Notes from 5/10–12/10

8 min readOct 11, 2020

COVID-19

How do pandemics end?

Black Death

It is believed the disease, which causes swollen and infected lymph nodes, called buboes, was finally brought under control by strict quarantining and improved sanitation, among other things.

But none of this could have happened without an understanding of how transmission occurred, says Steven Riley, professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College London. This is something that still applies today.

Smallpox

But, thanks to a vaccine developed in 1796 by British doctor Edward Jenner and the efforts of the scientific community, the disease has been completely erased — although it took nearly two centuries to do so.

Smallpox remains the only human disease to have been eradicated this way. Prof Riley regards this feat as one of the greatest achievements of mankind — rivalling the Moon landings.

Cholera

But while improved hygiene and sanitation in the West has removed the threat of the disease, it remains endemic — or common — in many low-income countries and kills between 100,000 and 140,000 people every year, according to the WHO.

HIV/AIDS

HIV could be regarded as an “worst case scenario virus”, says Prof Riley, because of the length of time it takes to develop symptoms and its high fatality rate. It spreads fast because people don’t necessarily know they have it.

However, advances in diagnostic techniques and global public health campaigns — which have changed sexual behaviour and increased the availability of safe injections for drug users — have helped slow the growth in infections.

Despite this, an estimated 690,000 people died from Aids in 2019, according to WHO figures.

Career

Killin strategy: the disruption of management consulting

Information: The data and analyses that take the client’s world, industry, and market position and make sense of it.
Expertise: An experienced operator’s perspective on a problem and the different ways that it can be solved.
Insight: The rigorous, analytical application of expertise to come up with insights that will help the company succeed.
Execution: The roadmap to choosing and implementing the changes to be made.

What’s eating it?

It’s highly dependent on manual (computational) human labor — something that computers are doing more and more of.
It traditionally has very high margins (and doesn’t bill based on outcomes but time spent).
The value is largely time-bound, in the sense that the advice often gets outdated quickly.
The value is largely driven by information asymmetry (knowing things other consultants or companies don’t), which is harder to maintain in the internet age.

Information — dashboards can take that

Experts — Today, the same types of experts that big consultancies have hired for decades can be consulted independently, without needing to pay for the rest of the management consulting package, thanks to so-called “learning networks.” Companies doing this in Europe include Third Bridge and AlphaSights, while in the US, the standout is Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG). GLG and others like it vet experts similar to how a consultancy like McKinsey would, then hires them out to answer companies’ questions on an on-demand basis.

Insights — In fact, virtually every framework to come out of the management consultancies (including the growth-share matrix) has been explained in books, MBA courses, essays, workshops, seminars, and blogs run by ex-BCG, ex-McKinsey, and ex-Bain consultants.

Execution — Among the forces disrupting management consulting forces on the execution front are independent freelancer networks like Eden McCallum and Business Talent Group (BTG).

Eden McCallum and BTG bring ex-consultants and other strategically trained, experienced operators together to form lean teams for client projects, and contract them out without the overhead of working with a conventional management consulting firm.

There are billions of dollars a year in massive, business-rethinking kinds of projects that CEOs can only justify to their board if they hire a big name like Bain or BCG. But McCallum and BTG aren’t necessarily angling to take on the entire consulting market today. They don’t need to overcome the branding of those firms to beat them, because they can chip away from the small end. They can build a client base among companies looking for more niche help and more routine projects with better defined parameters and clearer expectations.

