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Category: Leadership and Management

  • 5 Productivity Tips for Executives in Leadership & Management Roles

    Here are 5 productivity tips for executives in leadership & management roles. Each tip involves the number 5. Every morning (or the night before), make a prioritized list of the top 5 things you plan to accomplish that day. These are your must-do tasks for the day. At the day’s end (or when making the…

  • Case for a Consistent, Comprehensible & Cost-Effective Vacation Policy

    Case for a Consistent, Comprehensible & Cost-Effective Vacation Policy

    This article makes a case for having a vacation policy that is simple, sane and standard across the organization. Some organizations have unnecessarily complicated vacation policies that require a lot of labor and time to implement, manage and support exceptions for. That is substandard because such vacation policies are costly for the organization, they distract from…

  • Product Maintenance vs. New Development on Web Sites, Mobile Apps and Other Digital Products

    Maintenance of a digital business product (e.g. a Web site, mobile app, or software) refers to the work that includes modifications made after delivery to production to fix bugs, address compliance/security issues, or improve scalability/performance These modifications can be to the product’s software code, configuration, documentation, hardware, or surrounding network. Maintenance is often contrasted with…

  • Management & Technical Career Growth Tracks (v2)

    This second version of the diagram illustrating technical career tracks reflects the following updates since version one: A product management track is now included. (Future updates may include other tracks like design, editorial and marketing.) There is no longer a contributor-level position on the people-management track. This is because most organizations do not have an…

  • Productive Business Meetings

    Here are some suggestions for making business meetings more productive, efficient and effective. Based on readers’ feedback, I have split this article into the following separate blog posts. (Updated: 2023 September 17)

  • A Memo on Leadership by a Colleague

    I regularly ask other people for their advice, insights and knowledge about leadership and management. The following is a memo a colleague recently wrote for me on the subject. [memo begins] Loose your ego Leadership isn’t about you or what you can do and rarely are people motivated to make you look good. Itâ s…

  • Organizing a Digital Technology Department in a Media Company By Functional Areas

    This article presents a system to organize your digital technology department in a media company. It is written for a CTO, CIO or EVP Technology looking for suggestions on organizing or reorganizing your Digital (Web, Mobile) technology department. It is best suited for you if your organization has the following characteristics: You manage all aspects…

  • Confidence in Leaders & Managers and Their Performance: Reinforcing Loop

    When stakeholders, executives and team members have confidence in the abilities of a leader/manager, it results in their lending greater support to that leader/manager. It also tends to make them more forgiving of mistakes made by the leader. Both of these things result in better performance, effectiveness and results from the leader. That, in turn…

  • Some Pathways for Career Development in a Product Engineering Organization

    The diagram below illustrates some pathways for career development in an engineering-focussed product development organization. It shows an organization where software engineering is a major discipline. The pathways shown here map out career paths that we have seen work well in a number of organizations. (There are also other pathways that work well that are not…

  • Trinity Method of Technology Management

    In the Trinity Method of Technology Management, tasks and responsibilities are categorized under three types of roles: Creator, Guardian and Recycler. If you are the CTO or VP of Technology at an organization, your team needs to do three things effectively and regularly: Innovate; improve; create new products, features, services & processes Operate; maintain; execute…

  • CAREER-CLEAR: An Employee Evaluation and Career Development System

    CAREER-CLEAR is a system for doing fair, consistent and constructive employee performance evaluations and determining employee rank, title and compensation. It is meant to be used by supervisors to identify areas for improvement for their employees and to guide their career growth. Employees are scored in a total of 5 categories. Upto 10 points can…

  • Benefits of Using IRC or Group Chat & Video Conference During Incident Management

    When a team of engineers is dealing with a real-time incident, such as a system outage, troubleshooting a problem or dealing with a malicious hacking attack, having excellent communications is critically important. The appropriate communications tool can make a world of difference in dealing with the issue and learning from it afterwards. As important as…