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1. Constant communication with users to figure out what issues are impacting them and what they would like to do with the product in the future. 2. Trying to c
by tyleo 5y ago
1. Constant communication with users to figure out what issues are impacting them and what they would like to do with the product in the future.
2. Trying to convince management to focus on the right things. In practice this is really just me repeating the same thing in meetings and 1:1s until they happen as I gather more and more data from users directly, through analytics and share perspectives from people I manage.
3. Other engineers I’ve met over the course of my career. I also try to read for 30 min in the morning. I read everything from self help sorta books to deeply technical books about my area of expertise.
4. Having used Jira and Azure DevOps, scheduling tools still don’t seem great. The PM I work with prepares a schedule in excel with me every quarter and we revisit it every few weeks. People look at that like 5x as much as they look at our planning tool and it takes like 1/10th the time to edit or less.
EDIT: My team is 4 people including myself. 2 senior, 2 junior.
- handrous 5y ago> 4. Having used Jira and Azure DevOps, scheduling tools still don’t seem great. The PM I work with prepares a schedule in excel with me every quarter and we revisit it every few weeks. People look at that like 5x as much as they look at our planning tool and it takes like 1/10th the time to edit or less. I've a suspicion that in an ideal world, reporting/planning tools for management and day-to-day task tracking for teams would never touch in any kind of automated way. I think the desire for an automated chain all the way from ICs up to reports to higher management makes those tools suck both as reporting/planning tools and as tools for coordinating the actual work. I also think it'd be damn hard to sell that vision to management ("you want to make it harder for us to see exactly what everyone's doing at any time, and introduce a step designed for someone to fudge numbers or lie to us?" 1) Yes, and 2) They're already fudging numbers and lying, you've just pushed that step all the way to the bottom of the stack, at a cost to actual productivity and team-level transparency.)
- MattGaiser 5y agoI am relatively new to the workforce, but I am struck by the amount of time spent reporting estimate, redoing estimates, and planning work.
- jk20 5y agoYeah, you noticed? These activities did not exist when IT was driven by enthusiastic and clever developers rather than lazy managers creating artificial activities in order to justify their existence.