Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

So if you ever took a psychology class, or attended a fancy party with someone who did, you might be familiar with the marshmallow experiment. My wife will ask my kids from time-to-time “do you want to do your homework now or later?” It might not come as a surprise to you that they always say “later”. On these kinds of requests, I have been known to cryptically utter the comment “one marshmallow” within earshot.

I have found myself doing the same thing at work. When building teams and products, sometimes people like to make the easy decisions first. Ask for the strongest engineer to be on your team. Pick the shortest task to complete at the start of the sprint. There are lots of places where you can find a clear “one marshmallow” moment.

Sometimes you benefit from delaying that immediate gratification. For career management purposes, you might need to take a different approach to deliverables. Sometimes you might actually benefit from this too. I have seen multiple times when people have delayed the most risky thing on their project, to the end, only to have that blow up and cause them to miss a deliverable. If you defer taking the easier tasks, you might make some painful conversations less painful by taking on the riskier work first, and making adjustments early in the delivery process. We can discuss the pain of changing deadlines later. Let’s get back to those marshmallows!

Deciding when you want to take one marshmallow vs two marshmallows is important. If you are learning to become a manager, it might be easier for you to manage a strong engineer who basically does not need managing. What will you learn from that? A large number of engineering managers optimize themselves for this situation, and essentially push all the necessary crucial conversations and decision making elsewhere. At one point in my career, I was one of a few managers of teams who did not have any names to contribute to a reduction-in-force moment. The leader of the group quite rightly asked everyone else “why aren’t you addressing the problems in your teams instead of just waiting for me to RIF them for you?”

It is a really good question. I had already put the people who needed corrections on performance improvement plans, and in some cases they did not recover. I chose to take on the work of trying to improve people on my team, as well as taking some of the “more interesting” management challenges. Eventually it became clear to everyone that when you got moved to one of John’s teams, you were either a high maintenance rockstar, or a struggling developer. The challenge for some people was figuring out which was which.

We are coming up on the month of March. This is “international quit your crappy job” month for many people, because your bonus check is in the bank, and you did not get the rewards you were expecting for your work.

When looking at your next job, will you have lots of experience with tough projects and tough situations because you are a two marshmallow thinker? Or will you struggle to be considered for more lucrative opportunities and upgrades to your role because you opted for one marshmallow one too many times?

It is… food for thought.

Thank you for reading along! In the spirit of today’s post, I suggest you buy this clearly-Amazon-affiliated-hideously-overpriced bucket of marshmallows. You can use this to experiment on anyone in your household as to whether or not they are a one or two marshmallow person. See you next week.

This might come as a total surprise to you, but something on the internet made me angry this week. Come to think of it, this is now the third time this year it has happened. The three things that have tilted me are the Dungeons and Dragons OGL license kerfuffle over at Hasbro, the “account sharing” announcements at Netflix, and now most recently, the announcement for changes to 2FA (two factor authentication) over at Twitter.

Each of these three things are incredibly damaging to brands that I have come to use and trust, and honestly, I am heavily rethinking my relationship as a customer with each of them.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Let’s start with Hasbro. I have been a tabletop games enthusiast for pretty close to forty years now. The past decade has seen a massive renaissance in the tabletop games space, as evidenced by Netflix’s “Stranger Things”, Critical Role, and Yet Another Dungeons And Dragons Movie. People in the mainstream have taken to Dungeons and Dragons in a big way—they have made fetch happen.

For some reason, the leadership at the company has declared their Dungeons and Dragons properties to be “under monetized”, and they put out a “draft” change to their licensing that went from zero fees to twenty five percent fees for people making over $750,000 dollars.

Insert record-scratch noise.

There are a lot of people who feel that they floated the agreement to see how much fans of the franchise would react compared to creators. A considerable number of people online unsubbed from the Dungeons and Dragons online subscription product to make sure their voices were heard, and the people responsible for business decisions quickly walked back their proposed changes.

