Phil's $.02

The Christmas holiday is my favorite of the year. I love the smells, the joy and the wonder of the season – especially through the eyes of my daughter.

The morning after N’s 5th Christmas, I am again reminded that simple gifts are often the most lasting and important: Drinking “Daddy’s special hot juice” just before we light the tree for the first time, sprinkling reindeer food in the yard (so they can find our house) and waking up at 5:30am to my little girl screeching with glee, “Mommy!! Daddy!! There are gifts under our tree!!”

Still, N had a modest “haul” this year as we all continue to learn the lesson of less is more. She got a new “big girl” bed, a few puzzles, some clothes, a custom chest for all her dress-up clothes (made by her Uncle Tim), a new bike from Nana and a Hannah Montana outfit. (aside: for some reason, N loves Miley Cyrus. Party in the U.S.A is her new theme song)

After opening our gifts, we had brunch with the San Diego family. From there we tried a nap (#FAIL) and went to the “hot pool” to kill some time. Finally, we ended the day at friends’ house for Christmas dinner and a good old fashioned Tennessee Butt Whoopin’ by the Chargers. GO BOLTS!

This morning, I asked N what she enjoyed most about Christmas. In her words, “Doing puzzles with Mommy, watching Polar Express and playing in my new house.” I then asked about her favorite gift. “I told you already Daddy. I love playing in my new house.”

Her favorite gift turns out to be the box her new bed came in. With kids, it’s the little things.

Happy Holidays and a prosperous New Year.

Colin Powell has long been one of the public figures I most respect.  From his time as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to his service both before and after, Powell wields an incisive intellect and has powerful and practical wisdom to share.

A few weeks ago, my boss at Shopzilla forwarded A Leadership Primer – a presentation given by Colin Powell on leadership and victory in business and life.  I highly recommend viewing the entire presentation – but here are the summary “Lessons” from his presentation:

• Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
• The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.  They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care.  Either case is a failure of leadership.
• Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites.  Experts often possess more data than judgment.
• Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.
• Never neglect details.  When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be double vigilant.
• You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.
• Keep looking below surface appearances.  Don’t shrink from doing so because you might not like what you find.
• Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved.  Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds.
• Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.
• Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.
• Fit no stereotypes.  Don’t chase the latest management fads.  The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team’s mission.
• Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
• “Powell’s Rules for Picking People: “  Look for intelligence and judgment and most critically, a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners.  Also look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego and the drive to get things done.
• Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers who can cut through argument, debate and doubt – to offer a solution everybody can understand.
• [paraphrased] Use the formula (Probability of success) = 40 to 70 – where the numbers are the percentage of information acquired.  Once the information is in the 40-70 range, go with your gut.
• The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.
• Have fun in your command.  Don’t always run at a breakneck pace.
• Command is lonely

Powell finishes with:  “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”

I had the chance to hear Powell speak years ago just after he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.  His command authority is palpable.  Literally, you could feel that he had commanded the greatest force in the history of the world from the word, “Hello”.  His talk that day was on these tenets of leadership and have served as a foundational influence in my leadership style ever since.

This article is a cross-post from the Shopzilla Tech Blog.

The way we build software has changed fundamentally. From waterfalls and schedules to backlogs and iterations, we deliver more – more quality, more technology and ultimately more value.

Still, we sometimes miss the point. It happens every time we focus on progress as a first-order goal.

In the “old days”, a project kickoff would mean an extended brainstorm followed by a “scoping” discussion, ultimately resulting in a schedule nobody believed anyway. Inevitably, the teams would fall behind and since the schedule was our only measure of interim success, the frustrated project stakeholders lost faith in the “under-performing” team.  Well before the software had a chance to succeed, the team often had already failed – ironically not because of bad software but because the team were not clairvoyant.

I argue the real failure was a focus on progress instead of the point.  Even in an Agile/Scrum process, we can easily lose sight of the point if we aren’t careful to measure the right thing.

I’ll give an example from Shopzilla’s recent site redo.

In 2007 we redesigned our site delivery platform.  One of the most important decisions we made was to release our new site one “page” at a time.  This approach, coupled with our ability to selectively meter traffic to the newly released site infrastructure, allowed us to move much more quickly because we could limit our risk by % of traffic.

Sounds great – what went wrong?

Releasing page-by-page was fantastic for momentum and risk management, but as it turns out we never released more than a small percentage of normal traffic to the new pages.  Once we completed the functional development we realized that we had been so focused on incremental releases that we had never performance tested the entire system together.  Did it really matter if each page of the site met its SLA when the overall site did not at full-scale?

To a point, we were following the best spirit of agile development with our incremental releases.  However, “done” for a page – or even for every page – did not mean “done” for the site.  We simply never had to consider the performance of the site while releasing one page at a time.  It’s only after we tested the entire system for the final release (at 100% of scale) that we saw serious performance issues and took another month to fix them.

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Some argue we did exactly the right thing by only addressing issues (like full-scale performance problems) as they came up.  From my perspective however, the whole point of the initiative was to release our new site to 100% of our traffic.  Missing full-scale system performance until the end was a great example of us getting so wrapped up in our page releases that we forgot the point – the business value of a new extreme-scale site infrastructure.  This goes double given that one of the three goals of the project was 1.5 second full-scale page loads.

You get what you measure, so beware focusing too much on progress when the “point” is what you really care about.  Sometimes this pitfall shows up as a missed design principle like our example above.  Worse, we can find our teams more focused on things like 100% “commitment” rates in their iterations without regard to their actual yield (business value created).