Each week I share an Engineering wide “Plan of the week” that details where I’m focussing.
I do this cause, as a leader, I want visibility and transparency for everyone in my wider team on where I spend my time. It’s also an opportunity to shape culture and share, show that I’m a human, and share my thoughts on things.
Over time I’ve experimented with different templates, here is how they have evolved
Template 02
Brief personal experience Top of Mind Performance Update Miscellaneous
Mark’s Plan for the week - 1 Aug to 5th Aug
Hi folks, I hope you all had a fabulous weekend. With the wind blowing most of the weekend, I took the opportunity to go kite flying and had a ton of fun with the stunt kites and my kids!
Top of Mind No surprises here.. project ABC remains top of mind. This week we have several meetings with individuals and teams around setting ourselves up for success. There have been some great questions asked in those meetings. If you haven’t looked, a FAQ section gives more info. There is a follow-up All Hands scheduled for this Friday, where we will take everyone in Product Delivery through how we are evolving for this.
Performance Update Recognising that we still need to do work to take the high-level organisation OKRs one layer deeper by bringing this into engineering/product delivery with initiatives. That’s high on my list once we get over the project eXperience work this week.
Miscellaneous HACKATHON - following up on my update in the July Company meeting, please sign up for the hackathon if you are based in our Auckland offices. You can find out more at #tmp-hackathon-2022 - there has been an amazing amount of work put into making this an enjoyable event and we are encouraging your involvement.
Template 01
Personal experience about something this last week Main focus at work Other things happening for work Motivational / growth thoughts
Example
Mark’s plan for the week (28th of March to 1st of April)
This week I’m not working on Monday as I’m away on my son’s school camp - thanks to the power of scheduled slack messages you should still be receiving this on Monday! With a shortened week there are still important things underway: ABCD - last week we had a number of challenges around ABCD that’s required us to adjust the plan for how we support the SWAT team. I’ll be reviewing these changes and giving feedback to our internal and ABCD leadership. While never ideal to have a bumpy ride, I’m impressed around how the team has operated and supported each other. The experience has given me greater insights into where we need to focus and just reinforced how important it is to get our observability matured and some of our other processes and so on.
Some other things happening this week as well:
- Performance review calibration - there is an initial calibration meeting around performance ratings.
- Understanding Platform - continuing conversations with key people to deepen understanding of platform.
- Remaining DR priorities
- Hiring for this next financial year
Final thing I would like to mention this week another extract from the SVG Newsletter that resonated. The extract was titled Ideas vs Directives it goes… Senior Leaders need to be very cognisant of the power of their words, especially when engaging with individual contributor product managers, designers and engineers. Senior leaders are constantly exposed to many trends, and it is not unusual for them to get inspired with many different ideas. In a healthy product organisation, product teams want to hear these ideas BUT they need to know when it’s simply an idea to be considered and possibly explored, or when this is literally a senior leader exercising his or her prerogative to issue a directive. Unless explicitly stated as a directive, all discussions about ideas are assumed to be just ideas to be considered, along with many others from several valuable sources. During their product discovery work, the product teams will test out many ideas in order to discover a solution that works. Now my ask… when you hear me talking an idea through, please see it as an idea that can be challenged or questioned. Over time I’ve learned that I talk to think. I appreciate when someone comes back to me and says… hey you said this, but it doesn’t make sense because of XYZ. I appreciate this at all levels so don’t feel that you need to be in a senior role to reach out and “challenge” an idea. What I do ask is when something doesn’t make sense have courage to reach out directly. It’s way more powerful than questioning an idea indirectly via the grapevine or anonymously.