For me, that was too little too late. I am fucking gone as a customer. I am a few weeks away from ordering a replacement game system and doing my double-donut best to persuade anyone within listening distance to do the same. What Hasbro did here was to take a shot at the community of creators with which I self-identify. I have been making my own Dungeons and Dragons campaign materials for the entirety of my gaming lifetime, and I do not know about you, but I dream to get paid someday to do this for a living, even if it is a part-time hobby.

Their decision to go after the creator community for revenues makes sense to the business guy in me, but the sheer aggression of their initial ask was so ludicrous that I am not interested in even listening to anything more that they have to say. Going forward, there are plenty of other, smaller companies who can happily take my money for their systems. If they ever get to Hasbro-size as a business, I would hope they make a decision like “hey, let’s start with a five percent tax for anyone in the million dollars range” or something similar. I bet if Hasbro would have started there, they would have had a much more positive response from the creator community. After all, some people pay more than five percent in state taxes!

Next up, let’s discuss Netflix. I am going to ignore the fact that they flip a coin for canceling new shows. I can forgive them for canceling 1899…ish. What burns me is that they are so stunted for subscriber growth that they have entered into the “squeeze our customers for nickels” phase of their business, and I am squarely within the nickel-holding demographic they are targeting. Let’s talk about account sharing.

I have a son in college. I am happy to say he does not live at home while doing so. Because he is a college student, he has limited income and he is still a dependent by the IRS definition until he gets his piece of paper from his school and joins the economy as a happy worker bee.

I get that Netflix wants to go after password sharers in multiple locations, but I specifically pay extra for two simultaneous streams on the account to accommodate for my son using the family netflix account. Quite frankly, I am offended enough by this that I have already told my family that the day this feature goes into effect is the day we effectively turn off Netflix until the next season of Stranger Things comes out.

To be clear, I have faithfully paid Netflix for years as a “mostly satisfied customer” through all of the stinkers and unfortunate cancellations for shows that I really enjoyed. This is really the deal breaker for me. If they are going to treat me as something to dollar optimize, I am going to put them into the same bucket.

Finally this brings us to Twitter. I just got a notification that reads like 2FA is going away. I can say this pretty firmly because lots of people have responded to “we are taking away text messaging 2FA for free accounts”, and it is not immediately clear that you can just swap it out for a 2FA app of your choice. Let’s skip over the fact that this was messaged super poorly. Let’s also skip over the fact that they could have put up a benign prompt offering something like a month free of ads in order to incentivize people to make the switch. Text message 2FA is one of those things you expect as a dial-tone-level feature for an online service. Telling people it is going away gets everyone wondering what they are going to cut next for cost control reasons.

As a consumer of these services, I am pretty shook. That is how the kids say it, right?

I am not going to try to unpack what the hell these people were thinking in making these decisions. While I can assume they are just spending hours staring at a whiteboard with the single word “ideas?” written at the top, I am not in those meetings and I am not going to pretend like I understand what else they could or should be doing.

As a customer, though… Hoo boy!

Each of these companies has spent a long time cultivating a trust relationship with me. I give them money, they give me things—I was once even a Twitter paying customer! Their conduct in the marketplace is so completely toxic that they have salted the earth for their brands.

I am going to give a special callout to Elon Musk here… He is so egregiously damaging his own brand with this Gong Show conduct that it is materially affecting what people think of other companies for which he allegedly makes decisions!

The impact they are having on their businesses as “b” leadership is just that. Bleedership. They are causing customers to flee to… just about anywhere else. I mean, just look at Mastodon for five seconds and the fact that anyone tells you to find them there illustrates my point.

So what does all this mean?

There comes a point in every product’s life that people start making bad decisions. Jira Product Managers from 2017, I am talking about you here too. These three companies have hit this crazy point where they are staring at the data so hard that they are making ludicrous decisions that would not pass muster with an every day customer. How does this happen? And more importantly, how do you fix it?

