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On 1:1s, shipping fast, and underrated sponsorship 💡

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💡 Monday 3-2-1

On 1:1s, shipping fast, and underrated sponsorship 💡

Monday 3-2-1 — Edition #42

Luca Rossi
Mar 20, 2023
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On 1:1s, shipping fast, and underrated sponsorship 💡

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Hey, Luca here! Welcome to a new edition of the ✨ Monday 3-2-1 ✨

Every Monday I will send you an email like this with 3 short ideas about engineering management, technical strategy, and good hiring.

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

  • How to Create a Great Resume 📋

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

Become a better tech leader today ✨

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



Stepsize

Before we start, I am happy to spend a few words to promote Stepsize, a fantastic product whose founders I have known for a long time.

Stepsize allows engineers to track and fix technical issues (like tech debt and refactoring work) directly from your editor.

It integrates with your existing tools like Jira, GitHub, or Linear, so you can link issues to code, and make them visible in your codebase, without leaving your editor.

Stepsize has already helped teams like Snyk and Terakeet solve 70% of their tech debt  — you should definitely check it out.

Check out Stepsize

As a Refactoring reader you get one free month when signing up for the Team or Business plan, by using the REFACTORING23 code.


1) 🎽 1:1s are about consistency

As a manager, 1:1s are your most important meetings. Most advice on how to have good ones is about consistency and building the habit:

  1. Have 1:1s every single week — 1:1s are about issues and personal development. Whenever someone has an issue, they have to think they will be able to discuss it with you soon. The "soon" part is crucial to most 1:1s benefits, and "once every two weeks" is often not soon enough.

  2. Have 1:1s always at the same day, same time. This is important to build the habit, just like having breakfast or brushing your teeth. People need to prepare for 1:1s, and need to know when they will happen.

  3. Schedule 40 minutes for them. In my experience, 30 minutes are most often enough, but you don't want to cut the meeting short in case they are not. Especially because long 1:1s are usually important 1:1s.

  4. Always do them. Finally, this might be trivial, but it's really important not to cancel 1:1s. 1:1s work because they are a reliable space. If they stop being reliable, they stop working.

More ideas on how to run effective 1:1s 👇

Refactoring
How to Run Effective 1:1s 🧑‍🤝‍🧑
In a world where we need to reduce meetings and push for async communication, there is at least one kind of meeting we need to keep and nurture: 1:1s. In fact, we probably need more of them, and we need to get them right. This is more important now than ever as many people are isolated at home and, as a manager, you risk losing touch with how they feel a…
Read more
2 years ago · 43 likes · 9 comments · Luca Rossi

2) 🚢 Shipping fast changes your life

Your team’s behaviour vastly changes based on how fast and often you are able to release in production. This is truly one of the major areas that separates elite engineering teams from average and poor ones.

A simple thought experiment:

⏱️ Release takes 1 minute

  • Feedback loop is instant, no context switch.

  • Shipping is continuous — natural extension of development work

  • Time to recover is low, few outages

  • Confidence is high

⏲️ Release takes 10 minutes

  • Feedback loop is good, multiple releases are made every day

  • Some context switch happens during/after deploy

  • Higher QA investment is justified

🕰️ Release takes 1 hour

  • Multiple features are batched and released together for convenience

  • Failures increase because of batching

  • Recovery is slower because of 1) slow deploy and 2) context switch

  • More time is spent on QA and tests beforehand to avoid disaster

  • "Only in the morning" releases

🗓️ Release takes 1 day

  • Deploying becomes a formal process that needs approval

  • Only "at start of week"

  • Dedicated engineering work is needed to maintain the deployment pipeline

  • Frequent outages, pressure on SREs

I wrote more about how shipping fast changes your life in this previous article 👇

Refactoring
Shipping Fast Changes Your Life ⚡
Last week I discovered that the "10x Engineer" idea had officially become a meme. I also learned it was originally born out of real findings from a 1968 paper, titled "Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance…
Read more
2 years ago · 24 likes · 2 comments · Luca Rossi

3) 🌱 Sponsorship is underrated

Sponsors are those people who do practical things to help you.

They might advocate for your promotion, approve a budget for your project, or introduce you to useful people.

While mentoring is about giving advice, sponsoring is about empowering and giving opportunities. As a manager, you can sponsor your report by suggesting them as a good lead for a new project, or to give a talk about something they are expert about.

Illustration by Catt Small

Sponsorship is generally underrated. For example, studies have shown that women and people from minorities are over-mentored, but under-sponsored.

More ideas about mentors, coaches, and sponsors 👇

Refactoring
People who make you grow 🌱
People naturally help each other during their career. Sometimes we help others, other times we are the ones who get helped. The best of such relationships propel us forward at high speed. We can all think of someone special who changed our lives through their advice and support…
Read more
a year ago · 8 likes · 6 comments · Luca Rossi

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.

Get full access to Refactoring today ✨

2) ❤️ Share it — Refactoring lives thanks to word of mouth. Share the article with your team or with someone to whom it might be useful!

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I wish you a great week! ☀️

Luca

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On 1:1s, shipping fast, and underrated sponsorship 💡

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2 Comments
radhe
Mar 20Liked by Luca Rossi

To me the link for "over-mentored, but under-sponsored" is not working :(

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1 reply by Luca Rossi
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