Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Author: Pawel Brodzinski

  • Role of Trust

    It is said that formal agreements are for bad times. As far as everything goes well we can forget about papers even when there are some of these. Either way it’s all about trust.

    A question: what happens when a subcontractor doesn’t do their work well? Do you take a signed papers and count forfeits? Or you trust them and you believe you can find a solution which is acceptable for both sides?

    What about relations with your bosses or your customers?

    Probably in each situation we have a different level of pain. Sometimes we’d use our formal weapons faster, sometimes we’d try to avoid that as long as possible. Where’s the difference? Trust. The more you trust someone the longer you’ll be talking with them as human with another human, not as lawyer with another lawyer.

    There are people who you don’t trust much, maybe you just don’t know them or they let you down before. When doing business with them you’d focus on formal agreements much. There are those who you don’t trust at all and you won’t do anything with them even if they’d pay you well. Of course there are also people who you trust much and their word weights even more than signed paper.

    Which kind of people do you work for now? Which kind would like to work for? If answers differ think about it.

  • Evidence Based Scheduling – One More Way to Improve Your Estimates

    Somehow my recent discussions are mostly about estimating. Last discussion on PM Clinic happens to be on the very same subject. It reminded me about great technique which can improve your software estimates. It is called Evidence Based Scheduling and I’ve learned this from Joel Spolsky’s article.

    The basic concept is pretty simple. Jack the Developer gets the task. Actually a bunch of them. He delivers his estimates basing on his guts. Estimates are most likely crappy but at the moment it doesn’t matter much. As Jack does his work he tracks how much time he really spends on the task. It may happen it takes two days instead of planned 4-hour effort. Velocity for this task is 0,25 and it goes to the history of Jack. When Jack’s history is long enough you can use it to judge how crappy his estimates are.

    Evidence Based Scheduling uses Monte Carlo simulation which takes some effort to calculate results. However Joel brings some good news here:

    “Most estimators get the scale wrong but the relative estimates right. Everything takes longer than expected. (…) This common estimator has very consistent velocities, but they’re below 1.0. For example, {0.6, 0.5, 0.6, 0.6, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.6}”

    After completing a dozen of tasks you can get pretty much insight which number you should use to multiply Jack’s estimates to get something close to reality. Of course full-blown simulation will probably lead to better results but you get the idea.

    There’s one more gem in Joel’s posting which is worth stressing:

    “Fix bugs as you find them, and charge the time back to the original task. You can’t schedule a single bug fix in advance, because you don’t know what bugs you’re going to have. When bugs are found in new code, charge the time to the original task that you implemented incorrectly. This will help EBS predict the time it takes to get fully debugged code, not just working code.”

    I know it brings quite a lot of effort for Jack the Developer, since sometimes he fixes bugs really fast and accounting time spent on each bug fix to proper original task adds enough hassle to be reluctant to do so. However the ends are worth means this time.

    I strongly recommend you reading whole article as it delivers all the details about Evidence Based Scheduling.

  • What’s the Use of Wild Guesses Instead of Proper Estimation?

    OK, this one is controversial. Software estimating. How to do it good, or good enough? First of all, when talking about the subject we all can learn a lot from Glen Alleman who bring quite an uncommon perspective to the area as he’s based in industries which tolerate missed deadlines with much less patience than the average.

    Now, what’s the point? If you asked me how software estimating should be done I’d direct you to Steve McConnell book on the subject. Believe me or not, he didn’t write anything good (if anything at all) about role of wild guessing in software estimation. Which doesn’t make me avoiding wild guesses at all times.

    Actually sometimes I make good use of them.

    Now, go flame me.

    What’s the use of wild guesses instead of proper estimation? Wild guesses don’t have to be so wild if you ask a right person. If I ask my development manager how long something would take and it’s a piece of software he’s fairly familiar with in vast majority of cases he’ll come with some guess. It should be reasonable enough to judge whether it’d take 9 months to do the job or rather just a few weeks.

