issue 23 - week of february 5, 2024

Editor’s Note

It’s Black History Month!! It would be my favorite time of year if it wasn’t 20 degrees outside, lol. 🤪 Always a #floridagirl at heart.

And yes “thee” Tracy Chapman has been on repeat since the Grammy’s. What an icon!

I wrote this issue about cognitive load because all of us are doing our best out here. We have our families, our jobs, our lives...

And because of that, I think a lot about employee experience. I believe great program leads can make a team member’s experience working towards a common goal a little bit easier, a little less stressful, and maybe even a little more fun.

No one is perfect. These launches are a journey of growth, not just a fixed milestone. I encourage all of you program leads to think more about how can you bring an entire ecosystem on that journey of growth with you. How you can create movements and memories together.

Also, in this issue:

• How to rebuild trust with senior management

• Organizational design optimized for fast flow and delivery

• How to leverage AI to ask questions of large PDF documents

Stay blessed fam!

Until next Wednesday,

Phedra, Founder at HCPM

this week’s picks

recs for your delivery goals - uncommon sources with nuggets of wisdom

1. 📺 Watching: We’ve all been there. Missed a milestone. Lost a temper. Made the wrong bet. Didn’t hit the revenue targets. And yes - there’s a lot of talk about learning from failure. However, you have to do a little more than learn and promise it won’t happen again. This 3-minute watch is action-packed with advice on how to rebuild trust with senior management.

2. 🎧 Listening: Most managers fear giving feedback. We're afraid to "confront" our people. We worry about pushback. We don't know how to do it, so we're afraid we'll be clumsy. But feedback isn't about confronting. And most importantly, it's about future behavior. This podcast is a nice mindset adjustment on why feedback is so important for our teams.

3. 📚 Reading: Organizational design and delivery best practices are top of mind for me these days. Team Topologies has been a very informative take on orgs being designed around the flow of software delivery rather than traditional hierarchies or silos. I also love this take on team norms as an API. Get this book, you won’t regret it. #thanksangel

4. Trying out: I find myself consuming tons of documents these days and there’s not enough time in the world. When I’m in a pinch and getting inconsistent results with [insert large language model here], humata.ai has been coming through for me. Sometimes, I need a certain level of detail from a document and I can’t always rely on having the best prompt for.

Have a recommendation? Send it to: [email protected].

feature: the cognitive load diaries

We’re going to start this issue with an exhale. :::::Woo-Sah:::::

Everything. Everywhere. All at once.

Sometimes it’s like that.

You want to make an impact,

🤔 But you can’t figure out why you were added to this meeting series.

🤺 Two of your team members fell out in front of a client.

🤯 We’re funneling the decisions of 100 people through 1 person because we can’t distribute context in a timely fashion.

🙃 People won’t talk to each other and everything just keeps getting escalated.

💀 Slack notifications are going off every 3 minutes - all day.

🛠 Tooling is from 1995.

👛 Strategy changes every week because the client can’t make up their mind.

🌏 Tons of miscommunication due to a global team.

📚 There’s no onboarding or training.

And you know what, sometimes it’s like this on a project or program.

What do you do? How do you do it? Who’s responsible to make sure things improve?

People aren’t going to like this answer, but it’s everyone. You have to be the change you want to see. Trying to pin all of this on a singular person (typically a program manager or agile lead) is not the right approach. Sure we can drive and facilitate improvement, but everyone is responsible for making sure it’s a success. We’re all adults, right? Right.

There’s too much emphasis on blame games. So yes program leads can be accountable for all the things, including culture - but every single last person on the team is responsible for making things happen.

For example, if we’re doing scrum and we’re building an API or something highly technical, is the product manager the only one who can write stories? Absolutely not. In most cases, it’s helpful for engineers to jump in and add additional context.

If there’s no onboarding process for engineers, would be appropriate for the program lead to walk them through company coding standards or grant access to servers, databases, or repos? You guessed it. Negatory.

So how can you be the kind of program leader to help your team cultivate the mindset of “it’s ok to solve your problems”? Or “it’s ok to create & iterate on your own processes.” #notascrumleader or am I?

As program leaders, what we should do is arm ourselves with a toolbox to help guide our team on how to think about and solve their problems.

• Need some delegation help? The Eisenhower matrix may help.

• Need change management? ADKAR for the win!

• Need an MVP? The lean product playbook has your back.

• Need better ways of information flow? Dashboards, batching requests, and self-serve options can save lives.

• Team Miscommunications? Core working hours can help.

• Ineffective meetings? Meeting audits can change your life.

See what I mean? Imagine how long it would take for one person to fix this on a team. Or across 5 teams? Or 20?!

So quick recap.

What do you do? Acknowledge the issues. Empower the team. Solve things one at a time. If you focus on everything, you focus on nothing.

How do you do it? Provide tactics, frameworks, and principles to teach the team(s) how to think through their challenges. Assist with experimentation and feedback loops. Give free hugs.

Who’s responsible? Everyone.

Got it? Capiche.

tryna remind y’all to

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