Going remote: biggest risk for product teams

Coach your team on online interactions
Even with the best communication habits, remote teams are more likely to deal with miscommunications. So, when an email or text seems rude, assume it’s a miscommunication, rather than a deliberate effort to be rude. While learning and establishing new dynamics, it’s always better to try to handle sensitive conversations over video, to include body language that helps maintain trust.
Evangelize best practices of productive communication patterns (read this: The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling)
Model desired behavior
Be more direct and upfront about what you need or the behavior you want to see. Deliberately foster a climate in which people can speak freely, without fear of retribution. When something goes wrong, frame it as an opportunity to learn rather than a blame-fest. And if someone does start to bad-mouth a colleague, cut off the discussion and redirect it to the issue at hand.
Show understanding
Although this is a general rule, it’s even more important when interacting at distance to acknowledge other people’s point of view, validate their comments and recap what they have to say. We can’t understand and solve a problem without exploring how the other person sees it.
When conversations veer into difficult territory, try to convert opposition into partnership, repositioning yourself to be on the same side, so that you’re focused on the same problem.
Listen
Don’t forget to carry on regular 1:1s or even continuous direct communications. It’s important more than ever for managers to establish an open dialog with their team, to spot sooner rather than later signs of deteriorating situations; it also helps to identify and support individuals with less “social cues” that might otherwise become dangerous for the dynamics of the team.

Startup hiring guide

This is an incredible amount of work! You’ve essentially got to constantly search for talent

Data

I Scraped more than 1k Top Machine Learning Github Profiles and this is what I Found

Seems like one of those fun weekend projects

DisInfoVis: How to Understand Networks of Disinformation Through Visualization

It looks really good, the idea of time and tweets and the common hashtags

Development

Forget Scrum, this delivery methodology actually works (Part 2)

The Project Manager is the most senior person in the Novum Team, so the entire Build Team report to this person from a functional perspective (not legal line management — this sits with the Development Manager if there is one).

The Project Manager “empowers” the Novum Team, and makes sure everyone follows the Novum methodology to the letter, and that everyone on the team is productive. The Project Manager, as the most senior member in the Novum Team, may need to make technical decisions when a technical person more senior than the Lead Developer is not around.

Depending on the type of project, the Build Team can be extended to include the following sub-teams:

UX/UI Designer(s) (if building a website)
a BA (If the PO is too busy to capture requirements)
An Architect (If there is a lot a system design work, and this would stop the Lead Developer from being productive)
DevOps Engineer (If you are working with The Cloud)
Automation Testers (A special breed of Tester, these testers are more expensive than your usual Testers, but they speed up your testing and make you more Agile — only hire these if you have an enormous budget)
DBA/Data Engineer (If there is too much database work or really complicated database work)

System Design: Designing a Scalable & Highly Available URL Shortener

Starts from the specific requirements and then goes into the actual system architecture

Data

The Ultimate Data Scientist Cheat Sheet for Data Scientists

A list of lists!

Product

How to make things happen

A large percentage of my time as a PM (project manager) was spent making ordered lists. An ordered list is just a column of things, put in order of importance. I’m convinced that despite all of the knowledge and skills I was expected to have and use, in total, all I really did was make ordered lists. I collected things that had to be done — requirements, features, bugs, whatever — and put them in an order of importance to the project. I spent hours and days refining and revising these lists, integrating new ideas and information, debating and discussing them with others, always making sure they were rock solid. Then, once we had that list in place, I’d drive and lead the team as hard as possible to follow things in the defined order. Sometimes, these lists involved how my own time should be spent on a given day; other times, the lists involved what entire teams of people would do over weeks or months. But the process and the effect were the same.

What slows progress and wastes the most time on projects is confusion about what the goals are or which things should come before which other things. Many miscommunications and missteps happen because person A assumed one priority (make it faster), and person B assumed another (make it more stable). This is true for programmers, testers, marketers, and entire teams of people. If these conflicts can be avoided, more time can be spent actually progressing toward the project goals.

Here are some sample questions:

What problem are we trying to solve?
If there are multiple problems, which one is most important?
How does this problem relate to or impact our goals?
What is the simplest way to fix this that will allow us to meet our goals?

Always have a sense for the critical path of:

The project’s engineering work (as described briefly earlier)
The project’s high-level decision-making process (who is slowing the team down?)
The team’s processes for building code or triaging bugs (are there needless forms, meetings, or approvals?)
The production process of propping content to the Web or intranet
Any meeting, situation, or process that impacts project goals

Being savvy and environment-aware is most important in the following situations: