Learning from Giants #30
Learning from Giants #30
Programming time is tricky, Ensuring product excellence by Marty Cagan, and Square's awesome 1-on-1 toolkit.
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Programming time is pretty hard
"The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that's correct... sort of. But if you're stuck building software that deals with time, there's so much more to consider."
What do you mean by time is weird? Where to start...
"Samoa didn't have December 30, 2011. They went straight from December 29 to December 31."
"February 30 happened at least twice in history."
"Timezones aren't tied to hours: many timezone offsets happen at 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and so on."
That should be enough to keep you from rolling out your own time manipulation library. Here are a few principles to avoid time's many traps:
"Keep everything simple as much as possible."
"Handle more in the client." Use UTC on the server as much as you can. Leave the heavy lifting for input and display to the client.
"Leverage standards and let others do the heavy lifting." Every language has direct access to a TZ database and at least one popular time manipulation library. Just use that.
📗 Zach Holman was an early engineer at Github and later founded a Calendar company. UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right? contains their advice on dealing with time as programmers. After an enlightening education on the history and weird edge cases of time, Zach gives these precious principles.
Ensuring product excellence
Excellence in products is precious but extremely tricky to enforce.
"Over the years, this concept has been referred to by many different names, always necessarily vague, but all striving to convey the same thing: "desirability," "aha moments," "wow factor," "magic experiences," or "customer delight," to list just a few."
"The concept is that an effective product that achieves results is critical, but sometimes we want to go even beyond that, to provide something special."
But how can you as an organization or leader enforce this without undermining your team’s sense of empowerment and ownership?
"This is why it's a difficult topic to discuss. The last thing I want to do is encourage Steve Jobs wannabes."
But as a product leader, you're ultimately responsible for that excellence. When the bar is too low, you're the ultimate bar raiser. But for this to stick and become cultural, you must do more than give feedback.
"My favorite place to capture this dimension of product excellence is in the product principles, which typically are developed alongside a strong and compelling product vision."
Start from that strong alignment of your teams on the mission, find the excellence spark in your teams (everyone wants to be proud of their work, right?), and keep encouraging it, making excellence visible, and celebrated.
📗 Marty Cagan's Ensuring excellence is a very nuanced article that was complex to summarize, considering how dense it already is. It starts from this critical thought that the best companies have something more than excellent product strategy and execution. And you can have it too.
Square’s 1-on-1 toolkit
If you have a team of 8 direct reports, do 1-on-1s every two weeks; you spend 10% of your time in 1-on-1s.
Beyond spent hours, they're also one of your main growth vectors for your team, a definition of your impact as a manager. You should invest time and effort into making them as valuable as possible.
"The 1-on-1 Toolkit is my mission control for managing my teams; it's where we define actionable goals that are tied to specific sections of the career ladder, track progress towards each goal, set 1:1 agendas so that time is well-spent and focused on clear objectives, and capture kudos—all in one place."
Here are the toolkit's components:
"A partnership agreement". Agree on what matters for you and your managee and what you expect from each other.
"Organized meeting notes, action items, reminders. Keeping these agenda items up to date is critical to maximizing our 1-on-1 time."
"An up-to-date development plan." It can be revisited quarterly and followed closely to ensure you keep sight of the employee's goals.
"A Hype document." A repository of everything the employee has achieved, all the praise they have received, and other small items that show and hype their impact.
"Learning resources." You will often end up recommending readings, courses, or other resources. This page is an invitation to capitalize on them.
📗 Jennifer Emick developed the 1-on-1 Toolkit during their time as a Design Manager at Square. It was so valuable that it quickly spread in the company, which led them to share it widely. Thank you, Jennifer, for making all our 1-on-1s better!