. We put this down to improving the pictures and copy, though without more data it’s hard to make any firm statements.

What I’ve not done is break this down on a per product basis, right now we do not have enough products or traffic to justify it but we’re certainly noticing that some products are more popular.

In a few months times I’ll revisit this post and let you know how things are going. With a bit of luck there’ll be some yellow and green on there.

Sew Make Do – A Lean Startup Experiment

neilj — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:26:38 +0000

I’ve been an advocate of applying lean thinking to software for some time, and learnt a lot form Eric Ries’s blog. I’ve just finished Ries’s book ‘The Lean Startup’ and naturally am looking for opportunities to apply its ideas in my own work place. However doing so will take time and more immediately I wondered what would happen if I started on something smaller.

Mrs Fragile recently bought a hand made lamp shade online and was disappointed with the results, as a keen crafter she wondered if she could do better, and perhaps even sell some of her own creations. While initially suspicious of my gallant offers to help her run things on lean startup lines so far she’s tolerating my efforts.

I thought it would interesting to document progress through fragile and perhaps receive some feedback/advice along the way. The nice thing is that since this is not a serious venture it should be possible to be more open then would other wise be possible. The project is named Sew Make Do.

Assumptions

We started with the following assumptions to test.

People would like to buy Mrs Fragile’s lamp shades
The people that would like to buy the lamp shades are female and in their late 20’s to early 40’s.
30cm and 20cm drums will be most popular.
People will pay ~£28 for a 30cm shade
People will pay ~£22 for a 20cm shade
People will suggest custom fabrics to drive product development.

Of these assumptions by far the most risky is No 1. We have no idea if anyone will actually want to buy them. Therefore it makes sense to prioritise testing this assumption. To this end Mrs Fragile set up a shop on Etsy and presented a choice of 3 lamp shades offering a range of styles and sizes. This is our MVP for assumption 1. There is no reason to assume that long term Etsy will be the main distribution channel but it does provide a very quick way to put the product in front of potential customers.

Once, assumption 1 has been tested sufficiently to give us hope to persevere it will be easier to address the remaining assumptions, since all are dependent on sales.

Thoughts on metrics

The lamps shades have been up for a few days now, so far there have no sales but a good number of people have ‘admired’ them. It will be interesting to see if there is a link between the number of views, the number of admires and the number of sales. Longer term it would be interesting to perform cohort analysis on these indicators.

For now though we’re just hoping for the first sale – or possibly our cue to try something else…..

Too Much Trust

neilj — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:54:56 +0000

Trust trust trust trust trust trust trust trust trust trust

Excerpt from the management book I wish someone would write

A central theme in agile software development is that of trust. The agile (small a) movement speaks of openness, collaboration and collective responsibility – none of which are possible without trust. As a manager my team cannot be effective if they do not trust each other nor can I bring about anything but the most superficial change if they don’t trust me.

I’m not the only one who feels this way, turns out I’m in good company 1 2 3

So I like trust and consider it to be a ‘good thing’ but the point of this post is not to talk about how great it would be if there was more trust in the world. In fact I want to talk about situations where increasing trust can actually be destructive.

The total level of trust is undoubtedly important, but equally important is the distribution of that trust. The greater the differential between the relationship containing the most trust and that containing the least the less chance that the overall group can act as effective team.

A good high level example might be an engineering org and a sales org. It doesn’t matter how much internal org trust exists – if org to org trust is low the company will not perform as well. In fact the lack of inter org trust will felt all the more keenly in contrast to the strong internal trust that exists.

Applying this idea to a single engineering team, if a team has high trust for one another and a new member joins then it will take time for that new member to earn the group’s trust and be accepted as part of the team. This healthy and only natural. However if the team is split down the middle with two groups of high internal trust who do not trust one another then strengthening internal group trust will only entrench the distrust of the other group. In this case increasing trust can actually be harmful.

What I’m saying is that the effectiveness of a group to act as a team can be characterised by the weakest trust links in the group. If the differential between relationships is high then increasing trust in already strong relationships can actually hinder rather than help the team.

