Mid Career
The AWS Outage—Lessons on Worst-Case Scenarios
How bad is the worst-case scenario of your systems? I suspect it's not as bad as the DynamoDB system.
Mid Career
Mid Career
KPIs Gone Wild: Cautionary Tales of Lost Customer Obsession
How using KPIs and metrics as proxies, goals, or games leads us away from real customer value.
Mid Career
From One-Way to Two-Way Doors: Rethinking How We Make Big Decisions
How to recognize the differences between one-way and two-way doors. A way to think about risk and decision-making.
Mid Career
Resolve Risk First - Why Complexity and Ambiguity Not Effort Should Dictate Your Focus
Too often we resolve the hardest work first, instead of the riskiest. A walk through of why that's a mistake.
Mid Career
Inside a High-Severity Outage: A Late Night Sev-2 at Amazon
A detailed narrative of how we communicated about, worked on, and resolved a technical mess we created.
Mid Career
Writing and Speaking Clearly and Concisely - Upgrading Your Communication
Communicating takes practice and skill. Learn the ingredients to high-quality communication.
Mid Career
Failure is Necessary for Achievement and Growth — Why Success is Dangerous for Learning
You can only succeed if you are willing to fail. You can only learn if you are willing to be terrible first.
Mid Career
You Can't Schedule Creativity: Putting Inspiration Into Your Outlook Calendar
Creation can't be forced, but it can certainly be encouraged gently.
Mid Career
Start With Your Vision — Not With Goals. Measure What Really Matters.
Goals Without Vision Are Worse Than Useless. They can lead you in an expensive wrong direction.
Mid Career
Don't Let Others Run Your Life — Cut Your Schedule Like a Slasher Movie
If you don't make hard choices to focus on your top priorities, then you're choosing to fail at your top priorities.
Mid Career
A Three Topic Article — Interviewing, Multiple Choice Management, and My Holiday Gift Guide
Sometimes you have a single topic, sometimes you have three. Today is a 3-fer.
Mid Career
Six Reader Questions About Meetings, Feedback, Communication, and Ideas
I regularly receive questions over email and in comments on my newsletter. I decided to answer a few of them in detail.