    I don’t consider that as a full-blown estimate. It’s hard to use it as a base to create a schedule but still it’s a valuable feedback to judge whether and when your team is capable to overtake the project or decide if the whole thing is worth further presales effort. If you need to develop a bunch of tools which your competitors already have in their product portfolio chances are good you won’t match their schedules and/or prices. If you add that your team is backed up for the next half of the year it’s probably not worth investing effort to do more than just getting first coarse-grained approximation.

    Yes, every wild guess should be considered very carefully since after all it’s, well, just a wild guess not an estimate done according to rules. However doing proper estimation is quite an effort and sometimes you need something rough but quick instead of exact but demanding.

    And remember: don’t ever, ever allow your wild guesses to be sent to sales department.

  • Role of Leaders in Startups

    Who should be a leader of a startup? An easy question. One of founders. Or even better each of them. They are naturally predestined to leading role. They got the idea. They own the company. They keep all things running.

    Now the more important question: what kind of leaders are they?

    Why is it so important you ask? Well, having a great idea, being a CEO of a company and managing it on a daily basis tells you nothing about leadership. You can end up working either for a great leader or for a sick asshole. No matter which one is true as far as the startup has money leaders won’t change anytime soon.

    Because of a small size of the startup role of leaders is defined a bit differently. Not only they motivate their teams and set up a strategy of the company but they’re also personally responsible for building company culture and enabling company growth.

    In a big organization one asshole doesn’t make much difference – you either work for dozens of them or he’s going to be the only low-performer among great leaders. In a big organizations company culture is already set and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of people to change it (for better or worse). In a big organization one person won’t hamper growth even if that’s CEO who believes leadership is all about yelling at people.

    In a startup one person makes a difference if he leads the company. If he’s a sick weirdo don’t expect healthy atmosphere all over the place. If he makes working for him a hell you won’t see many long-runners in the team as everyone comes and goes as soon as they realize things just won’t change with that kind of boss. In small organizations poor leaders are the main reason why companies suck.

    If you worked for a person who is physically unable to build anything bigger than a couple dozens of people or creating healthy atmosphere at work you exactly know what I’m talking about. Big corporations can be filled with these types and they’ll manage. Startups don’t have luxury to be lead be them.

    That’s a final post of Entreprenurs Time series. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Please leave your feedback and let me know whether I should post this kind of series in the future.

     

  • Lessons Learned: Startup Failure Part 2

    Last time I shared mistakes we made while working on Overto – startup which was closed down some time ago. Today another part – things we did right and are worth replaying next time I’ll be engaged in a startup.

    Setting up a company behind

    Setting a company, which is quite an effort in Poland, from the very beginning was really a good idea. All founders knew each other well so lack of trust wasn’t the main reason standing behind the decision. We just wanted to give ourselves a bit of motivation making it a real business. However thing we didn’t really plan was that we gained much credibility showing company’s details instead of letting people think the whole thing was created by some student during holidays and won’t be supported in any way in future. Seeing a company behind a service doesn’t guarantee you it won’t die but at least you can be sure someone cares.

    Long discussions before start

    Before launching the project we had very long discussions about what we plan to do and how we want to do it. Of course not every detail was checked but when I compare Overto to other startupish projects I was working on it was really well-thought at the beginning.

    Wide range of roles covered with our experience

    We had really good pack to run an internet service. Development, administration, user support – in all those areas we had experience from the past. There weren’t many things which could have surprise us. We weren’t forced to look for a specialist in any technical aspect of building our application.

    Working in the same place

    For some time we worked in the same building which helped much in decision-making process. We could all meet ad-hoc whenever something important had to be decided. After some time we spread among different places and suddenly we saw how much value was in working in the same office.

    Despite we invested some money to fund the project I don’t treat it as a loss. For experience I gained it was a low price. Another time when I’ll decide to jump to that kind of project chances of success will be bigger.

    First part of lessons learned from startup failure

    Whole Entrepreneurs Time series.

