Ailyak

Ailyak (ay-lyak) Meaning: This is the Bulgarian version of the African hakuna matata or the Italian dolce far niente. The word is untranslatable and comprises the art of doing everything slowly, with no rush, enjoying the process and life in general.

Which is exactly the mindset I need now, starting in a new job - finding a sustainable pace for onboarding, processing all the information I need to help the organization succeed, all the things I need to learn, and forming strong bonds with my new team and stakeholders. I started a new, amazing journey with Choco on January 1st.

Cinnamon, our new family member will surely help with all this!

🐕‍🦺 Leadership

​The Most Important Characteristics Of High-Performance Teams​

It wasn't conscious from my side, but gathering all my thoughts and experience in building great teams over the past 7+ years will definitely come in handy in my new job. I'm pretty proud of this article and I believe it's a really useful reference for all engineering leaders.

​Group Dynamics: Norms and Emotion​

Closely related to the above, this article talks about how group activities and norms influence their wellbeing and effectiveness, and it offers a nice exercise for that, too.

​Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts​

Knowing where to look for problems by figuring out who reports up to whom.

​Managers should ask for feedback​

This should be a no-brainer, yet... I've met quite a few leaders who never thought of this. The article provides guidance on the "how", as well.

🪅 Product

​The 2 greatest clarifying questions in product development: "On what time frame? Under what circumstance?"​

"Everything that is true can become false, and vice versa, depending on how far in the future you are looking." - this Twitter thread is golden.

​The Dark Side Of OKRs​

If we could tag one apocalyptic rider for adaptive organizations, it would be "traditional performance management." It is old-fashioned performance management that keeps us in a world of humans as resources, as command-and-control takers, with rigid top-down planning, and solid prevention of curious and exploratively-minded cooperation.

​Hard Edges, Soft Middle​

Have you had that feeling of being several weeks into a project, and you find yourself wandering around, struggling to wrangle the scope back to what you thought it was when you started?