During the weekend, I realized that I missed something from working in a big organization.
The random coffees and learning from different people. A space to chat about anything without structure.
When I was in big organizations, like ThoughtWorks and Creditas, every week I was able to meet and learn from people I didn’t meet before about topics I didn’t know.
In Barcelona, we have the BcnEng slack community with the 🍩 donuts channel in which we do this random coffees every two weeks, and after a couple of them, I wondered if I could find other people within my network.
So, that’s what I did. And it had an awesome adoption! Already 7 people scheduled the first day.
After the chats, I asked people if it was OK to do a summary of the conversation and learnings, so, here are the ones that agreed 😄
#1. Learn and Development (L&D) and moving from HR pushing courses to pulling HR to enable teams to fill their own skills/capability gaps
We started to talk about her experience with L&D on different companies and how fixed mindset it is.
We both had the experience to be part of a company in which L&D is driven by Human Resources. They owned the goal of promoting a “continuous learning culture”, but most of the time feeling like a continuous learning theater to fill some company objectives that felt to be defined out of the blue.
Some of those activities we acknowledged that didn’t impact the team’s day to day, nor helped them to fill the necessary capabilities/skills to do their job. Yet, we tried to find a better alternative.
I recalled that at Creditas, I had a great experience when I worked with a great professional and better person from the People department. She was energetic, willing to drive change, and supporting to all the employee needs.
We did things different that time, instead of People department pushing the initiative, we inverted the flow. Instead of pushing trainings, learning sessions, and so on, they acted as a pull system. Something like:
Teams create awareness of their needs and skills/capability gaps.
People department acted as an information radiation and supporting function.
Teams made the learning activity as part of the day-to-day job instead of punctual trainings (we kept the trainings, but they were for specific things).
#2. Engineering Strategy, foundations, managers of managers, and why Platform Engineers use K8s
We jumped directly into engineering strategy and in specific about the diagnosis phase. We both consult about engineering strategy, and we shared how we run some workshops. The interesting part was how we approached the engineering strategy when we worked with CTOs vs. how we do with middle management. It was fascinating to see how we came to similar conclusions.
I shared that for the diagnosis phase, I focus on three key aspects:
Foundations.
Which are the basic foundations (good and best practices) that apply to your context that you aren't doing yet. Also, things that you are doing that you shouldn't be doing!Complains.
What's preventing you to reach your goals? What's preventing you to make your job? Which are the things that don't work?Crucial conversations.
Is the group able to talk about the hard things? Are we touching only the surface, or are we able to get into the root causes? Is people avoiding hard conversations because the group doesn't know each other enough good, and then they avoid conflict?
You can see the full description of the posts here.
We also shared about our faith on middle management and how we see a tendency of people aiming to learn how to do engineering strategy better because they know the impact on the people. They want to understand the C-level strategy and implement it the best way possible by understanding the business impact, the engineering needs, and how to not burn people during the process.
That conversation moved us to talk about how Platform Teams can take a central role to make engineering strategy happen, but the tendency to misunderstand Platform Teams with Cloud Infrastructure with K8s for example.
We saw the situation of companies building a set of tools to improve the developer experience to build, run, and monitor solutions when there are multiple players that are already providing a good experience there. We shared that those platform teams that are able to leverage those existing products and just provide a thin platform on top of it are able to impact more their organization.
#3. Remote work-office, Copilot, and Wardley Mapping
I briefly shared why I’m doing random coffees to help me to connect with more people because it is something I miss from working from an office with more people. I was able to connect and learn from other people.
This brought us to the remote vs hybrid vs office work. We both acknowledged that regardless which is the model your company works with, it needs to commit to the model instead of cherry-pick this and that. If you work remotely, be sure you adopt the right practices to help people share knowledge, not feel isolated, etc.
We also shared how hard it would be for people starting their career in remote if the company doesn’t have the right working practices like pairing. This is to ensure that people starting their career can learn the good practices and be supported.
I consider that if you cannot support people starting their careers because you lack the right practices, I would rather suggest you to only hire seniors than do a disservice to them.
Then we also moved into something we are seeing more often, which it is the AI enabled environments. They help to go faster for the developers that already have the foundations. But how less experienced developers are able to deliver features with the help of AI but without understanding the consequences of the code design on the long term.
People starting their career that lack the proper support to understand the consequences of some design decisions that Copilot imposes you, we will see some mess on the midterm.
If the cost of adding code is way more cheap than refactor and remove code, we will create Big Ball of Mud faster while losing the skills to know how to refactor them.
Then we moved to talk about Wardley Mapping due to I'm running the Wardley Mapping BCN Meetup, and we will see each other to do some mapping in person. 🙌
#4. Engineering Strategy, feedback loops, and Wardley Mapping. Finding the right people for the right problem
I met for the first time Óscar and the conversation started with a nice challenge to some ideas I shared about Engineering Strategy here, in my blog. In a post, I share that the shorter the feedback loop for strategy, the better. The shorter the feedback loop, the faster you learn.
If you are doing strategy every year, you are learning less than the ones that do every quarter, than the people that do every week.
The challenges come to each week you cannot be doing a formal strategy, and that’s true! You shouldn’t be designing strategies that are invalidated within a week, it means that at analysis/diagnosis level, you missed important stuff.
The point I wanted to make is about thinking strategically weekly. Build a strategic mindset to help people connect their weekly efforts to how they contribute to the strategy.
Later on, we move into talking a little about Wardley Mapping and how people help into the different phases of a product. The ones that help you build a product from scratch are different from the ones that help you scale a product.
By the end of the conversation, we spoke about how the marked dynamics set some expectations on how to build software by growing the teams vs. leveraging the tooling. This last topic brought me more ideas that I will share in a dedicated post because it is super dense and interesting.
The outcome has been amazing! I didn’t expect that warm adoption and depth conversations with people that I didn’t meet before.
I 💯% recommend this to you all!
If you want a 30-min chat to talk about anything, or about Engineering Strategy, Team Topologies, Wardley Maps, DDD, … use the following link and let’s meet!
Thank you a lot for reading this post 😄.
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