Hierarchy of spaces, default to meeting, rolling out career frameworks 💡

Monday Ideas — Edition #61

Hey, Luca here! Welcome to the Monday Ideas 💡

Every Monday I will send you an email like this with 3 short ideas about making great software, working with humans, and personal growth.

You will also receive a long-form, original article on Thursday, like the last one:

How to Invest in Engineers' Growth 🎓

To receive all the full articles and support Refactoring, consider subscribing if you haven’t already!

p.s. you can learn more about the benefits of the paid plan here.

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◯˚GitStart • Code as a Service

I have been in touch with Hamza and the guys at GitStart for some time now, and I am excited to promote it in the newsletter!

GitStart turns backlog into code. You can see it in action on the repos of Cal.com, Supabase, and SourceGraph. Here’s how it works:

1. Set up your repo and assign tickets

2. Fully dedicated devs hack together

3. Review and merge PRs

Here is why GitStart works:

• 🔒 Secure Git Sharing - companies of all sizes, including banks, use GitStart tooling to securely share subsets of their code.

• 💸 Pay for code, not the time we spend coding - pricing is per PR. Only pay for those you merge.

• 🌱 Grow the next generation - your implementation details are someone’s growth opportunity. GitStart is a paid career accelerator with alumni in Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

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1) 🧘 A Hierarchy of Spaces

Last month I spoke with my friend Jean about productivity vs carving out space for yourself.

She told me about a time, years ago, when she felt extremely exhausted and didn’t want to engage in creative things anymore. She always thought of herself as a creative person, so she wondered: maybe I am not creative anymore?

Over time she realized that her need for creativity and self-expression would still emerge, but there were other needs and spaces that had to be fulfilled before she could go to the next level.

So she came up with a hierarchy of spaces, similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

1. 🟣 Space to not be exhausted — this is about your basic needs, like good sleep and eating well. Even basic needs can be challenging with young kids and demanding work, but if you don’t take care of those, you can’t move up to the next level.

2. 🔴 Space to do whatever — this is about giving yourself the permission to spend some unproductive time. Like watching Netflix, or doing absolutely nothing.

3. 🟡 Space to enjoy — only once you have some spaciousness to do whatever, you can engage in activities you like and enjoy doing. These might be games, hobbies, and anything that makes you happy.

4. 🟢 Space to be creative — this is about activities that let you express yourself in a way that is uniquely you. Jean believes that true creativity can only emerge once you have satisfied your other spaces.

You can find the full chat with Jean here 👇

Hustling, remote culture, and personal space 🧘

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2) 🪜 How to roll out a career framework

Rolling out a new career framework is tricky because people are very personally and directly affected by it.

In my experience, a good rollout starts with a good creation process. This is true for pretty much anything that is company-wide: OKRs, career frameworks, remote policies, etc.

The challenge of such processes is that they should strike the right balance between being participated by the team (bottom-up) and following the vision of the leadership (top-down).

• ⬇️ Top-down direction delivers consistency and fast decision-making.

• ⬆️ Bottom-up contribution makes things grounded with your team’s reality, creates consensus, and leads to better decisions in the end.

So, I am a fan of the W Framework for this, created by Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth. It is made up of four steps:

1. Context: Leadership shares a high-level strategy with Teams

2. Plans: Teams respond with proposed plans

3. Integration: Leadership integrates into a single plan, and shares with Teams

4. Buy-in: Teams make final tweaks, confirm buy-in, and get rolling

This is a generic strategy that you can apply to pretty much anything that requires wide participation.

What does it look like for a career framework? Here is a possible implementation:

1. Context: Leadership provides high level direction: fundamental levels and tracks based on current team composition and future strategy.

2. Plans: Teams (e.g. your senior leaders) come back with the qualities and responsibilities they would like to see for the various levels.

3. Integration: Leadership challenges, integrates these elements and shares back with teams.

4. Buy-in: Final tweaks, Q&A + people get assigned to the levels.

More ideas on creating and executing career frameworks 👇

Career Frameworks — Part 2 🪜

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3) 📑 Default to meeting vs default to docs

Meetings, though expensive, are very easy to summon. You don't need any particular process: you create an event on the calendar and invite the relevant people.

That's why they become the easy default.

Any async/written counterpart, instead, needs work to be set up. If you want to make async the new default, you should design it to be as effortless and reliable as meetings.

How do you understand if what you have in place today is good enough? Ask yourself a couple of questions:

• 📑 Documentation — if you want to create a doc about some specs/information, how easy is it to do? Do you know where to put it? How confident you are that it will be found by other people and used in the future?

• 🤝 Decisions — if you need to converge with others on something, do you have a reliable place to do it in written form? Do you trust this place not to get lost and to be referenced in the future?

Good answers to these questions are the result of hard, deliberate work that builds up over time. So even if you feel you are not there yet, don't get discouraged and keep working on it!

You can find more ideas to reduce meetings in this previous article 👇

How to Reduce Meetings 🪚

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🐺 QA Wolf

In case you missed it, last week we promoted QA Wolf and their unique, cost-effective approach to get you to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage in just 4 months. Plus, they include unlimited parallel test runs, 24-hour maintenance, and a Zero Flake Guarantee.

Schedule a demo and see for yourself! 👇

(p.s. and ask about their 90-day pilot!)

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And that’s it for today! If you are finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these:

1) ✉️ Subscribe to the newsletter — if you aren’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can learn more about the benefits of the paid plan here.

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I wish you a great week! ☀️

Luca