  • Lessons Learned: Startup Failure Part 1

    Some time ago we closed down Overto – startup I was involved in. It was a failure – pretty obvious thing since we’ve closed the service. Since we learn much on our mistakes I think a reliable analysis why the business have failed should be valuable for you. For the beginning things we screwed.

    No one working full time

    From the very beginning we knew none of people engaged is willing to leave their daily jobs to commit fully to the startup. We thought we’d able to run internet service after hours. To some point that was true. As far as nothing bad was happening with the servers and the application it was all fine. We were working on new features when we had enough free time. Problems started when we faced some issues with our infrastructure. We weren’t able to resolve issues on the fly and had several downtimes. You can guess how it influenced user experience. That also backfired on service development since we had to focus on current problems instead of adding new functionalities. Lack of person working full-time and being able to deal with maintenance and bug fixing was the most important reason of failure.

    Catching the market

    That’s partially a consequence of the previous point. Since we spent majority of our limited time on trying to keep the service running we weren’t able to catch the changing market. We needed to cover new areas to move the application to another level but we couldn’t complete ongoing development. The whole project stopped in beta version and for users it didn’t look like anything was about to change.

    Lack of marketing skills

    Thin line between life and death of internet service is a number of users. For the initial period of time the numbers were growing systematically. Then we hit the ceiling of what we could achieve effortlessly. It was a time to do some marketing. Unfortunately no one of us was skilled in that area. Even worse, no one had enough time to fill the gap. That would be another stopper if we dealt with the problems mentioned above.

    Business model

    We hadn’t checked very well a business model we set up on the beginning. We were surprised a couple of our features weren’t as unique as we’d initially thought. Ironically that wasn’t a big problem since we had a bunch of ideas how to adjust the strategy in a new situation. Anyway, you should plan to change your initial business model.

    Screwed chance of selling the business

    After we’d decided we won’t be able to maintain the service in the long run we had a chance to sell it. To make a long story short we screwed negotiations starting with way too high price. We thought more about how much work we put into the project than how much it can be worth for potential buyers. Things are worth as much as one’s willing to pay for them, no matter how long it took you to produce them.

    Waiting too long with final decisions

    I think that one is a bit sentimental. Since the service was our child we were reluctant to make a decision about closing it faster and limit losses. We’ve been tricking ourselves thinking that everything would be fine while we couldn’t get the application back to work properly.

    Second part of lessons learned from startup failure

    Whole Entrepreneurs Time series.

  • Difference between Managers and Leaders

    When talking about managers people often confuse two terms: a manager and a leader. The difference is pretty simple however.

    Management is a job while leadership is an attribute.

    You can be promoted to a manager role, but you can’t be promoted to be a leader. To become one you need to work your butt out showing your leadership in the battlefield. You have to inspire people, make them believe they can achieve a goal and motivate them to work harder. Or smarter. Whatever. That’s definitely not enough to tell them “go and get that and better be quick.”

    In normal situation managers, who aren’t leaders, usually end their work when they tell their teams what to do. Micromanagers go even further. They tell what and how exactly thing should be done. Anyway they’re barely a kind of task-dealers.

    Leaders not only point goals and give out tasks but also encourage people to show their own initiative and creativity. They take decisions when it’s needed and are always ready to face any problem team can encounter. You’d willfully follow the leader while you wouldn’t follow the manager if you didn’t have to. Not that you often have a choice.

    Good manager is always a good leader while poor manager is barely a white collar.

  • A Failure Is an Option

    One of my ex-CEOs told me once a story about situation he’d have to face when he’d been a newbie manager. Shortening the story (it’s dull anyway, you can just skip it) a bit there was serious hardware malfunction in a company. There were no spare parts on service stock and they were to deliver their services next day, which was impossible to do without working hardware. The manager felt he had to do something to get machines working again. Unfortunately there was virtually no chance for him to succeed. Company failed to meet their deadlines and he felt as it was partially his fault, which wasn’t true.

    The moral of the story is:

    A failure is an option. Face it.

