Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Category: Tips and Tricks

  • The art of noticing 

    There is a rich curriculum of life advice compilations out there. From the classics like Life’s Litte Instruction Book, Kevin Kelly’s 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known which turned into a book, to 100 Tips for a better life. They are often fascinating reads. But they are also often more entertaining than driving actual change.

    Yet, they do become educational once you have the experience that brings the wisdom home. “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away” is only relevant once you sign a contract or buy a product to then get disappointed by the fine print. Having those experience matters with those lists, because then they help us notice things, patterns and behaviors and rethink them.  

    A while back Tony Fadell gave a TED talk about the secret of design being noticing. His thesis is that great design notices even small annoyances that add up over time. One of his examples was the little sticker on supermarket apples. It’s there to promote the brand. But for most people that sticker is a minor annoyance in a series of many throughout their day.   

    The lists of life advice do help us notice things. They spell out what we know, but don’t have the words for yet. They make the implicit explicit and help us put words to feelings. As such it makes sense to read and re-read those lists every now and then. I’ve made thousands of new mistakes since I first read Life’s Litte Instruction Book back at university. Many of those lessons make sense in a way they did not back then.

    In that spirit: find a good list or book and put a reminder into your phone to re-read them every few of years. It’s a good cheat code to get better at noticing.   

  • The OKR Operator’s Manual

    The OKR Operator’s Manual

    I’ve recently come across the Operator’s Manual, a post by Ian McAllister. It’s a compilation of tips for communicating data, dates and deliverables. Basically, how to live up to “be bright, be brief, be gone”. 

    Taking inspiration from that post, below are some tips that I frequently share when it comes to OKRs. My standard line is “OKRs are deceptively simple, but tricky to get right” or as I just recently heard from Isaac “a minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” Below is an overview of some of the tricky aspects. None of them are rocket science, but each represents a hard-earned lesson:

    Introducing OKRs

    Articulate the “why” for OKRs: The original sin is starting the conversation with “I think we should do OKRs” without specifying what you want to improve with them. OKRs can help with many things such as increasing transparency, aligning teams on clear goals and targets, surfacing disconnects between teams early, bringing strategy closer to execution, improving focus, … Pick one or two challenges upfront and be clear on how OKRs shall help. Unless you create clarity for what you optimize for, OKRs are easily dismissed as another management fad.

    OKRs are not an extra thing: OKRs are set to fail when they are handled separately to the rest of the product management process. Instead, they should be tightly integrated into how teams work and manage their products. Product decisions and feature prioritization should be grounded in their alignment to the Objectives and their ability to move Key Results.

    Keep it simple: It can be tempting to design OKRs from the get-go for an entire organization all at once with multiple levels. That becomes overwhelming quickly. It helps to pick one leader and design a single set of 1-2 Objectives with 2-4 Key Results each for their area of responsibility. Think of it as a cheat sheet that they would use for the 1:1s with their boss. Don’t overthink it and avoid the temptation to put too much detail into too many Objectives and Key Results. Start with 1-2 Objectives with 2-4 Key Results and take it from there.

    OKRs are not individual performance management: OKRs can be an input for an individual performance review conversation. But they should be one of many inputs. As somebody once told me: “I’m not going to force myself to promote jerks just because they deliver on their OKRs.”

    Selecting Key Results

    Outcomes over outputs: When defining Key Results, if at all possible, avoid output-Key Results. Outputs are basically tasks that need to get done (Launch feature X, reach milestone Y, revamp marketing website, …). They are tactics to get to an outcome, but they are the outcome itself. Walk the extra mile and identify what the benefit is that you want to achieve with a specific feature or activity (increase in user engagement, more leads, better customer conversions, …) and use that as your Key Result. Techniques like the five whys help. That discussion can become quite esoteric (“Why do we exist? What is our purpose?”), but that is only temporary and typically an indication that the team is on the right track to better and more refined OKRs. Rick wrote a good post about this: Binary: Good for code, bad for OKRs

    Fewer but better OKRs: Every single time I’ve introduced OKRs we ended up with more than the recommended 3-4 Key Results. I’ve come to accept this as a necessary rite of passage, because after a few OKR review meetings the team realizes that the conversation always centers around 2-3 Key Results that really matter. Once you come to that realization, go ahead and deprecate the other Key Results. They are typically the ones that turn out to be green/on track while nobody feels good about the overall progress.