From a practical perspective, the manager’s job is always to create an environment where trust can grow, but it is important to focus on the low trust relationships since they are the ones that characterise the effectiveness of the team.

Worried about candidates googling during a phone screen? You’re doing it wrong.

neilj — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:26:30 +0000

Interviewing is time consuming, companies have a finite amount of time to dedicate to recruitment and inevitably some capable candidates are turned down at CV stage without ever having a chance to shine.

Phone screens are a great way to address this problem, they are typically shorter and often run solo. They allow a company to take more risks and consider candidates from further afield.

My company is still pretty new to phone screening, we’ve been trialling it out in cases where it is difficult for the candidate to attend in person – perhaps they are based overseas. As a result I’ve been doing a lot of reading on how best to construct a decent phone screen. By far the best writing I’ve found is Steve Yegge’s take. I’m not sure how practical it is to fit everything Yegge mentions into a 45 minute call, but I consider it an excellent resource.

A common fear I have seen in other discussions seems to be that candidates will use google to somehow game the system. If this is a genuine concern then one of two things has gone wrong. Either:-

The questions are purely fact based and will tell the interviewer nothing about how the candidate thinks.
Or, the questions are fine but the interviewer is focusing on the wrong part of the answer.

A question like ‘In Java what is the difference between finally, final and finalize’ will tell you very little about the candidate. Plenty of terrible programmers could answer that without problem and what’s worse, a talented but inexperienced developer might stumble. In short these type of quick fire questions add little value to the overall process.

Something like ‘How does a Hash Map work? How would you write a naive implementation?’ is more interesting, it’s open ended but forces the candidate to talk about a specific area of knowledge – even if they don’t know, you’ll learn how good they are at thinking things through from first principles. The only way that it can be gamed through googling is if the interviewer simply waiting to hear specific terms and is not asking free form follow ups.

I’ve just googled Hash Maps on wikipedia and could probably quickly extract ‘Associative array’, ‘key-value pair’, ‘Collision’ but really if that’s all the interviewer wants to hear then the question is of limited value.

So what I’m saying is that if you’re concerned about googling, then it’s probably the questions or desired answers that are the problem. Furthermore if one in a hundred people do manage to game the system you’ll pick them up in the face to face in an instant.

Reasons I love working in software

neilj — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:02:02 +0000

It all comes down to two things

I get to work with people who really love what they do.
I get to work with people who are insanely open to change.

Why Work At Your Company?

neilj — Sun, 22 May 2011 17:19:35 +0000

Recruitment is all about relationships and trust, whichever way you look at it common recruitment practices support neither. While there are countless articles focusing on how hard it is to hire good developers little is said about how to find good companies. Trust work both ways and in order to ‘fix’ recruitment both sides of trust equation must be balanced. Examining each in turn:-

Employer-> Candidate trust

Employers have low trust in external recruiters, low trust in CVs, and low trust that candidates can complete a Fizz Buzz question. This means that it’s not possible to invest sufficient time in individual applications, which in turn makes it less likely they’ll ever attract really good people.

Services like LinkedIn and Stack Overflow have made some gains in solving the employer-> candidate trust problem. In LinkedIn’s case they have scaled the ability to ‘ask around’ for recommendations and Stack Overflow provides a feel for someone’s knowledge. Neither is perfect and in truth the best they can do is give me confidence that the candidate is not a total waste of time.

Candidate -> Employer trust

The Candidate -> Employer problem is more interesting not least because it’s generally ignored. Unless you happen to be Google or Facebook candidate->employer trust is a major stumbling block. How can a candidate be sure that they are dealing with a good company? They can’t trust their agent to have a clue (or care) and they themselves will not be aware of a host of interesting companies. As such applications tend towards the bland and generic since candidates cannot afford to spend days tailoring individual introductions, this in turn fuels the employer perception that passionate interested candidates do not exist.

As an example, I work for a small B2B Telecoms company, our work is on the public eye, but our brand is not. Most developers will not be aware of us. Once hired, developers tend to want to stay with us, with working environment and the freedom to ‘get things done’ playing a big part in that. However as a company I have no easy way to express this. It’s not even a case of saying ‘Isn’t my company great!’ it’s much more about about describing the trade offs. Not everyone will appreciate the chaos, pace and variety of working at a small company, some will prefer the promise of a well defined career path, security and greater opportunity to specialise typicallly afforded by a larger organisation. It’s down to personal opinion.

