Notes from 13/4–20/4
Career
What does a Director of Engineering do?
Lead people, enforce values, work on the software development lifecycle.
Predictably and consistently deliver high quality software.
The right balance here is for me to focus on outputs, value and costs while letting my team focus on the outcomes. I’m responsible for reporting on how many hours it takes to create a feature, or how many points we can achieve per sprint, or how much it costs to keep my team running. I’m only able to manage what I can measure.
Data
An Introduction to Graph Databases
Can be used to model useful relationships
Lets use this theory to run a more complex query, looking more deeply into the relationships between people and movies. The following Cypher returns an extract of our graph showing movies that were directed by Joseph Russo, and feature Robert Downey Jnr as an actor
MATCH m=(director:Person {name: “joseph russo"})-[r.Directed]->(movie:Movie)<-[a:ActedIn]-(actor:Person {name: "robert downey jnr"}) RETURN director, movie, actor
If we want to perform aggregation, for example to find the total budget of the movies returned above we modify the query slightly, as follows
MATCH m=(director:Person {name: “joseph russo"})-[r.Directed]->(movie:Movie)<-[a:ActedIn]-(actor:Person {name: "robert downey jnr"}) RETURN SUM(movie.budget)
First, lets use this additional data to find the name of everyone who fought Thanos in Avengers Infinity War
MATCH (hero:Character)-[:fought {film: "avengers infinity war"}]->(villain:Character {name: "thanos"}) RETURN hero.name
If we run this, we’ll get four names returned: Iron Man, Captain America, Vision and Black Widow. Let’s now find out who fought Thanos in Engame, but not in Infinity Wars
Match (hero:Character)-[:fought {film: "avengers infinity war"}]->(villain:Character {name: "thanos"}), (hero2:Character)-[:fought {film: "avengers endgame"]->(villain:Character {name:"thanos"}) WITH COLLECT (distinct hero.name) AS AIWheros, COLLECT (distinct hero2.name) as AEheros RETURN [x in AEheros WHERE NOT (x in AIWheros)]
Product
Becoming a Great Product Manager
The ability to visualize the world from someone else’s perspective and understand their feelings. Study it, think about it, and consider how to bring it to your whole team, not just yourself.
We are innovating and that means we cannot know the outcome with certainty. A great PM gets that, embraces it, struggles with it, and still moves the team forward.
22 Lessons From Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letters To Shareholders
For Jeff Bezos, the key to staying innovative and growing is constantly urging employees to “wander” — to pursue creative ideas that, while they might sound odd or useless today, stand to deliver extraordinary value to your customers.
“The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf,” he says. “We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.”
Bezos argues that despite common thinking that high standards are intrinsic to certain people, high standards can be taught in virtually any domain. And if a company wants to stay competitive, it must teach high standards.
As you grow, you need to make an effort to not just get your own standards up, but to build an organization that can develop and recruit new people with high standards.
Two things hinder the ability to cultivate high standards, according to Bezos:
- Scope: Employees are able to recognize high quality in the field, but they have an incorrect idea of how long it’ll take to reach that level themselves
- Recognition: They lack the ability to recognize high quality in the field
“To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be,” writes Bezos.
Bezos offers four strategies to fight complacency:
- Stay focused on the customer
- Be skeptical of proxies
- Stay alert for and quickly adopt trends
- Make high-quality, high-velocity decisions
To remain innovative as you grow, you need to understand which decisions are reversible and should be executed on quickly, and which have lasting consequences and should therefore be mulled over more slowly.
“I believe we are the best place in the world to fail,” he writes, “and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.”
Place your bets where your downside is capped but your upside is unlimited.
Top-down teams are effective at optimizing existing processes and enforcing the completion of work, but only decentralized, bottom-up teams can consistently generate new ideas.
Building a great customer-centric business over the long-term doesn’t happen when you’re only reacting to your competitors.
Proactively delighting your users costs money, but it pays off when you distinguish yourself — your customers stick around for longer and they pay you more.
Amazon has disrupted traditional publishing similarly to how it disrupted traditional retail: by building a platform for other people to use to sell their wares.
Instead of setting goals and judging your company’s efforts using financial outputs, work on perfecting your inputs, and trust that the outputs will handle themselves.
In this letter, Bezos mentions several key inputs he and his team assessed throughout 2009, including:
- The # of reviews added to Amazon products
- The # of different items available for immediate shipment on Amazon Prime
- The # of new product categories available
Missionaries are people who understand the appeal of the old ways. They understand why the “good enough” product is “good enough,” and because of that, no one else is better positioned to disrupt that business than them.
While you need concrete insights and metrics to bet on a new idea, you also need patience and nurturing to make it thrive.
When trying to weigh personal instincts versus quantitative models, use the customer experience to tip the scales.
Decisions that make sense on paper but don’t improve the customer experience may have limited upside. Decisions that undeniably benefit your customers can have significant upside, and sometimes the potential upside is so big that it’s worth risking the numbers not working out.
To achieve both low prices and a great customer experience, harness the power of fixed costs.
Amazon turned their customer experience — their recommendations engine, personalization, etc. — into a fixed cost. It is based on technology that it built and now only pay to maintain, which means it doesn’t get (much) more expensive over time.
For Bezos, focusing on free cash flow provides a clear method of valuing Amazon for internal planning purposes, as well as for investors.
The metric represents how much value each individual share of stock in a company has today and stands to have in the future.
“Ultimately, your determination of cash flow per share will be a strong indicator of the price you might be willing to pay for a share of ownership in any company,” he writes.
While some companies left inventory in stock for long periods of time, Amazon was always focused on minimizing this to a few days at most, and collecting payments from customers before paying suppliers. This avoided lag times and ensured that Amazon continued to have cash coming in while others were bleeding dry.
Prioritizing free cash flow and being extremely disciplined with their operating cash flows gave Amazon a sound foundation they could use to ride out tough times and ultimately come out ahead.
Building on established platforms is the easiest and most expedient route, but one with the least upside.
Established platforms offer the most integration, often have low barriers to entry, and have plenty of accumulated wisdom around them.
At the same time, their growth potential is often limited due to the high pace of technological innovation across industries.
Building on a high-growth platform like Amazon did require a much higher degree of upfront investment in engineering and research, but on the long timeframe of technological improvement, it gives you a much higher chance of building a huge, long-term business.
In business, the most important thing isn’t what your competition is doing. If you’re expending effort trying to follow your rivals’ every move, you’re losing the big picture.
Bezos ended his 1997 letter by reminding Amazon’s shareholders that it was their responsibility to decide whether this was a thesis worth investing in. In the opinions of many analysts of the time, it was not.
His remark was that it was still “Day 1” on the internet. The building at Amazon headquarters where Bezos worked is now called “Day 1,” and he has signed off each letter with the reminder that it’s “still Day 1.” Those who invested with a similar goal of inventing each and every day have been rewarded.
Sustainable Product Strategy: How to Move from Outputs to Outcomes
When you’ve narrowed down the solution space, instead of taking on a large multi-month project, we’ve found it valuable to start with small bets
- Technical or viability risks (e.g.: Can we execute this within a defined time? Can it scale?)
- User risks (e.g.: How desirable is this? Is the solution intuitive? Are people willing to pay more for it?).
A Leader’s Guide to Metrics Reviews
Start by modelling your business, this way you know what are the drivers
You should include metrics that the team is actively trying to move since you’ll want to know whether the initiatives are moving the needle or not. This should include all of the key results that you’ve defined as part of your OKRs.
Tools
The Ultimate Python Beginner’s Handbook
Interesting seeing how exactly people teach Python