    By the way I’ve heard the story just after I finally rescued a project after 80-hour over-weekend battle with short brakes to get some sleep. Yes, it sounded totally irrelevant, but what would you expect from CEOs in that matter anyway?

    The moral however is very wise. A failure is an option. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you try there are objective obstacles you can’t deal with. It can happen even if you’re the greatest Project Management Superhero in the galaxy and the biggest projects eat from your hand.

    If you ask me what to do, well, you won’t be surprised with the answer – prepare yourself. Sure, you can sit and cry your eyes out but you won’t get The Most Creative PM Technique Prize for that.

    First thing is to acknowledge you can fail. To be honest most of managers don’t get through this one. You know, you need to tell your ego you’re not as perfect as you think. That’s a tough task. Especially if your ego is so big it goes 5 meters ahead of you.

    Second, to have clean conscience, make sure you did everything you could to avoid failure before giving up. After all you’d prefer to be fairly sure you couldn’t make it, right?

    Third, prepare rescue plan. When you’re finished with hitting the wall hard with your head, have a plan how to call for an ambulance. It was said already that crying over spilled milk or crushed head isn’t the best idea in the world.

    I always smile whenever the reaction for question about potential problem is “we’ll manage, we’re superheroes, don’t ask” kind of approach. And believe me I see that a lot recently. I should have several great stories to tell soon.

  • Post Mortem Basics

    What is it?

    To make long story short post mortem is a little discussion after a project or important part of project. The team discusses what was done well and what was screwed. Before discussion one person gets feedback from all team members to bring a food for thought. Outcomes are used in future projects.

    What’s in it for me?

    Why to do post mortems? You usually feel what went wrong and what went well. But do all team members feel the same? Does a developer care if communication with a client went perfectly? Does a project manager understand all architecture flaws developers had to face? Does quality assurance team was aware about complex hardware installation part?

    Post mortems bring two main outcomes.

    1. Knowledge sharing. Everyone adds their two cents. All perspectives are included. Even the least important team member can bring a refreshing insight about project.

    2. Written summary. The process of preparing post mortems forces a person to prepare a piece of document before discussion. You just raise your chances to have a written summary after all which won’t fade in a week.

    How to do it?

    The scenario is simple:

    1. A person who knows a project well, ask all team members to answer three questions:
    • What went well and should be repeated in future projects?
    • What was on a good path and should be improved in future projects?
    • What went wrong and should be avoided in future projects?

    2. Then the person needs a lot of squeezing to get answers from most people from a project team, as many people won’t just answer a polite request.

    3. All answers are assembled into one summary. That’s part can be tricky as it sometimes happen the same thing will be put in different categories by different people.

    4. The whole thing is discussed and adjusted during team meeting, when everyone can add anything what comes to her mind.

    5. Post mortem can be, and should be, used to improve future projects.

    The questions can be adjusted if you feel like it, although I find the more general they are the more interesting things people will bring in answers. You don’t force people to change their perspectives, you just let them exploit their area of competence.

    When to do it?

    Definitely when a project is finished. But when you run a project which lasts three quarters you won’t remember all the issues you had to resolve during first phases after all. Then it’s quite a good idea to run post mortems after each important milestone.

    When you shouldn’t bother?

    If you don’t plan to use post mortem outcomes to improve future projects, don’t waste your time. Looking back is worthwhile only when it is a tool to improve future.

  • A Measure of Good Management

    One of measures of good management is a number of situations when people, not a manager, decide how to do things. When the manager allows people to make their decisions. Let them become accountable.

    I’d like to see technical design document, but you decide what should be in, what out and how the whole thing will look like. Hey, you guys will be working on that later, not me.

    We need formalized risk management in the project, but it’s you who decide how to run whole thing. You know a project team better. You know what will and what will not work.

    We have some emergency in server room in another city and it has to be dealt with. Find a way to fix the problem and to minimize impact on other tasks. I don’t have all the data to make the best choice.

    The more you hear those kinds the better manager you work with.