Individual companies can solve this problem by publishing an engineering blog, sponsoring community events, getting people speaking at conferences and generally exposing their culture and values. It could be argued that companies willing to go to these lengths clearly value recruitment more highly than others and deserve the rewards. However, if there was someway that candidates could pull that information rather than have it pushed then that would be hugely valuable.

The closest example I can see is the Joel Test. To me the Joel Test is starting to show it’s age and could benefit from an update, the best it can say is ‘this company is less likely to be a horrific place to work’. Glass Door also addresses this in part, though practically speaking companies must be a of certain size before it becomes useful.

I’m not sure what the solution might be. Perhaps a curated job board/job fair is the way to go, the curator finds a way to characterise companies and makes sure it only backs good companies. This builds trust with candidates, and should mean that it attracts the top people, especially those for whom money is not the top driver. Companies are happy to pay decent rates because they know how good the candidate pool is, further more there is prestige in being associated with the agency.

The Challenge

So, world, here is my challenge to you. How can I, as a company, express my culture and values in a meaningful and standard way so that candidates can approach me with confidence.

‘We only hire the best’ – I don’t believe you

neilj — Sat, 07 May 2011 18:20:32 +0000

Ask anyone about hiring developers and the advice is always the same ‘only hire the best’. The principle reasons being that

Developer productivity can vary by an order of magnitude between apprarently similarly qualified candidates.
The best people only want to work with the best people. A graders hire A graders, B graders hire C graders.

On the face the face of it this seems like great advice, who wouldn’t want to hire the best? It turns out pretty much everybody.

For instance, how long are you willing to wait to fill the position? What if you are really really stretched? What if you’re so stretched that you worry for existing staff? What if hiring a specific individual will mean huge disparities in pay between equally productive staff? What if not making the hire is difference between keeping a key client or losing them? At some point every company has to draw a line and elect to hire ‘the best we’ve seen so far’.

The difference between the great companies and the rest is how to deal with this problem. Great organisations place recruitment at the centre of what they do. If hiring is genuinely everyone’s number one priority then hiring the best becomes more achievable. For starters you might even have half a chance of getting ‘the best’ into your interview room in the first place.

Of the rhetorical questions posed above, in all cases the impact can minimised (though not eradicated) so long as management understands and anticipates the challenges in recruitment. For example “What if hiring them will mean huge disparities in pay between equally productive staff?” A company that intends to hire the best understands the value of keeping the best. So compensation of existing staff, especially longer serving staff relying on annual raises to ensure market parity, must be at an appropriate level. Doing so can be hugely expensive when multiplied over all employees and this cost comes directly from the bottom line. Companies that put recruitment at the core are willing to make the investment. Yishan Wong’s writing on this subject is brilliant.

If hiring really is everyone’s number one priority then there is a trade off to make, something has been deprioritised or sacrificed to make room. As a result hiring is much more than a partitionable activity, it is a statement of corporate identity. Proclamations like “we only hire the best” are meaningless without an understanding of the trade offs and sacrifices made.

People are not our most valuable resource – a response

neilj — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:24:43 +0000

Pawel Brodzinski recently wrote a post entitled ‘People are not our most valuable resource’ the point being that people aren’t resources at all , they’re people and should be treated as such.

“Every time I hear this cliché about people being most valuable resource I wonder: how the heck can you say people are most valuable when you treat them as resource? As commodity. As something which can be replaced with another identical um… resource. If you say that, you basically deny that people in your organization are important.”

I’m in agreement with Pawel on this point, but I’d go further. Not only is a statement like ‘People are our most valuable resource’ degrading and counter productive, even if you restate it as ‘Nothing is more important than our people’ it’s still incorrect. The real value had nothing to do with people and everything to do with teams.

