Tech | Salman Ansari

Staying Technically Sharp

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You were once an engineer, and now you’re an engineering leader. Suddenly, you realize that management is not the next step in a development career, it’s actually a totally different path. You’re challenged in completely new ways, and often feel unprepared. You need to learn an entirely new set of skills – empathy building, effective communication, expectation setting, performance tracking, and so on. That’s a lot to learn all at once, which is why management is so challenging when you first get started (check out my posts on effective 1-on-1s and hiring for diversity and inclusion for some helpful tips).

It’s almost as if you’re starting from scratch. Almost. The truth is that your past as an individual contributor helps you tremendously as an engineering leader. It’s crucial to understand why, so that you can do what’s necessary to maintain your technical edge. Ultimately, your technical skills are a critical part of your engineering leadership effectiveness.

Why It Matters

Here are just a few reasons why it’s still worth it to keep your technical skills active:

Unblocking Your Team: In many cases, developers will not ask for your help even when they need it. They worry about being perceived as needing help, or are unsure of your own ability to help in a given domain. So, it’s up to you to be forward and offer your help. That said, if you are rusty (or simply believe you are rusty, which is equivalent in this case), your ability to help will be compromised. Remember that you were trusted with leadership due to your own past achievements as an individual contributor. Your technical skills and experience are a valuable asset, and it’s likely there will be lots of problems that could be solved much faster with your input. Do whatever it takes to maintain them.
Respect: The most powerful authority is earned, not given. Your title may serve to clarify expectations of your role relative to your team, but ultimately when difficulties arise, people follow those they trust. This is especially the case with engineers — even if you’re not discussing a code problem, they are more likely to take your advice / follow your lead if they respect you. The best way to earn and maintain the respect of your team is to demonstrate your technical capacity through solving technical challenges. Your past history can help, but its value erodes quickly over time, so it’s important to keep contributing.
Scaled Learning: One of the things I sometimes hear from developers is that they worry about a management role limiting their learning. In my experience, I actually find that I can learn more as a manager (albeit a different kind of learning). At one stage, engineers were coming to me with only the most difficult problems they ran into. We would talk about it, design a solution, they’d try it, and come back to me with the results. I would learn from this, but I’d also be learning from 5-8 other engineers at once. So in essence, my learning potential had multiplied significantly when it came to software design & architecture.
Personal Productivity: With management, we don’t often see the ‘fruits of our labor’ for months or years, if ever. Even when we do see them, good leadership ethics encourages us not to take credit and instead to congratulate our team. This can leave us with precious few opportunities to feel like we’re actually accomplishing anything. Writing (and shipping) code is one of the most direct and satisfying ways to feel productive. We can build something, push it out, and see the result of our work immediately. Yes, it’s okay to do something for yourself — your own motivation levels must be taken care of if you intend to motivate others.

With these motivations in mind, let’s go over some of the best ways to sharpen our technical skills, given the limitations on time and bandwidth as leaders.

1. Low Priority Features

If you’re working in a small team, you likely never quite have the bandwidth you need to deliver everything on your roadmap. This is actually a good thing as it forces ruthless prioritization, but there’s no such thing as a perfect roadmap, and so the more bandwidth the better. This is where you come in — if there are small / low priority features that could have high value, you should take the opportunity to just go and get them done. Often, these can be tasks that would almost take as long to explain + write up a task to assign + prioritize with a developer than it would for you to just do it.

The low priority modifier here is key. What you absolutely want to avoid is being a blocker for a critical task. This will only serve to frustrate you, your team, and eventually deteriorate their trust in your ability to deliver. In short: help the marathon runners, but don’t get in the way.

2. Bug Squashing

While investigations can often seem hopeless, and production resolution plans can be tedious, I find few things in life are more satisfying than finding answers to challenging mysteries. Often, there are issues that have been plaguing a team or product for a while, but no one wants to invest the extra time to figure it out.

If you’re able to tackle one of them, your team will be incredibly grateful to you, and you’ll save them some bandwidth that they can then use to work on critical features. Again, like with features, do not take on a mission critical production downtime issue — instead, choose long-standing low-impact bugs that only come with a positive if you resolve them, and no real negative impact if you don’t (i.e. in the worst case, things stay the same).

3. Internal Tools

As a leader, you’ll have a much better perspective of how the team is performing from a high level. You’ll be able to see process bottlenecks much faster than anyone inside the process. As such, you’re in the best position to not just recommend and document changes, but to implement and improve tools to automate and optimize the process. This can be a very rewarding exercise, as you’ll feel the productivity boost of putting this change in place, and then see the results in a more high-functioning team (thus, making your job as a leader much easier).