Maybe it might start by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. I remember joining some product leadership meetings at Zynga and hearing some really sharp statements and questions from a few very senior leaders. They all started with “I was playing your game the other day”. I had tremendous respect for them for that, and it was clear to everyone in the room that they cared about those products deeply.

In the case of Netflix, Twitter, and Dungeons and Dragons, I do not feel that level of thought in the decisions they have made recently. I feel like they are super damaged brands to me. I am eating up the last of Netflix and getting ready to shut them off. I am going to modify my text message 2FA on Twitter, but I am on the edge of the “delete my data” box on the decision making flowchart. I am also just flat-out fucking done running Dungeons and Dragons and about to buy some alternative systems—assuming they are back in stock sometime soon.

Building a strong brand position with your customers is very hard. I am reminded of the black swan event from the mobile sms ringtone era—the Crazy Frog Ringtone that everyone had to have, and in order to get it, you signed up for a 99 cent subscription. The ringtone itself was a fad, but the big problem is that it taught an entire ecosystem how to turn off these services by sending a STOP sms. Each of these companies has created their own Crazy Frog Ringtone STOP moment here.

I hope that someone in decision making at each of these places reads my rant and spends a few minutes sitting in the corner asking themselves what they did wrong. The blood on their hands is not just mine. It is also their own.

I’ve got nothing to sell you this week via Amazon Affiliate Link. This Post Is For Serious.

See you next week.

Hello again! We are going to continue to talk about superpowers as we approach international “collect your bonus and quit your job” month. Today, I decided to talk about decision making.

One of the things I have learned is that it is very important to make decisions quickly—except when it isn’t. One of the most important executive skills you can learn is when not to make a decision.

There are often good reasons not to make a decision right away. You might not have all of the information you need to make a decision, or there might be events happening that will reveal new information within a well known time frame. You might also have more important decisions which you need to make right now. I learned the term “Eisenhower Box” fairly recently as a filter you can apply to work related decisions and tasks.

Knowing what is urgent and what is not urgent is a great first-pass filter on whether or not to make a decision. As clearly illustrated by this friendly, Google-sourced image and link, you can always schedule a decision that is not urgent in the future.

The next time you need to make a big decision you should ask yourself: “Do I need to make this decision right now?”

You might surprise yourself how often you do not need to make a decision immediately. You might also use that opportunity to construct a habit of scheduling when you need to make a decision.

That is it folks. That is the whole post.

Before you disappear, please contemplate doing something for future you. Buy some Clearly-Amazon-Affiliated wrist rests. If you are on your infernal thrice-damned computer nearly as much as I am, you run the risk of getting some of that RSI happening. I have ordered several of these to sprinkle around my house and travel luggage. Your wrists will thank you for it!

I am going to tell someone else’s story to start today, and I am probably going to tell it badly. Someone I work with was telling me about this exceptionally intelligent coworker who struggled to convey their ideas to other people. Whenever you asked for an explanation, you would get a huge whiteboard loaded with dense and inscrutable data. If you ever said “I am not sure I understand”, they would double down on it and increase the depth and complexity. Eventually you would wind up with ten times the amount of information and almost none of the clarity. I am intermittently guilty of this. I have been known to answer a question with fifteen to twenty words that would have been better answered with a simple yes or no.

If you feel personally attacked by this description, I have good news. I am about to help you. I am going to talk about an important superpower for communicating with leadership. Welcome to using metaphors.

When someone in leadership is requesting information, they are often looking for a summary or distillation that is easy to understand. If they are trying to understand why something is really difficult to do in a production environment, lots of people have been known to say “Imagine trying to change an airplane engine while the plane is still in flight.” They immediately understand that you are trying to do something with a lot of potentially scary problems and logistics issues.

Expressing your complex problems in layman’s terms is a very important superpower. I once worked for someone who came from the hotel space. He really disliked the term technical debt, and did not quite understand what it meant.

One day I decided to tell him a story to see if it would help.

