Essential Links in May 2021
Phew - May went by so fast. And since I have started collecting links each month, my lists become bigger and bigger. So this will be the last time, that I put out a monthly article, since I will switch over to weekly articles. By this, I get a smaller list (hopefully) and I can squeeze in a little bit of my own writing.
One of the biggest news for me this month the Connectivity Standards Alliance emerged from the zigbee alliance. With big players like Google, Amazon and Apple they announced matter, an open-source, IP-based connectivity standard built on Thread.
Essentials
- (DE) Christian Riedel describes the Situation-Response-Board. A board to visualize and analyse your situation and what you can (and should) do about it.
- I first stumbled across Westrum and his model of organizational culture in Nicole Forsgren's Accelerate. Here is another, extending article on Westrum's culture topology.
- Are you scaling scrum? Here is a webinar on scaling Nexus - and some lessons learned.
- Here's how miro aligns and builds his products.
- Another article on infoq.com on Journaling your Leadership Action.
Asynchronism
Drew Falkman and Jay Garcia talk about The Rise of Asynchronous Collaboration and What It Means for Development Teams on infoq.com but have in mind what Cal Newport says about asynchronous ping-pong on The Ezra Klein Show. It can hurt your productivity and your well-being. It may send whole organizations into a being busy state.
However, Matt Mullenweg (his company Automattic works from home) lists his 5 level of autonomy, in which asynchronous processes plays a major role.
- How to prioritize your tasks and actions (German).
- Visualizing your work can be key to prioritization and creating the next important valuable item. Here's how you visualize your product work.
- Here is how Instana does their SRE.
- The C4 model can be used to diagram distributed architectures.
- Are you procrastinating your sleep?
Leadership
This month I read the book Liminal Thinking by Dave Grey. It is a beautifully illustrated book that goes much deeper than I thought. It makes me understand what is holding me back sometimes and how. Great read!
- With liminal thinking in mind I stumbled across the 9 attitudes of mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
- As a leader, a good opportunity is to focus on removing waste and solving problems.
- Here is what a conservative, traditional company learned when it changed into a more agile organization (German).
- Pirates can teach us about leadership.
- Here is a letter by Mr. Bezoz focussing on staying hungry and curious.
How are we going to work?
Many of us have gotten their first vaccination. This lets us looking forward to design the way we want to work in the future. Here are some thoughts on that.
- A great article on effective meetings and a few learnings on the way.
- Do you know how to get to consensus in your team?
- Let's have a look at another evolving management model at Haier in China.
- Working remotely is the future of work for some companies.
- Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress fame interviews Twitter‘s CEO Jack Dorsey on getting a company work from home.
Product vs. Project
There have been a lot of discussions around Project vs. Products in this month. Here are some articles on that topic that I had collected over the time.
- Products over Projects.
- What are project and product mindsets and baselines at scrum.org.
- The difference in product and project management
- Product vs. Project Teams.
- Another article on the difference between a project and a product.
The essential background of these stories and articles can be found summarized in Marc Andreessen's famous 2011 Wall Street Journal article Why software is eating the world.
Podcast episodes
Videos
- Authentic conversations and the art of feedback by Coach Takeshi's Mental Model Dōjō.