If the changes you’re working on succeed and grow significantly in impact, be wary of the potential for you to become a bottleneck on a critical path. Ultimately, if it becomes important enough to be considered a “high priority” task, then you should now be thinking about allocating your team resources onto it. Remind yourself that the goal here was to provide some value and exercise technically, not to own the component forever.

4. Pair Programming

If your team doesn’t practice pair programming already, doing a few pair sessions with them could be a great way to start. While I’m not an advocate of pair programming 100% of the time, I do believe it can be a valuable way to decrease errors and increase speed for certain tasks. Generally, I find that if it’s a really complex new feature or a sensitive refactor, having two engineers work together for a few hours / days can be a great way to power through it and come out with a higher degree of confidence in the solution.

As a manager, you can ask to simply join in on whatever an engineer is working on for a day. It’s an easy ask, as it doesn’t really burden them too much (it’s up to you to provide value though), and can be a great way to improve your rapport with the engineer. Be warned — the real challenge will likely be your own schedule, which is not designed to allow you a full day of focus. You will have to be a bit ruthless about ensuring you’re not interrupted while pairing. Otherwise, it will just annoy both you and the engineer, and you likely won’t get that much out of it.

Personally, I found this difficult to do successfully at first, but over time it became easier. Eventually, it helped me get a lot closer to my engineers, contribute value, and stay updated with the code.

5. Newsletters & Blogs

Sometimes it can seem like there’s no point in subscribing to all those technical blogs and newsletters if we’re not writing code day-to-day. However, I find them to be fantastic ways to stay up to date with the fast-moving pace of web and mobile development. It’s critical that you maintain perspective on the latest tools and frameworks: you need to ensure that new projects consider all options (and that you can have an informed conversation about them with your team), and you need to occasionally re-evaluate whether certain technologies you’re using are no longer being maintained.

6. Books & Online Courses

Sometimes new technologies will come along that may change the fundamental paradigm of how you approach certain software problems. Even if they don’t necessarily fulfill their lofty visions, it can be valuable to understand them so that you are prepared for the future (whether this means using it in products you’re working on, or doing early preparation for future job opportunities). Some examples of resources I leveraged recently while operating as a CTO:

Taking an online course on data science to truly understand the fundamental mechanics of machine learning and models, as I was working with a data scientist we had hired to build out new features
Reading a book on Elixir, as it is an interesting new language that solves certain types of scale problems unlike any other (e.g. WhatsApp leverages it to handle its incredibly high scale messaging platform)
Taking an online class about React Native, even though I’ve been fully immersed in native iOS development, because I wanted to understand what the value proposition really is and whether I should consider it for future projects

7. Side Projects

With all the work on our plates, it’s rare to have free time to engage in a coding side project. Still, if there’s an idea you’d like to build, this can be a really wonderful way to feel productive, build something useful, sharpen your skills, and have fun. Remember not to look at it as something you’re doing in order to launch a successful business - look at it as a means to play, with the other benefits being a bonus.

Side Note: If you understand how hard it is to find time outside your primary work to build side projects, hopefully you can see why it is just as hard for full-time developers to do so. Keep this in mind when interviewing.

As you can see, there are so many different ways you can keep learning technically as a leader. Hopefully it’s also clear how doing so can maximize not just your own potential but that of your team. Ultimately, your ability to find time for these activities really depends on how you are prioritizing work at your company.

What are your favorite techniques? Let me know in the comments!

Effective 1-on-1s

Sun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

You’re in yet another boring 1-on-1 meeting. It seems like all you do is go over random updates, or just chat about life. You could be using this time to do real work instead!

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The 1-on-1 meeting, when done right, can be the most powerful tool for building alignment and clarity in teams. If you’re a manager, you need to be using them to their full potential, otherwise you are flying blind. You might still make it to your destination, but you’ll smash into a lot of obstacles on the way. Even if you’re not a manager, you should understand the support you should be getting (it’s up to you whether you want to ask for it).

Luckily, doing them well is pretty straightforward. Focus on building better habits, and then practice, practice, practice.

Let’s dive in.

Keep regular meetings

You should be meeting once every 2 weeks. Monthly meetings tend to only work when you already have a high level of trust / communication. Never meet less than once a month.
If you must cancel a meeting, reschedule it immediately rather than skipping it.
DO NOT ask them if they are “okay with skipping”. They will almost always say yes, not because they don’t need one, but because they don’t want to appear needy.
Remember that this meeting is your commitment to show that you care, and that they are a priority. Every cancellation sends a message. What kind of signal do you want to give?