    Be an OKR pragmatist, not an OKR dogmatist: There are lots of different flavors and nuances with OKR implementations. John Doerr had “output” Key Results in his examples and even within the almighty Google not everything is as clear cut as it looks from the outside. Try to understand the underlying concepts behind OKRs, but also feel free to break the rules when they hurt you. In the same way as database normalization comes with clear drawbacks the further you progress, there is value in not being too dogmatic about OKRs. Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively. (Hat tip to Isaac for the punchy headline)

    Don’t start with an OKR tool: When introducing OKRs, the first step is to understand the methodology and create a rhythm around setting, reviewing and scoring OKRs. You can do that with a shared document to set, track and review OKRs in a smaller team or one specific level in the org hierarchy. A tool will distract at the beginning and easily derail the effort. Once you roll OKRs out across multiple teams and organizational hierarchies, a tool can help manage the complexity. But start small and simple first, build the muscle and then move to a tool. I wrote more on that here.

    Reviewing progress

    Commentary over number: Knowing where a metric stands is important, but understanding what drives that metric and what the implications are is by far more important. I recommend addressing three aspects in the commentary:

    • Data (what): What does the data say, is it going up or down, by how much
    • Insight (so what): What does it mean, is this good or bad, what are the causes for this behavior, what can we learn from this, have we identified new risks to our plan, …
    • Action (now what): What should we do about it, do we need to adjust our plans, …

    Once you get to a spot where the commentary is consistently good in OKR reviews, OKRs become this amazing learning tool that accelerates how quickly a team understands its customers and its product.

    Embrace the red: Encourage Key Result owners to give a fair and balanced assessment of the status of their KR. Being “red” is not necessarily bad – pretending not to be is. Once a team “embraces the red” OKRs shift from a performance management tool to a learning device that facilitates highly impactful conversations about what teams learn as they build, launch and operate products. I wrote more on that here: Embrace the Red.

    No watermelons: Avoid the temptation to declare a Key Result as “on track” when it is actually “at risk”, i.e. the watermelon (“outside green, but when you look inside it’s red”). If it’s at risk, declare it early, which brings us to …

    No surprises: Leave it all on the table and make sure that you create maximum transparency when reporting your Key Results. I’ve seen too many rationales that assume a hockey stick growth curve only to be surprised in the last OKR review of the quarter or semester. Hope is a bad strategy. One way to address this issue is to track the confidence level for each Key Result as part of the review conversation: each Key Result starts at 50% by default, i.e. a 50-50 chance to hit the goal. As you progress through a quarter you will learn more and the confidence will move up or down and allows a team to communicate confidence even if a Key Result is backloaded. It creates an embedded feedback loop in case confidence levels swing hard towards in the last weeks of a quarter: What could we have anticipated earlier or better mitigated risk? Christina Wodtke has more on that in her book Radical Focus.

    Final Words

    Every OKR implementation is different and the above are just a few of the lessons that I learned over the years. I’m sure I’ll be able to add more over time. By the way, most people know Measure What Matters by John Doerr, which is a great intro into OKRs. Once you understand those basics, I highly recommend The OKRs Field Book by Ben Lamorte. Lots of hands-on advice in there on how to get started and what kinds of pitfalls to avoid. 

    Big “Thank you” to Isaac for his generous contributions to this post. He’s also been the one who got me back on the OKR bandwagon.

    Photo by Ryan Graybill on Unsplash

  • My new blogging machine

    A few months ago I tried out ChromeFlex. This is a version of ChromeOS that’s easy to install on traditional laptops. I had an old Surface Pro 3 machine which was collecting dust. It just waited for me to carry it to electronics recycling. As it turns out, ChromeFlex gave it another lease on life. The installation was easy. You create a bootable USB drive via a Chrome browser extension. Then you can choose whether you want to just try (boot from USB drive) or go all in(wipe machine and install ChromeOS for good).

    The whole process took less than 30 minutes. Booting from pressing the on/off button to entering your Google ID to enter the machine takes 20 seconds. And then you are ready to go. The gist of ChromeOS is that everything runs in a browser. My nearly nine year old Surface Pro can watch YouTube, I can use the web version of WhatsApp, of course manage my email, run Microsoft Office in the browser (even inking in OneNote works without problems), … and last, but not least, write blog posts without problems. I have a dozen browser tabs open without any performance issues. There are some UI glitches on YouTube, but nothing that makes YouTube unusable.

    The wonderful thing about this approach are the limitations. There is not an unlimited amount of apps and configurations, and one has to get a bit creative on how to get things done. For example: How do I get images from my phone into my blog, while converting from Apple’s HEIC image format to JPEG. It took me a while, but now I know that …

    • selecting the relevant photos on my phone, …
    • uploading them to Google Photos to then …
    • download as JPEG and …
    • upload into the WordPress Media Library

    does the trick. Sounds complicated? It is. But WordPress is partially at fault, because I have not managed to understand how I could upload photos from my phone to my self-hosted WordPress instance. Somewhere between my phone, my host and my WordPress installation the system breaks. The workflow above is cumbersome, but it works. And it works on my new/ old machine. Because it is so limited, it takes out the complexity that comes with having degrees of freedom. Besides, creativity thrives under constraints. And ChromeOS has just the right amount of constraints while getting the basics (i.e. speed, speed, speed) right.

