Description
You communicate generously. As a P&E member, you are thorough, seek to understand, and gently teach when called for. You also ensure information is translated in an easy-to-understand way for all Lessonly team members and customers who are not necessarily proficient in business or technical terms
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.
- Communicate project status clearly and effectively
- Collaborate with others with empathy
- Ask squad team members for help at the appropriate juncture
- You are an active participant within squad meetings (asking questions, bringing up opinions, sharing insights)
- You take a complex backend bug and explaining the impact in an understandable way to non-technical stakeholders
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)
- Your PR descriptions, stories, and documentation anticipate questions and proactively document anything that won't be obvious to a reviewer.
- Ensure stakeholders are aware of their personal and their squad's current blockers
- Choose the appropriate tools for accurate and timely communication
- 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
- You ask clear questions by sharing the appropriate amount of context and relevant background information and outlining your assumptions and expectations.
- Engineers who have never worked on the area of code you've changed easily understand your PR's.
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
- You're proactive about creating documentation and/or comments in the code base to share knowledge and ensure every engineer has the clarity they need when working on areas of the code base you touch
- When describing technical concepts/information to non-technical folks, those consuming your information do not need to ask follow up questions.
- Communicates project risk and tradeoffs skillfully and with nuance
- Anticipate and share schedule deviations in plenty of time that may impact squad goals
- Resolve communication difficulties between others
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.
- Lead organization and facilitation of offsites and what is going to be communicated during those sessions
- Contextualize and clarify ambiguous direction and strategy for others
- Identify 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.
- Define processes for clear communication for Lessonly
- Develop and deliver plans to execs, the board, and outside investors
Configuration Health
- ✅ Associated with 15 roles
- ✅ Has been referenced in 7 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
- Back End Code Reviewersmust be milestone 1+
- Back End Architectsmust be milestone 3+
- Back End Engineersmust be milestone 1+
- Discovery Engineersmust be milestone 1+
- Front End Code Reviewersmust be milestone 1+
- Front End Architectsmust be milestone 2+
- Front End Engineersmust be milestone 1+
- Implementation Engineersmust be milestone 1+
- Incident Remediation Leadsmust be milestone 2+
- On Call Application Engineersmust be milestone 2+
- Story Shapersmust be milestone 1+
- Tier 2 Escalation Engineersmust be milestone 1+
- Tier 3 Escalation Engineersmust be milestone 2+
- Tier 4 Escalation Engineersmust be milestone 3+
- Triage Application Engineersmust be milestone 1+
Examples / Observations
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 agoFeaturing:Stephen G.Engineering CommunicationInitiativeStakeholder / Feedback ManagementDevOps Enablement LeadUnexpected, concise, clear, communicated with both summaries and details, and action-oriented. As it pertains to emails about technical topics, it doesn't get much better than this.
I now feel that much more confident that Stephen isn't just thinking about doing the tasks he is assigned... he is thinking about the overall picture and health of Lessonly as we navigate this journey we are on.
Love it!!
Email #1:
HI everybody,
As you may or may not be aware there was a massive hack on solarwinds which provides infrastructure software to many companies. ( https://www.solarwinds.com/securityadvisory ).
I want to present to this group the (preliminary) findings as I investigated our exposure because industry-wide implications and more customers are going to be asking about this. It is going to be beneficial to have some sort of statement to respond with.
If you would like me to work with somebody on what that statement should be please let me know. And if you have any guidance on verbage before we craft such a statement I would appreciate it.
Executive Summary
We use a small unaffected Solarwinds product in non production environments. A couple of our vendors had similar exposure. Our biggest risk is Twilio which actually used an affected product, but they believe they were not impacted by the breach.
Our Direct Exposure
We do not use their software directly in our data centers.
PaperTrail
We use a product called PaperTrail in non-production environments for logging. No sensitive information should be sent there. This product
Vendors
Vendors known to have some exposure to SolarWinds Products
Twilio (Sendgrid, Twilio, Segment)
The company Twilio owns 3 services that we use. Twilio did use the affected software "in a limited fashion." They have been working with SolarWinds and believe they were ultimately unaffected by the breach
Twilio is our biggest risk, but at this point I believe it to be mitigated.
Harness
Harness used an unaffected SolarWinds product (Pingdom). Ultimately I see no risk here, but they did share this for transparency.
CloudBees (Codeship)
CloudBees owns the codeship product that we use. They, like Harness, used some unaffected SolarWinds products
Librato (scoped to our CodeShip product)
PaperTrail (scoped to our CodeShip product)
PingDom (basic external monitoring used by Ops)
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:
Observation created almost 5 years agoFor starters, I was impressed by the quick turnaround to remove courses from Copy Company. It came up earlier in the day, and then oh what's this, a PR is already ready to be reviewed? Happy to pick it up, especially since it's something that benefits Learn next quarter. 🙌
But the quickly-moving PR is especially impressive because the notes were dense with Classic Steve Thoughtfulness.
"Why do we care about removing courses from Copy Company?"
"How can we be sure that we're safe to do so?"
"What even IS Copy Company?"These are questions that each have multiple answers in Steve's PR notes. Even though I've worked with Copy Company a few times, I still felt like I was learning something. I felt empowered to give a review and move this along in the process, because I knew that Steve had explored the potential risks around giving this code the axe.
Here is the PR in question! https://github.com/lessonly/lessonly/pull/9093#pullrequestreview-523805875 As someone who always favors more over less when it comes to context and supplemental information, I appreciated these notes a lot!!! 🤩
Observation created about 5 years agohttps://lessonly.slack.com/archives/C8LGVESDC/p1601648444038100
The thing I love about this is that it is clear and actionable.
- Sense: Paying attention to those emails is valuable. Multiple folks on the team likely received that. Only one did something about it.
- Context/Respond/Actionable: Saying what the impact will be, an initial estimate, story created, and giving a recommendation makes the message actionable
❤️🙏🏾
Conversations about Engineering Communication
This section is for Lessonly folks only. Sign your team up to find your Gruuv!