Listen more, talk less

Let your team member set some agenda items beforehand (tools can help with this, see below). This will make it far easier for you to jump to any pressing concerns or challenges they’re working on.
If you don’t have an agenda from them, ask them at the beginning of the meeting. This can be as simple as asking, “What’s on your mind?”.
Embrace awkward silences. Your goal is to try and flush out what is worrying them. It’s your job to force the conversation into sometimes uncomfortable territory.
Avoid using 1-on-1s as a status update meeting. There are far better (asynchronous) ways to get status updates. Make the most of this valuable time you are spending together.
Do not spend the entire meeting (or any of it!) on your phone or laptop (take notes in a notebook if needed). You are here to listen. Give them your full attention. If you aren’t listening, they will definitely notice, and likely be less open to sharing in the future. This will make it more difficult over time to understand their concerns.

Address the elephant in the room

Your team member may not want to discuss it, but 1-on-1s can be a great medium to raise and discuss sensitive issues.
If you do this right, you can learn a lot about how the controversial message is being received. Pay close attention to their tone and body language. Such invaluable signals are often missed when discussing tricky topics in group settings.
This can be exhausting if you do this with your whole team, but it’s still worth it. Would you rather spend a few hours diving into this and figure out the state of affairs, or leave things up in the air? Remember that by the time any real issues surface, they may have evolved into something far worse.

Take the temperature

Take notes during/after your 1-on-1 to identify key issues raised. Highlight any areas for yourself that might be a flag, and be sure to followup on it as soon as possible.
Record a simple “green/yellow/red” measure for each team member. Look out for extended patterns of yellow/red…
Pay close attention to their tone, words, and body language. You can usually see the signs of a disgruntled employee way before it’s too late.
Be pro-active. It only takes a couple of skipped 1-on-1s to miss even the strongest warning signals. Companies move fast, but so do people.

Track performance

Use 1-on-1s for tracking details about incidents related to performance. Sometimes, it can be difficult to see when an individual is underperforming. Each week is a mix of good and bad, so things never seem that bad. That is, until you look at your notes over a three month period, and notice some disturbing patterns.
Communicate your concerns in each meeting. Provide clear guidance to get them addressed. Use the recurring meeting as the platform for reinforcing your expectations. Be as specific as possible.
If you have to take the difficult decision of letting someone go, these notes will enable you to decide with data. It’s not only about defensibility and fairness, it’s also about peace of mind during a very stressful period.
You can track positive performance achievements the same way. Use this technique to help justify your recommendations for compensation or other awards.

Follow up

I recommend sending out emails every meeting for the following:

Reminder emails the day before a meeting, with a reminder of action items from last meeting. Team members should reply with their desired agenda items for this meeting.
Followup emails after the meeting with the action items agreed upon in the meeting.

If you wish to automate the above, consider using an online 1-on-1 management tool. There are a few out there, but the one I’ve used with success is Lighthouse (if you do sign up, tell em I sent you!).

Be sure to actually review the previous action items in the next meeting. Doing so sets the expectation that you are both going to follow-up on any commitments made. In turn, this reinforces the value of the meetings to both parties.

Hopefully you’ve gotten a sense of how important 1-on-1s are for your organization. Try applying a new technique for a couple weeks, and see how it works for you. The best path to long-term improvement is iterative changes.

What other techniques have you employed with success? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear them!

Hiring for Diversity & Inclusion

Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There are many reasons why building diverse teams within inclusive environments is beneficial. Others have written about them at length, and the cases are compelling. If you aren’t already familiar with the data and rationale, please take the time to do some research on it. Without strong intrinsic motivation from your leadership, change is unlikely.

With that in mind, here are a few motivations that drive me:

Product: As we build products for a wide audience (especially consumer facing), we often lack a diversity of perspective in the people building it. Despite how disciplined one might be in terms of trying not to just “build for yourself”, the creative ideas that come from people who have totally different experiences than us simply cannot be emulated by will. So, our products end up suffering and a large portion of our consumer audience does not resonate with them as strongly as they could have.
Talent: Hiring is already one of the hardest things to do in terms of finding great talent without breaking the bank. Underrepresented groups are often not in the typical places we hire, and so there is a lot of untapped talent out there if we go to the right places (similar argument is often made for remote workers, it’s slightly different but core idea is the same).
Opportunity: This one is not economical but rather more around principles: We should be doing everything in our power to ensure that people actually have a truly equal opportunity to succeed and contribute to common goals. The world as it exists today has systemic discrimination which makes it easier for people carrying privilege to access certain positions and opportunities (to better understand this issue, read Ijeoma Oluo’s wonderful book. It then follows that in order to truly provide equal opportunities we need to go out of our way to provide access for those that are underprivileged. This is not over-biasing to hire them exclusively, but rather compensating for the extra obstacles they have to go through just to be seen and heard, and giving them equal voice in the conversation of our hiring decisions.

