Last year I wrote a few words about the “Time to Value” metric mentioned by Adrian Cockcroft in his “Innovation at Speed” talk at Re:Invent last year. This talk is about how to get better at software-based innovation (obviously, this involves using the cloud heavily — that’s why AWS is talking about it). Since in OLX we’re also looking at how to get a bit better at measuring our product development performance, I decided to reflect a little bit on this time to value metric to better understand what it means, what type of behavior the metric incentivizes and how to evaluate if that’s something your company is ready for (or even interested in).

Sorry for the link bait title. It was either this or “27 ideas on how to make better decisions,” and I’ve developed a spam filter in my brain that filters out titles with numbers in them. Ok, let’s go on topic. A while ago I wrote about well-considered decisions. I argued documenting decisions in a somewhat structured way is a great way to create trust and document the rationale behind things.

In a previous post I wrote about the “No More Feedback” book. I’m not done with this topic yet. In fact, I skipped a concept Carol Sanford focuses on quite a bit in the book: your essence. I realize how hippie this may sound, but as usual: bear with me. So, dear reader, let’s continue our journey to make sense of a world without feedback, a world where everything you assumed to be “right” is turned up-side-down.

At OLX I send out a weekly update email every Friday. It is an attempt to be transparent about what I’ve been working on that week and helps me reflect. Sometimes I also muse a bit on more broader topics I’ve been thinking about, or books I’ve read. This is an excerpt of this Friday’s email, I thought it may be interesting for people outside of the company as well.

I sometimes joke that one half of my job is approving things, the other half is asking questions. Of course, asking any question isn’t all that hard, asking the right question is a skill. However, there are a few tricks. There are a couple of questions that prove valuable over and over. Let’s do some branding here and let’s call them power questions. Are you ready for some power? Here’s one: “Is this the right problem?

Or: How to fight the hierarchy of disappointment Chances are that in your company, once it hits a certain size, the hierarchy of disappointment makes an appearance — and, not to be hyperbolic about it, it is slowly killing your company. “What the hell is the hierarchy of disappointment!?” At the top of this hierarchy is the Business. In the Business we identify opportunities in the market that are going to be huge (some would say yuge).

One thing I learned to do before giving a talk is to practice it beforehand. I figured this out in high school after blacking out fairly consistently during presentations in front of the class. A harsh start to my career as a speaker. To avoid this from happening again, I would practice presentations before, by presenting them to with the wall as my audience. It was shocking how often slides with their nice pictures, and occasional bullet point, seemed perfectly logical and sensible while editing them in Powerpoint, until I started to narrate them, and they made no sense at all.

“I’d like to become an engineering manager one day, what books should I read?" — Anonymous I have three recommendations, and they’re ordered on purpose: The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier This is the book to start with. It’s the book I wish existed when I started my career. It starts at the individual contributor level and explains the roles and expectations all the way up there to senior tech leadership.

A few years ago I wrote Reading for Busy People. Last week somebody asked if I cannot write something similar, but about writing. While it may not be visible online, I actually have been writing a lot recently, but most of it is internally focused (we use Facebook’s Workplace, where I have a space I use as an internal blog). So, how does a “busy” person get time to write?

This happens too often: Employee has an idea for a new initiative (e.g. feature, workshop, hackathon, event storming session, newsletter, offsite, recurring meeting). Manager: “That’s great, we support initiatives, let’s do it!” Initiative happens; people participate; success is declared: “Initiative happened, lots of people participated, it was a success!” Was it, though? It’s quite often that we, as the initiator of some new idea, are so excited we are blind to its uselessness.