Links: 3-24-2016

Your Path through Agile Fluency
Going through this at work, another example of shaping an organization or a team through indirect influence, standard setting + levels.
(categories: agile management teams productmanagement metrics process )
The Netflix Tech Blog: Fault Tolerance in a High Volume, Distributed System
Thought I had bookmarked this awhile back, really great visual introduction into circuit breakers, timeouts and failover.
(categories: architecture distributed netflix scalability distributed-systems resilience concurrency circuit-breaker )

Links: 3-20-2016

Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years,…
Somehow remembered Yegge’s posts from back in the day this week. Wish he was still writing.
(categories: amazon api soa yegge google communication )
How To Have An Opinion Worth Hearing
Understand causality, set aside political / religious beliefs, don’t be afraid to be wrong.
(categories: communication discussion influence thinking causality humility )
Seth’s Blog: The dominant narrative
Great descriptive phrase and something to watch out for, both in case you or your team get labeled with some kind of dominant narrative or as something that you hear other teams or people get labeled.
(categories: leadership management change language writing )

Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v. Noise — Medium
So many good quotes in here… Also, it’s not chat, it’s social software in general.
(categories: slack communication culture work attention focus )

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Quote: "As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the s…
(categories: google teams management listening psychology team work collaboration leadership )

How to Provide Great Feedback When You’re Not In Charge
Quote: "There are at least three different kinds of feedback that may be appropriate in a given situation: APPRECIATION is expression of gratitude or approval of another’s effort. It is an expression of emotion, designed to meet an emotional need. ADVICE (or COACHING) consists of suggestions about particular behavior that should be repeated or changed. It focuses on the performance, rather than judging the person. EVALUATION is ranking the subject’s performance in relation to that of others or…
(categories: feedback leadership management candor work )

Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss | First Round Review
Lots of good stuff in this article (blog post?), similar to "fierce conversations" book I read recently. The "um" story is worth remembering.
(categories: feedback leadership management conversations candor work )