Imagine you are building a hotel. It needs to be open by Christmas. You have 100 floors under construction, and it will not be ready in time. You decide that in order to get the 100th floor done in time for the opening, you build the entire top floor out of drywall and two-by-fours. The hotel opens in time for Christmas, and it is a huge success. Things settle down a month later and someone from management comes and says that they need to add 5 more floors to the top of the hotel.

I asked him “Do you immediately start building on top of the penthouse built with drywall and two-by-fours?”

He looked at me and replied “No, that would be bad. You have to tear down the top floor and put in enough support for the five floors that get built on top of it”.

At that moment, he realized what technical debt was. Sometimes you need to go into an existing project, take apart some software that was rushed to market, and put it back together to support new features.

He never stopped disliking it, but he fully understood what it was, how it happened, and why we needed to get rid of it.

Everyone will have a different go-to for their metaphors. Some people want things explained in terms of sports teams. Other people like comparisons to airplanes. Some people think in terms of construction. It will take some to identify the metaphor that will work for each person.

This skill will become more important as your role becomes more senior over time. You should start practicing now. The next time you find yourself giving a complicated detailed explanation, see if you can describe in the abstract using hotels, airplanes, or your favorite sport. After all, the last thing you want to do is to show up for a championship game without having done any warm ups or training.

See what I did there?

Thank you for reading along this week. In addition to describing a superpower this week, I am also going to talk about a superproduct. I tried recommending Amazon Affiliate products I randomly found. I also tried recommending Amazon Affiliate products I buy and love. Today I am going to recommend a product I should have bought. Introducing the HP Neverstop Laser Printer. I am now on my third HP printer since 2001 and I have discovered that I regret buying the latest OfficeJet printer because it eats ink like a hungry family of rabbits in a carrot field (See? SEE?). I have fixated on the hundreds of dollars I could save over the years by buying a second printer. It would pay for itself in under three years. Next time you need to purchase a printer please bookmark this url. Future me will thank you for the nickel you have stolen from Jeff Bezos on my behalf.

Good morning everyone. Like most people, I have been reading about all of the layoffs this year. A number of leaders for large companies have made comments about remote work, and they discuss changes in productivity throughout these conversations. I am more than a little disappointed in how that is being messaged and managed. To understand my irritation with these comments, let’s remember why we started working remotely: 

We were entering a global pandemic.

I would love for this to be front and center in some of the conversations that are looking to vilify remote work. I have successfully worked remotely in a variety of roles for years before the pandemic, and while I agree it is not for everyone, the amount of vitriol and misinformation leveled at remote work is astonishing.

I think that there will eventually be some Harvard Business Review studies around the amount of anxiety and loss of productivity that occurred because we entered a pandemic. I do not know if there is a large enough base of remote employees and leaders to do a comparison on productivity levels for remote workers before the pandemic, nor do I know if there will be enough internal honesty for people to drive post-pandemic studies on remote work productivity now that we are on the other side of the pandemic. It is far too easy to just say “remote work is bad”, especially if you are more of a manager than a leader and you have a need to control your people rather than trust them.

I do not know if I have more to say on that subject. Since I generally like to write so many words as to offend the average TikTok consumer, I want to add a little more to my weekly writing.

Most company leadership has not learned to separate the remote work issues from the pandemic issues, as evidenced by their tepid and blame-ey statements for layoffs. They also did not learn how to perform remote layoffs really well either.

There are fascinating stories emerging this week about people on business trips, on vacations, and even having a baby and entering maternity leave getting thrown into the redundancy bin. I hope there are a decent volume of lawsuits filed as a result of this, and simultaneously hope they all get settled reasonably by companies.

The reason I want to talk about this is that I am certain some of you reading this might have had this happen to you or your teams.

So what are you supposed to do if you are a manager and some, or all, of your remote team was let go without your knowledge?

I have had a few thoughtful conversations about this with some other engineering leaders I know.