The key thing that a team provides is a means to align the goals of its members. These goals need not be for the greater good of humanity, in fact they’re generally much more mundane. It really doesn’t matter who wins the world cup* or whether project omega will ship by next Tuesday, all that matters is that the team succeeds in its common goal. A group all pulling in the same direction is orders of magnitude more effective than that same group working as individuals – a business cannot be successful without effective teams.

The trouble is the word ‘team’ is massively over used, it’s a buzzword that has become so ubiquitous we don’t even notice it. The tendency to assemble a group of disparate people and label them as a ‘team’ devalues the concept. One area where this is especially true is that of ‘The Management Team’, generally comprised of middle management peers from various disciplines this group often have very little in common in terms of shared goals and identity.

And here lies the problem, if management is unused to working in a team themselves, then the value of a team is less visible. Furthermore, since it is generally individuals, not the team as a whole, who complete the component tasks the team effect is not obvious from afar.

I don’t think you’ll find an organisation that is anti team, simply that it’s hard prioritise the tasks necessary to encourage team formation when the value of teams is poorly understood. It’s easy to measure the cost of co-location but much harder to measure the benefit to the co-located team, hence the true value of the team is passed over.

Not only are ‘people are not our most valuable resource’, people aren’t our most valuable anything just on their own, it’s all about teams.

[In this post I’ve purposely avoided the subject of how to form a team. It turns out that it’s quite tricky, I’d recommend Peopleware as a good place to start.]

* Except if it’s England of course.

Hell is for Heroes

neilj — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:58:07 +0000

Last December I attended the London XPDay, the session I enjoyed most was run by Chris Matts on the subject of Heroes in the context of software development teams.

What makes a Hero?

Chris put forward the idea of the ‘Hero’, an unofficial role assumed by an experienced developer critical to the project. There are positive aspects to the role, this is person turned to in the moment of crisis when something must be fixed ‘right now’, they are the person with the deepest knowledge of the system and an indispensable contributor to the project. As with many things, however, this strength can also be a weakness. The feeling of being indispensable is very powerful and freely sharing knowledge and collaborating with other less experienced/capable team mates only undermines this feeling. If the Hero is no longer the only person who can fix the problem, surely that makes them less important?

In extreme cases the presence of the Hero becomes toxic, reluctance to collaborate is unpleasant, but active obstruction and obfuscation is something else. At this point the team/project has some serious problems. On the one hand it is doomed to failure without the Hero, on the other-hand, the ability of the group to act as a team evaporates and progress on the project is brought to all but a standstill.

What to do when a Hero goes bad?

We spoke for about an hour on the subject and while there were one or two examples that partially dealt with the problem, ranging from ‘move them to another project’ through to ‘fire them’ (!), no-one in attendance was able to provide a truly positive example of recovering from such a scenario.

I am fortunate in never having worked with anyone quite as extreme as the examples presented in the session, but where I have seen glimpses of this behaviour my sense is that overwhelmingly, the behaviour is the product of environment rather than necessarily any failing on the part of the individual.

The participants in the session, seemed to be made up of managers/coaches rather than out and out developers, which may explain why much of the discussion seemed to presuppose that the fault lay solely with the Hero.

Common environmental factors that I have observed include:-

Perceived ambiguity over who has technical responsibility for a system
Poor performance feedback and/or poorly communicated career development
Lack of trust/respect amongst team mates
Seemingly overwhelming operational issues
Compensation schemes pitting team mates against one another

It is the manager not the Hero who has most influence over these points. So I think that before answering the question ‘What to do when your Hero goes bad?’, a better question, as a manager is ‘What have I done wrong to allow my Hero to go bad?’.

Focus on Teams

Unhelpfully, as with all management problems, the best way to solve the problem is not to have it in the first place. Placing greater emphasis on the performance of the team rather than on the individual can help here. Any action that benefits the whole team is recognised and celebrated so the Hero need not lose prestige by supporting those around him. In fact the Hero’s standing increases since he is now multiplying his own capability through increasing the skills of the team. As a side effect, since the team is now more capable the Hero has more time to spend on the truly difficult problems, which in time, he will pass onto the rest of the team.

Switching focus away from individuals and towards the team is a non trivial exercise, but if the agile movement has brought us anything it is methods to engender collaboration, trust and team level thinking.