    Long story, short: If you have an old machine lying around, give ChromeOS Flex a shot. It is a lot less complicated than installing a Linux distro … although, ChromeOS is based on Linux itself.

  • FancyZones – bliss for ultrawide displays

    The older generation might remember Microsoft PowerToys. Microsoft released it first for Windows 95 and then later for Windows XP as well. Back in the day, they gave us a few extra settings to customize Windows and a few tools like an image resizer. Two years ago Microsoft decided to resurrect PowerToys. Even better, it made it a open source utility collection for Windows 10.

    I find FancyZones indispensable as it fixes one of the biggest flaws of Windows: Window Snap. I might be a bit dramatic, but it has horrible keyboard support and moving windows is pure guesswork. It is that little mental friction which gets exhausting over time. FancyZones allows us to create custom window layouts with overlapping zones. The tool can remap the standard Win+Arrow shortcut, which makes it very intuitive.

    I’ve recently got an ultrawide display. FancyZones transformed this hunk of screen real estate into a highly effective canvas. The setting that made all the difference is

    Override Window Snap shortcut (Win + Arrow) to move windows between zone

    If I’m not mistaken, it’s turned off by default – I highly recommend activating.

    PowerToys is actively maintained and every few weeks new features are popping up. It’s like multiple mini Christmases throughout the year. Thank you, open source community.

  • Scaling yourself

    Scott Hanselman gave a talk in 2012 called “Scaling Yourself ” about personal productivity and not burning out.<footnote>As I learned today, he since has given a variant of that talk dozens of times and it probably has improved. However, I saw the 2012 version.</footnote> I would say it’s more relevant today than it has been then.

    A lot of us have been working from home since early 2020. We’ve had to re-arrange childcare, supervise remote learning, take care of family members and adopt new protocols such as social distancing – all against the backdrop of a global pandemic, an economic downturn and social unrest. We are not just transitioning to work-from-home, but rather dealing with multiple severe crises that force everyone to stay at home while still trying to work.

    While Scott’s talk does not solve global healthcare, he has a few actionable suggestions that might lighten the load. Below are more notes:

    • There is a fundamental difference between efficiency (reducing the effort to get things done) and effectiveness (doing the right things). Efficiency will come with time and experience. Effectiveness can be improved immediately.
    • Each week set aside time to define the work that needs to get done. That makes sure that you are working on the right things.
    • Say no/ drop things off your todo list. We can only do so many things and even fewer things really well. Give yourself permission to say “no” or re-negotiate your commitments.
    • “Being busy is a form of laziness”. Instead of taking care of everything as if everything is of equal importance, invest the time to triage work, i.e. make some upfront decision about if this needs to get done, whether you are the best person to do it and by when it needs to get done. Don’t just jump to the conclusion that add it to the top of your todo list.
    • Save your keystrokes: When writing longer instructive emails, consider putting them in a document or a blog post instead. That way you can share more broadly with others and don’t have to repeat yourself.
    • At the beginning of a day or a week, pick three things that you want to get done. As work and life now blends it is even more important to set boundaries and set yourself a bar for success to make sure you don’t end your day without guilt. If you don’t set that bar, your workday will never feel done and you will continuously carry the psychic weight of unfinished work with you.

    Scott does a much better job at telling stories around these concepts. Give it a shot, it’s only 30 minutes that will pay off later: Scaling Yourself – Scott Hanselman

  • Hard to discover tips for macOS

    These days I spend little time on macOS, but I’m still a sucker for tips on how to use it better. Tristan Hume collected quite a few of them:

    Inspired by a few different conversations with friends who’ve switched to macOS where I give them a whole bunch of tips and recommendations I’ve learned about over many years which are super important to how I use my computer, but often quite hard to find out about, I decided to write them all down:

    Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant

    The list features one of my favorite macOS features: “You can drag the little file/folder icons at the top of many windows.” Might sound unimpressive, but it is one of those things that I dearly miss in Windows. Have a look:

  • How to get more out of OneNote

    OneNote is one of those underappreciated apps within Office 365. To be honest, I’ve only used it for the last two years despite my wife having praised it for her work as a teacher for a long time. But it really has grown on me and I enjoy taking notes, working on outlines and reviewing documents with OneNote. Its integration with Teams makes it a no-brainer to share notes among a project team.

    I recently saw an unanswered tweet asking for help about OneNote and thought this might be an opportunity to share some of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate about OneNote over the last two years.

    (more…)