There might be some instructions from the “Human Resources” at your company not to engage with former team members. I would like to remind you that Human Resources is not always “Humane Resources”. In times like this, a significant part of their job is protecting the company from incurring legal costs for doing inhuman things to people. I have witnessed this first hand.

If you have people who were on your teams, I would encourage you to do the opposite of what you are instructed to do, and to reach out to people who used to work for you.

I will add the caveat that there are a lot of things you should not say because they will incur some liability. What you should say is that you are sorry that this happened to them, and you can ask if they need any assistance getting into a new role elsewhere.

I have had to downsize teams in the past and when I can, I have written LinkedIn recommendations, collected resumes, and reached out to people I know with open roles to help get people back to work. I will absolutely do so again.

There is a counterargument to be made that this is hard to do for 12,000 people.

Yes it is. But there are thousands of managers in there with three to eight people who ought to invest the time in helping people that you were previously leading. While the company has done something horrible to people who trusted their livelihoods and families well-being to said employers, you can make a difference in someone’s life by helping out. Even if they do not take you up on their offer, you will certainly help them feel better about it.

It goes without saying that you should also check in with the people who survived. Some will feel guilty about it, and some will start telling themselves their own stories in their head. It is convenient to believe that your first priority is to the people who survive, and the business that just did horrible things to your previous team members will expect you to do your very best to restore everyone to some semblance of business productivity as swiftly as possible.

All of the messaging and resources you will receive will be with that in mind, and very little will be provided to people who just got thrown into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Please bear that in mind when you make decisions about whether caring for the surviving team members is more important than helping people who now have a shelf-life to their income, and the stigma and emotional scars that come with being laid off.

I do believe that helping both groups of people is equally important. This is a tough place for everyone to be, and you are going to be in the middle of it. I wish you the best, and I hope you can do right by as many people as possible.

I also think that you should look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if you are in the right place. The markets are upside down, the global situation is awful, and your employer just did something urgent and violent in a way that was probably entirely avoidable with some amount of forethought. In the case of some, they at least waited until after the start of the new year and whatever holidays people generally enjoy.

In my opinion, looking around at a new opportunity for yourself is the best way to respond to this kind of activity. I have spent some amount of previous posts discussing superpowers, and will spend a bit more time on this subject because you are about to collect your end-of-year bonus for your hard work. This generally happens from January to March for public companies, and this is the optimal time for you to be considering upgrades and sidegrades.

Thank you again for reading along. I hope you agree with how little consideration has been given to the pandemic to the whole “remote work is bad” thing, and also how careless people with tens of millions of dollars of compensation are being with respect to their people. If you need some help figuring out what to do, or you want to help some of your team get settled into a new role, please reach out. I am always happy to help people. I know this is very different from my usual weekly send off, but it is quite important.

Hello everyone! I am back to inject more words into the cloud. Last week we had a discussion about various writing superpowers. Let’s talk about one more superpower this week: Making presentations.

You will need to make presentations more and more as your career progresses. There are going to be a variety of different presentations you need to make, and in many cases the audience will be incredibly different from presentation to presentation. You will make presentations to your team, you may make presentations to your customers, and you will very likely make presentations to your boss.

Sometimes your boss might want you to make a presentation for his peers or his leadership. You might get peeved that they are asking you to do their job. You should think about it as an opportunity. This is one of those exercises that might help you get promoted someday.

So what makes for a good presentation?

There is a classic saying:

Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.

It is some good advice.

Usually when I start my presentations, I will put together an introductory slide. It will give a list of headers for subsequent slides, or subsequent sections if it is a really big presentation. I will then create one slide for each header and start to fill them in as I edit.

Here is an example of a business pitch deck:

The first slide contains these six lines:

1. The Mission.
2. The Problem.
3. The Market Size.
4. The Product.
5. The Revenue.
6. The Team.

And then I will create six slides with each header from the above list.

The important thing about a good presentation is that it is not a massive wall of text. There is a great book called The Art of The Start. You should go buy it right now if you have not read it. (Disclaimer: This is an affiliate link). It talks about the 10 20 30 Rule.