Typically, people tend to focus on (1) and (2), but personally I believe (3) is just the right thing to do, and so that is often what drives me the most.

This post is for those of you who are ready to start improving your teams today. In my last startup, I spent a lot of time working to build a healthy level of diversity in the team. While we were successful in achieving a strong representation of women in the company, we struggled in other areas. I learned a lot through the process, and am hoping some of these techniques will help you in your own efforts.

Here are 5 simple ways to improve the diversity of your hiring pipeline:

1. Write inclusive job descriptions

The easiest step is to review your job descriptions. They likely have language that discourages certain groups, without you even realizing it. Studies have shown that certain terms and words can be off-putting to women vs men. Also, women tend to avoid applying to jobs unless they feel 100% qualified. By contrast, men will generally apply as long as they feel they meet the majority of criteria. Reshma Saujani did an excellent TED talk on this topic.

To address this, you should:

Remove terms that could be discouraging or aggressive to certain groups. Textio is a great tool to help with this.
Encourage applicants to apply even if they don’t meet 100% of the criteria
Explicitly encourage candidates from underrepresented groups to apply. Emphasizing your intent and policies around equal representation

Try and imagine reading your own job descriptions from as many different perspectives as possible. Then ask yourself, “If I was X, would I really apply to this job?”

2. Create a welcoming office environment

It’s important to recognize that even with the best intentions of a hiring manager, the external perception of your company can work against you. What do the photos on your website show? It may seem welcoming to you, but try to imagine a candidate of color, a woman, or a transgendered individual. Do you paint a picture of uniformity, or inclusivity?

This is a tough thing to work on early on, but I found that once you get this right, it can yield exponential returns. Imagine a woman being interviewed by your team of all men. Even if she liked the role, she would be taking on significant cultural risk by accepting the position. Can she rely on your team to be considerate, thoughtful and inclusive of her, given they already have a team of ten without a single woman? Is the job worth that kind of risk?

By contrast, imagine her attending an interview and seeing even one other woman. The risk she takes drops dramatically. The same effect of course applies to other underrepresented groups. The lesson is here is that within each group, the first hire will be tough, but it’ll only get easier from there.

3. Look for “Culture add” not “Culture fit”

We all tend to have ideas in our head of what the perfect candidate looks like. While it’s important to have a sense of the skill-sets and experience you’re looking for, it’s equally important not to include specific schools or degrees in our “required” list of traits in the candidate. We need to remember that not everyone benefits from the privileges of top tier schools, and when they succeed in the field despite that, it demonstrates a level of perseverance and dedication that is often hard to find.

Often, hiring managers use the term “culture fit” to describe a personal, unspoken list of credentials they filter for. As a result, it becomes an invisible wall that certain candidates cannot get past, regardless of their qualifications.

Take down the wall.

Instead, look for candidates that will be a “culture add”, and evolve the overall culture of the team by extending it with their unique background and perspectives.

4. Enroll in diversity training

Building a diverse hiring funnel is hard work. It takes effort and perseverance to get right. Sometimes, it can help to get some guidance to ensure that the whole team (not just the hiring manager) is on the same page in terms of building the right environment and working against unconscious bias. Luckily, there are some great institutions focused on this issue that provide great resources and training (e.g. Women 2.0, ParadigmIQ).

If you do schedule trainings, everyone on your team should attend. While you may be interested in it for the hiring best practices, the more crucial training will likely be for your team to learn how to build and maintain an inclusive office environment.

5. Post in diversity-focused job boards

Hiring managers sometimes make a token effort to look for diverse candidates, only to give up a short time later, citing a lack of diverse candidates in their applicants list.

Are the candidates not there, or are you not looking for them in the right places? Is it really that surprising that candidates who don’t conform to the typical stereotypes for the role also don’t hang out in the typical social networks / job boards / etc.?

Thankfully, there are now job boards which focus specifically on reaching diverse candidates (here’s a good list). The goal should not be to post only in these boards, but to use them as an additional channel in your overall pipeline.

The logic behind this is simple: go where the candidates are.

Building diverse teams is not easy. It takes consistent action, perseverance and dedication. Still, from both a moral and economic perspective, it’s totally worth the effort.

If there are other techniques or resources that you’ve used with success, let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear from you. Together, we can look forward to smarter, more inclusive, and healthier hiring practices.