Five learnings from 2022

At the end of each year, I like to reflect and note down some lessons I've learned througout the year. And as a personal challenge, I'd like to share those learnings in public. In this post I list five things I've learned in 2022.

1. Scoping things down is a superpower when building products

I first got introduced to the concept of scoping things down when reading the book Shape up. Shape Up introduces fresh new ideas on how to build products, by introducing a concept of fixed time and variable scope. In this framework, you need to scope things down to be able to fit things into the fixed timeline. From my experience, scoping things down is not at all about cutting corners, but all about simplifying things down to the most basic building blocks - never allowing more features or tweaks to be requested until we’re certain that we can deliver the minimal version on time. We’ve been aggressive about using this technique in my team in the last year, and it’s been immensely useful for us. It leads to strong collaboration between product, design, and engineering while keeping everyone on the same page about what’s most important at any given time.

2. Shipping frequently is a team force multiplier

A few months ago I read a tweet from Paul Graham:

Tech companies must keep shipping cool new things or die. Not because customers require it, but because the best employees do. If your best programmers stop being able to ship new things, they'll leave to work somewhere they can.

It hit me at the perfect time. I had been involved in a project where we were trying to tackle too many things at the same time with no clear end in sight, and the team energy was starting to fade. After reading this tweet I got inspired to rethink our approach, and find ways to break things down into mini-deliverables, to be able to ship to some users every few weeks. This change was a game-changer for the team's energy, and it was pure magic to see how much ownership people took over each goal to be able to stick to our deliverables.

3. Fewer goals lead to an increase in productivity

My team works in 3-week cycles, and during each week of the cycle, we set weekly goals. At the beginning of the year, we often tried to squeeze a lot of things into the weekly goals, because we were ambitious and wanted to get a lot of stuff done. For a reason that is not completely clear to me, this turned out to be a bad idea. Setting too many goals seems to have a negative impact on team productivity. Setting fewer goals seems to have the opposite effect. In fact, we often finish more things when setting fewer goals vs when we set many goals. Trying to keep the focus on too many things seems to be distracting, and from my experience generally leads to a loss in output and energy. Matt Mochary talks about 3 and 3 (3 objectives and 3 key results), as an effective rule-of-thumb when setting company OKRs, which leads me to believe that the rule of 3 in goal setting is generally a good idea.

4. High-momentum teams breed high-momentum people

Lack of momentum in a team kills momentum for even the most ambitious and productive people. It’s for sure hard to constantly keep the momentum high for the long term within a team, but doing so is what sets teams and team morale apart.

5. Well-executed performance reviews are worth the investment

This year I did my first rounds of performance reviews. This post from The Pragmatic Engineer was a big inspiration for me. The post argues that not putting enough effort into performance reviews is a huge mistake since low-quality performance reviews lead to broken trust between an employee and a manager. In short, showing that you know and care about what your direct report has been doing goes a long way. I took the advice from the post to heart and went all in on reviewing the last year for my direct reports, taking the time to come up with thoughtful suggestions about what could be improved and what they might want to focus on next. I must admit it took me a very long time, but damn was it worth it. I’m by no means saying that I’ve got it all figured out, and by no means were the conversations necessarily easy, but getting the chance to dig deep and set the direction going forward in collaboration with my team members felt really good. People felt seen when they saw how much effort I put into it, and came out motivated about taking things to the next level in the next year.