• 10 Slides
• 20 Minutes
• 30 Point Font

It helps to make sure you are making your points succinctly and also presenting the information in a manner that is digestible.

If you have to decrease the size of your font to fit more on the page, you might be doing something wrong.

You should also find your presentation voice. I tend to inject humorous images into my presentations.

Here is an example from an ancient talk I gave at GDC.

Yes, there is not much alignment of interest between the spider and the fly.

The reason I add some entertaining visuals to my presentations is to help people pay attention to the subject matter. When you are making a presentation, you need to be able to “read the room” and be aware if you are losing your audience. You might be presenting too fast for people to follow. You might be talking about something incredibly boring. You might have gone into overtime in your presentation and are losing people to multi-tasking.

There are a variety of different ways to ensure that you are keeping people engaged in your presentation.

You can take pauses from time to time to ask if people have questions.

You can make odd off-topic comments that have entertainment value.

You can be physically animated and do something to grab people’s attention.

You can stop the meeting for a break, if it is really long, and then come back later and give a quick recap before resuming.

In general, if you are talking for more than 40 minutes, you will need to do something to keep the audience engaged. For a few years at GDC talks, I would conduct an audience survey and include cash prizes. That is a great way to warm up a room!

I would recommend that you ask for help with your first few presentations. Find someone on your team, or within email distance, who can help you with building your presentation structure. You should also ask a trusted peer, or trusted leader, in advance of your presentation to give you some feedback on the presentation once it is done. This is important so they know that you want them to view the presentation through that lens.

Make sure you also keep your presentation on the rails. If there are distractions or moments when things go out of control, remind everyone of the purpose of the meeting and ask if you can get back on track.

These are some good guidelines to making presentations. They are not immutable rules. I have blown a few presentations to organizations in the past, and sometimes these can be educational moments. In recent memory, I had to make a presentation to a green light committee, and the meeting went off the rails. I was fairly new to the organization, and at any moment I could have interrupted people and asked if I could finish my presentation. I chose not to, and was able to learn a significant amount of what I needed to change in my presentation in order to get the contents approved.

As with any skill, practice makes perfect. The more presentations you make, the better you will become at giving them. With any luck, this will turn into a superpower that will help you progress your career.

Thank you again for reading, and hopefully you have purchased the affiliate-linked book from above. If you have not, then thank you for helping me retain my status as one of the worst affiliate marketers ever. It is a great incentive for me to keep my day job! Maybe next week we will continue our conversation about superpowers. You can prepare yourself by purchasing some superhero merchandise, like this awesome Atom T-Shirt from DC Comics.

Hello again! I almost convinced myself not to write today. Between staring at the legal kerfuffles happening over at Hasbro’s under-monetized tabletop rulebook revenue extraction unit, and the unrelenting rain hammering away outside my residence, I had a strong urge to just stare at the ceiling instead of clickety-clacking away at this keyboard. It is important to me that I keep writing, so here I am!

Everyone is good at something. Some people, however, are really great at very specific things. I have been told that team building and recruiting pipeline management are among my superpowers. There are two specific superpowers I look for in team members. The first is the ability to create documentation. The second is the ability to iterate on documentation.

Creating documentation is hard. Not everyone can sit down in front of a blank page and successfully get from zero to one. This is also true for making presentations. I will probably save that for its own post sometime in the future. My best guess is that some people experience fear and anxiety around drafting a document:

• What if the format is unacceptable?
• What if there is information missing?
• What if it is wrong?

These are natural feelings. There are a few ways to mitigate some of this fear. One way is to have a reference document that enshrines the “gold standard” for the document you are writing. This may include some templates, as well as criteria for completeness. Another way to mitigate this is to have a trusted party who can give you feedback on the document. It is good to have peers and managers who you can trust to look at a document, and give you actionable feedback to make it a better product.

