Description
You communicate generously. As a P&E member, you are thorough, seek to understand, and gently teach when called for.
Milestone 1
I have observed this person showing a consistent, comfortable, continuous, and clear positive impact to a squad when wielding this ability, and therefore I would put them in situations where they can employ this ability with only a small amount of guidance
- You treat your feedback as a collaborative discussion rather than demands.
- You ask clarifying questions about anything you don't completely understand.
- Communicates project status clearly and effectively
- Collaborates with others with empathy
- Asks squad team members for help at the appropriate juncture
- An active participant within squad meetings (asking questions, bringing up opinions, sharing insights)
Milestone 2
I have observed this person showing a consistent, comfortable, continuous, and clear positive impact to a squad when wielding this ability, and therefore I would put them in situations where they can employ this ability, with no assistance as well as being a trusted active or passive mentor to others
- Your PR descriptions, epics, stories, documentation provide the full context necessary to understand the change we plan to make in the world (Story Writing/Epic Writing)
- Ensures stakeholders are aware of their personal and their squad's current blockers (Squad Progress Communicator)
- Chooses the appropriate tools for accurate and timely communication
- Organizes, coordinates, and facilitates a squads retro, project kickoff, quarterly kickoff (Epic Shaper)
- You go out of your way to make sure all voices are heard. In meetings or group settings, you give space to each person to share their thoughts
- Your PR descriptions, Epics, stories, documentation anticipate questions and proactively document anything that won't be obvious to a reviewer.
Milestone 3
I have observed this person showing a consistent, comfortable, continuous, and clear positive impact to multiple squads when wielding this ability, and therefore I would put them in situations where they can employ this ability as well as being considered an expert within this discipline
- Resolves communication difficulties between others
- Anticipates and shares schedule deviations in plenty of time that may impact squad goals
- Presents change management to the team at off-sites or weekly team meetings
- Creates or updates slack channels to ensure team members are clear on what is appropriate communication in each channel
- Creates slide templates, spreadsheets to communicate information that anyone on P&E can reuse and repurpose
- Communicates project risk and tradeoffs skillfully and with nuance
Milestone 4
I have observed this person showing a consistent, comfortable, continuous, and clear positive impact to a squad when wielding this ability, and therefore I would put them in situations where they can not only employ this ability but where they set the tone for this at the company level
- You drive long-term investments that deliver ongoing value and provide solid foundations for future needs.
- Leads organization and facilitation of offsites and what is going to be communicated during those sessions
- Contextualizes and clarifies ambiguous direction and strategy for others
- Identifies needs for remote working communication and works to implement those across P&E and the company
Milestone 5
I have observed this person showing a consistent, comfortable, continuous, and clear positive impact to not just internal teams but the community/industry in general when wielding this ability, and they are recognized by the community/industry as an expert
- At this exceptional milestone, your impact is foundational to Lessonly's future or is of industry-level prominence.
- Defines processes for clear communication for Lessonly
- Develops and delivers plans to execs, the board, and outside investors
Configuration Health
- ✅ Associated with 6 roles
- ✅ Has been referenced in 11 pieces of public recognition
- ℹ️ No one has achieved a milestone on this ability
- ⛔️ Last updated: about 5 years ago
- ℹ️ Never conversed about
Role & Position Requirements
- Company Level Dbw Initiative Membersare recommended to be milestone 1+
- Escalation Mitigatorsmust be milestone 2+
- Interviewersmust be milestone 1+
- Onboarding Buddiesmust be milestone 1+
- P&E Dbw Group Membersmust be milestone 1+
- Squad Managersmust be milestone 1+
Examples / Observations
Observation created over 4 years agoAs a former member of the Practice Squad I still lurk in their channel, and today I was go glad I do because I got to see Haley in action. As Tech Lead she brought some concerns from the practice devs to the whole squad to discuss: things that were slowing delivery down and had the potential to endanger the squad's objectives. True to our company value of asking clarifying questions, Haley explained the situation, asked for specific answers, and the squad is going to meet to decide on them. She also asked to be the point person for technical questions, empowering the other practice devs to stay focused on building awesome software. Haley, thanks for seeing a need and stepping in to meet it, and for a great example of one of the many actions technical leadership can look like.
Observation created over 4 years agoThis message in a thread really needs nothing around it to explain its absolute amazingness.
A tiny bit of context. The team was really pumped about making an optimization to our authorization system that is now making a lot fewer calls to the database. The team was excited about the results and the thread was full of gifs and celebration. A non-technical member of the team came in to show appreciation and celebration as well, and asked if someone could explain a bit about why everyone was so pumped (up to this point you really needed to have significant experience in site reliability concepts to follow).
The amazing Ethan responded with this...
ELI5 Fridge example. Before whenever you were hungry for grapes, you would go downstairs, open the fridge, grab one grape, and return upstairs to eat it. That’s fine when you are younger and have a smaller appetite, weren’t sure if you liked grapes yet, and generally had fewer things to do. As you got older, you found yourself hungry more often and you found out grapes were your favorite snack. You realized you were wasting a lot of time making trips and only getting a single grape. Instead of getting a single grape every time you are hungry, you take a little extra time to fix a bowl of grapes instead. You eat from the bowl when you’re hungry instead of making many smaller trips. This frees up a lot of time you would have been using on additional trips which were causing you to take longer to go hang out with friends or finish your schoolwork.
Now for our scale, imagine you were getting hungry 77k per hour, but making 2.68 million trips per hour. Now you make a bowl and only make 77k trips🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️🙌🏾🙏🏾❤️
Observation created almost 5 years agoKatherine prepared an AMAZING agenda document for our ongoing discovery meetings which, I found super helpful.
If you've ever been in a meeting (heh, that's all of you), you know how easy it is to lose track of the goal and forget the agreements you make. We had this doc staring us in the face the whole time, which really helped keep us on track and encouraged us to take notes and track action items.
Meetings that flow like that - staying on track to meet the goal, and ending with specific action items - make me not hate meetings, and this helped our discovery conversation feel so productive. Thanks, Katherine!
(See a screenshot of the doc below!)
Observation created almost 5 years agoGeorge reached out to me earlier this week to set up some time to pair on a migration similar to one I had previously done. While pairing, he recorded our Zoom call because he knew that the information I was sharing with him might be valuable later on. After we finished pairing, George continued to ask great questions to seek clarity about things that were not well documented and mentioned that he wanted to write down his notes and put them in a lesson to share with others on the Empower squad to use when they run into another tricky migration.
Observation created almost 5 years agoI'm thankful for Brittany's PR updating our seeds file.
First, she noticed that the test data it produces has gotten out of date over time and didn't provide an optimal testing environment. This PR is a step towards addressing that need. She also introduced a cool concept of using the filler text in Lessons as a way to help provide guidance on how they are expected to work. What a cool idea that provides assistance at the time of need while also providing realistic test data!
Secondly, her PR notes very clearly shared the context behind these proposed changes, explained her solution, and even included "hot tips" to help call out pitfalls while testing it. I appreciate this because I was very quickly able to not only understand her changes, but think about them in the context of the problem they were aiming to solve. All of this information was conveyed in format that was concise and easy for me to follow, which is not easy in itself. While I found the PR description helpful, it will also provide helpful context to the next person to work in the seeds file :tada:
Conversations about Communication
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