Randy Silver in The Myth of Velocity:

When we measure how quickly teams ship stories & code, we’re measuring speed—how quickly they move. It’s only when we measure the effect it has on the target metric—the value that we’re after—that we’re actually looking at velocity.

It doesn’t matter how much you ship if the end result doesn’t deliver value to your customers and your company. If you’re measuring story points, you’ve fallen into the trap of measuring outputs, not outcomes. When we talk about slowing down to speed up, this is the point: the only thing that matters in this equation is how quickly we can deliver actual value. Everything else is theater.

In You can’t stand under my umbrella the Raw Signal team makes the case for when it’s not appropriate for managers to be “sh*t umbrellas” for their teams:

When things are steady, and people know the right things to work on, teams are constrained by velocity. We know the course we’re racing, the question is just how fast we can go. In that context, it makes sense for a manager to clear every obstacle out of our way. But during times of significant change, teams are constrained by agility. It’s not that velocity doesn’t matter, it still does. But when everything has changed about the race, we need the ability to steer. A manager who tries to preserve velocity at all costs risks running us into a wall.

They go on to talk about how to Accept, Adapt, and Act in such moments of significant change.

Frank Tisellano in The Cynical PM Framework, a business-first approach to product:

Every product, every feature even, serves a function in your business. It has one of three jobs:

• Acquire new users or customers
• Retain those users or customers
• Expand engagement or revenue per user or customer

Underwater Photographer of the Year—2023 Winners. These are so great.

Impostered. Great post from Mandy Brown about the need to reframe how we think about imposter syndrome. “I’ve started to think less about imposter syndrome (a description of a person’s experience with it) and more about being impostered (a framing that draws attention to the systems and structures that lead people to believe they are imposters). While the former framing remains useful in many contexts, the latter creates space to consider not only the symptoms but the root cause of the phenomena.” [everythingchanges.us]

What’s So Funny? Very good essay about the current state of stand-up comedy, and what makes something funny. “The audience whooping and applauding Roseanne’s ‘anti-woke’ comedy is not reacting with laughter at a previously un-acknowledged truth, but instead expressing approval for the point of view that they already knew they agreed with. This is not the same thing as laughter in response to a joke.” [biblioracle.substack.com]

Why Are You Seeing So Many Bad Digital Ads Now? “Social media advertising, once a niche art practiced by specialist agencies, is now easily available to anyone. Many of them are eschewing targeted ads — placements intended to reach specific audiences, usually at a higher cost — in favor of a cheaper spray-and-pray approach online, hoping to catch the attention of gullible or bored shoppers.” [NYT gift link]

Traffic Lights Need a Fourth Color, Study Says: Here’s Why. Yeah what could possibly go wrong. “For the dawning age of the self-driving car, transportation engineers from North Carolina State University are proposing the addition of a fourth ‘white light’ whose function would be to alert humans to simply ‘follow the car in front of them.’” [popularmechanics.com]

The people who live inside airplanes. Ok I kind of like this idea. “By the end, she had a fully functional home, with over 1,500 square feet of living space, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and even a hot tub — where the cockpit used to be. All for less than $30,000, or about $60,000 in today’s money.” [cnn.com]

Here’s an interesting article by Will Larson with advice on how to move past incident response to reliability in our products. Among other things it reminded me to watch out for “incident legalism”:

Incident legalism is when an incident response and analysis program—trying to better drive reliability improvements—becomes focused on compliance and loses empathy for the engineers and teams operating within the program’s processes.

He goes on to propose a more holistic, expanded model for reliability to help teams diagnose their systemic problems—and how to solve them:

Finally, you study the mitigated incidents, determining how to prevent them from recurring, and they become remediated incidents.

This is a great post by Chase Warrington for the Twist Async newsletter on How to build human connections in an async workplace. They make this really important point about what human connection is actually about on a remote team:

I’ve come to realize that team culture and human connection is primarily built by how you work together—not how you socialize together. […]

The work we do is what actually brings us together. That’s ok (and frankly healthy) to admit. One of the biggest benefits of remote work is that it provides you the opportunity to spend more on the people and things you care about outside of work. Let’s not sabotage that with a bunch of forced and awkward social events for teammates to attend on top of their work duties.

I think we forget this too often. Doing a fun online social activity together doesn’t improve team culture if we haven’t also made sure that actually working together is safe, healthy, and enjoyable.