This leads us to the second superpower: being able to iterate on a document. Today, modern document sharing platforms make this very easy. Being able to leave comments to people for areas they should change, or using “Track Changes” functionality to put those edits in for someone to approve/reject, are really good tools. Every once in a while you will get feedback like “I do not like this” or “This is not correct.” Teaching people how to give actionable feedback is really important. Include examples or more details as much as possible when working on a document with someone.

I have observed that some people are really good at one of these two things, but not both. Some people can create new documentation really well, and some people can iterate on documentation really well.

This is one of those areas where I encourage people to get out of their comfort zone. If you are not great at creating new documentation, you should try to do it more often to get better at it. If you are not great at reading a document and iterating on it, then you should do that more often for the same reason.

As a leader, It is important to know what superpowers exist for members on your team. It is also important to leverage those people to help other people refine their own abilities, and perhaps turn them into superpowers over time.

You know who else has amazing superpowers? Green Lantern. Green Lantern was my favorite superhero growing up. He still is my favorite superhero today. In the time honored spirit of randomly linking Amazon Affiliate Merchandise that is clearly labeled as such, I give you a link to this awesome looking Green Lantern t-shirt.

As always, thank you for reading along and I hope to see you back here next week!

Welcome to 2023! After a two week hiatus, I am once again back to maintain my title as Amazon’s Worst Affiliate Marketer. For a brief period of time this title filled me with deep shame. I have decided this year to lean into it. I embrace my badness at compelling you to buy things on Amazon!

This is an excellent segue into this week’s conversation. This week, let’s talk about doing your very best.

Throughout the course of your career you will discover that some of your efforts will give outsized results. At some point in your career you will do your very best work. For example, a friend of mine was part of the team that made the pinball game that shipped with Microsoft Windows. Not only do lots of people hold that up as the gold standard for many subsequent pinball games, it was arguably one of the most played games on the platform by virtue of it being bundled with the operating system.

Every game that my friend worked on afterwards probably had fewer players and also was less well distributed. You could make the argument that every other game he has shipped afterwards has paled in comparison to that shining gem. I bring this up because once you have had a certain level of success in your career, you will find that it is hard to replicate. Note: There are lots of better examples of this in the games industry, but if I am going to throw someone under the bus, I want to be able to call them up and apologize to them for it.

There are a lot of examples of this outside of games. It certainly applies to startup founders. Every once in a while a startup founder will experience an outsized exit, and then spend a considerable amount of time trying to replicate it. People will apply some sort of cognitive bias that amazes me. “I did this one incredible thing once, which means I can do it a dozen times more with a high degree of certainty”.

I always make the statement that I think that a successful founder’s second startup is likely their worst because they probably did not internalize why their first one was successful.

Let’s focus on games again for a moment. Games are very much a hits-driven business. Building hit games is hard. I was fortunate enough to have been making games from 2001 to 2005 in early mobile where the platform limitations meant you could make a lot of games with very small teams. This helped me to figure out my hit generation potential as a game creator. With 30 shipped titles, I have had six excellent successes. I can confidently believe that my hit rate is one in six. Yes, I know the number above suggests it is one in five. I also know that you want to be cautious in measuring success and I would like to leave some margin for improvement.

If you look at that math, what that meant is that every hit game title needed to pay for itself and five other titles for our studio to stay alive. That held true for early mobile for the years where mobile carriers were taking 500 games a year. They decided to reduce that to 100 games a year, which reduced the number of games we could release as an independent studio that co-published some of our titles. I have spoken elsewhere about this and how it eventually led to us shutting down our studio.

It is important to understand the economics of success and the economics of failure in your current role. It is also important to understand that sometimes you will have outsized successes in the course of your career.

Every once in a while I run into someone who has had an early and outsized success in their career. I engage with them carefully until I have a good sense of what they learned from that success, if anything. It is my belief you can always recreate your career successes under carefully controlled circumstances.  If you have not learned enough from your success, and possibly subsequent failures, then I am not sure that you are operating under carefully controlled circumstances.

