There’s some really good advice for job seekers in Carilu Dietrich’s post 10 Most Important Metrics For Evaluating a Company:

Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is one of the best ways to see if a tech company is healthy and growing. It measures the expansion or contraction of a company’s existing customer revenue over a given period. NDR takes into account the revenue lost from churn and increased revenue from upselling, cross-selling, and renewals from existing cusomers.

I would also add Gross Revenue Retention to that list. It describes how much revenue a company keeps from its existing customers over a specific period, not including any new revenue from new customers. So, if a company started the year with $100 from its existing customers and ended the year with $90, even if they lost some customers but upsold others, the gross revenue retention would be 90%. It helps guage how good a company is at keeping its current customers happy and continuing to spend money, without taking into account any new business they’ve gained.

The Reforge team has a long post on How To Master the Art of Managing Up. I find this aspect especially important:

Those who have mastered managing up will package problems in a way that takes their managers’ constraints into account,  including time, lack of resources, or competing priorities. 

Your approach to packaging and communicating difficult situations can make the difference between managing up effectively and just causing more chaos for your manager.

They go on to provide some very good, practical tips for how to package problems effectively.

This is such a great post by Will Larson about onboarding executives into a new role. His recommendations for topics to cover in the first two weeks are especially good. Like this:

Where can the new executive find real data to inform themselves, rather than relying on existing narratives? The best executives will listen to you, but won’t fully believe anything until they’re able to find data to substantiate your perspective. That’s not because they don’t trust you, but because any seasoned executive has been burned by trusting someone who fervently believed something that ultimately wasn’t true.”

And this:

Who do they need to spend time with to understand the current state and the company’s implicit power structure? Especially the longest tenured employees who uniquely hold parts of the business in their heads, and individuals who have significant influence over the executive team that wouldn’t be obvious from the reporting hierarchy.

Turns out there’s a Donella Meadows quote for everything:

Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Blake Thorne on The LaunchNotes Podcast. I think I’m a little rusty with the speaking thing, but I did have a lot of fun here. We covered a bunch of topics, including how people got into product management before Inspired was published, how to enable autonomy and ownership in product teams, the value of writing and publishing what you learn, and also somehow… my favorite kettle. Give it a listen if you’re into that sort of thing!

I’m sure we’ve all seen those “here’s how to work with me” documents (and the controversies around them), but I like this slightly different take. In her post 9 Managers in 4 Years: Creating Continuity in Chaos Genevieve Conley Gambill shares a framework for helping our managers understand our skills, our work, and our career goals:

• Foundation – What are my unique strengths and capabilities?
• Trajectory – How do I view my current role and performance?
• Aspirations – What am I working towards in the future? 
• Support – What do I need to adjust or build on to get there?

She also shares a great Google Doc template with more details. The post goes into more detail on each section of the framework.

Marco Rogers has been an engineer and manager of engineers for 20 years. In this post he shares some short, practical (but not always easy to follow!) advice for engineers. A few of my favorites:

• Learn what the true scope of the project needs to be. Back away from “story points” and understand what the project needs to accomplish. More context about the goals will help you negotiate what’s in and what’s out of scope.
• Collaborate on designs. Designs never have the level of detail that matters. When you run into UX problems, work with people to develop a solution. Don’t just ask for more mocks. Own the details of what you’re building.
• Don’t just write code. Solve problems. Make sure you understand the value of your work and you talk to people about that. Not just “features”. For example, “this needs to ship by Fall because it’s our big strategic bet for the year.” Tell people how to achieve the strategic goal.

Read the rest of his post for the others.

I love this post on the personal brand paradox by Debbie Millman:

But rather than manufacturing a personal brand, why not build a reputation? Why not develop our character? Imagine what we could learn from each other if we felt worthy as we are instead of who we project ourselves to be. Imagine if we could design a way to share who we are without shame or hubris.

Tracy Durnell builds on this:

I’m more interested in following people as people — while I might have been drawn to certain blogs in the past because of the topic, the reason I keep reading many of them is having gotten to know the writer.

Those two posts articulate why I’ve decided to relax a little bit on the blog this year. For too long I didn’t really post here any more because it was so hard to get over my own self-imposed “this is worthy of a post” line. But these days I’m so much less interested in “building a brand” than I am in just… having fun and, well, being a person. So I am sharing things I find interesting, I am publishing unfinished thoughts alongside the deeply-researched posts. And I am slowly getting comfortable with posting more personal things as well (like yesterday’s LotR post).

I know this is the year of saying “this is the year of the personal blog” so I’m sure you’re pretty tired of hearing it from yet another person. But seriously, consider it. Consider thinking out loud and sharing those thoughts on a place that you own. Plant that digital garden—it might just give you life.

In the post How New Managers Fail Individual Contributors Camille Fournier makes a great point about the split between “managerial” and “technical” career tracks:

Most people become managers right at the point where career tracks split between “technical” and “management” specializations. The result is that many new managers have most recently been very technical, yet they have no idea what it means to climb the technical track, but they will be managing people who want to follow that path. To be a great manager, you can’t afford to let the ICs on your team feel that they have no career path, so it’s up to you to manage this well.

She goes on to to list five pitfalls that new managers should work to avoid in order to set their direct reports up for success.

• Surreal Animal Mashups by Ingo Lindmeier. This one lives up to the title.
• Interesting research on Time Savings When Working from Home and what we’re spending that extra time on. It’s mostly for more work! “The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. […] Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.”
• See also: Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek. “Among the reporting countries in the 4 Day Week study, revenues rose an average of 8.14% and increased a whopping 37.55% in comparison with the same period the previous year.”
• But then also see: Job searching and interviewing is a nightmare — and only getting worse. “It’s important to remember that if a company’s hiring process feels off, working there might feel off, too.”
• I’m never relinquishing my closet of DVDs. I can definitely relate—it’s why I still buy vinyl and CDs. “Unless you have a physical disc in hand, you really don’t have control over what happens to it.”
• Wonders of Street View. Weird things picked up by Google Street View. Easy to get way too lost in these.
• I’ve been spending more time on Mastodon now that Ivory is available for iOS. It’s a wonderful app and it’s really fun over there. Come join us!