As you tear into your 2023 workload, ask yourself what success looks like. Ask yourself some hard questions.

Are you trying to exceed your previous career success?

Are you working with someone who has a previous success that they need to exceed?

Are the circumstances for replicating that success carefully controlled?

These are hard questions to answer, especially if you are only asking yourself. I know this from experience. Early in my career I did not think enough about these things, and I believed that continued and increased success happened just by showing up and working really hard.

I now know that there are lots of other factors that contribute to success, and some of them are outside of my control. Understanding what you can and cannot control will help you be successful, and it may also help you realize this year might not put you on the leaderboard for “best professional outcome”.

Thank you for reading along! If you are looking for some actual actionable advice on how to be successful, I encourage you to read the-cheerfully-Amazon-affiliated-linked-book: The Power of Habit. I have recommended this book to two people I currently work with, and I also cheerfully shove this book into every professional book club in which I participate. Helping think about your habits will help you with your success. Consider this your call to action to click this link and buy this book. Otherwise, I will continue to gloat about my place at the top of Worst Amazon Affiliates.

I am looking forward to many more conversations this year!

Nothing more to see here for the end of the year everyone.

Looking forward to conversations on engineering leadership in 2023.

I am a little under the weather this weekend. That means spending lots of time pointing my sinus-irritated face at my shiny new 32 inch Samsung 4k monitor and watching Netflix instead of writing code or web content. Yes, that is an Amazon Affiliate Link. Click on it. Buy it. Love it.

At any rate, I want to talk about decision making.

I helped a friend of mine build an application that he uses to help make decisions. Users add deadlines, priorities, and a variety of other category tags for things they need to get done, and the app reduces that to a number in order to prioritize them. I was hoping to get him to be a guest writer for a week, and it does not look like it is going to happen in the near term. In the process of developing the application, he introduced me to the concept of the Eisenhower Box as the basis for his “get stuff done” formula. 

Rather than provide a detailed definition or explanation, I am going to just include this pretty picture of what the Eisenhower Box is.

I am not paid by the word here, so I am not going to include a page of explanation for each of these—Google is your friend!

I decided this would be a nice, lightweight post because I found myself spending a little bit of time explaining “urgent” to a few people in the past few months.

I also want to call out the “Not-important not-urgent” quadrant. Engineers have a genuine tendency to wrap themselves around an axle here. It is easy to have an idea that sounds really good and to decide to spend cycles on it because it is new and fresh in your mind. There have been moments in my career where I have been guilty of this, and later was asked by an executive “Why did you spend time on this?”  “It was shiny” is not a very good answer. Delete might sound a little extreme as an outcome, but it is probably the right thing to do. If people fixate on something that is not important and not urgent, and refuse to accept that it should be deleted, then you should concede the point and put it on a backlog—probably somewhere near the bottom. It is a good idea to keep a catalog of ideas and their relative priority. It is also good because it lets additional stakeholders look at the ideas on their merit and reinforce the business priorities.

Engineering teams occasionally put urgent technical items that are hard for stakeholders to understand into the backlog. One of the important jobs of engineering leadership is making sure that those tasks get addressed in a timely manner. This can be accomplished by asserting a window of time that this work ought to be done, or by negotiating with stakeholders by discussing the risks associated with the work being discussed. This is important because if a stakeholder decides that it is “Not Important” then it should be deleted. If this is erroneous, then it is important to educate them about why they need to upgrade it to “Important”, or else assert that it simply needs to be done.

As a final thought, be sure to invest the time in educating stakeholders as much as possible about items that are “Important” on the backlog. You will burn goodwill by asserting engineering leadership privilege and doing something that is important to your team. I would recommend keeping the frequency of these events to two a year at most, even if it means clumping together a few unrelated technical tasks.

Thank you again for reading along, and sorry for being a bit brief this week. I am not well. I hope my sinuses are back to normal again next week so I can be appropriately angry at things instead of feeling sorry for myself.