Techpoint Charlie

Noa Tamir (Data Science Manager) and Raz Shuty (Engineering Manager) share with Alaa Sarhan (IC Fullstack-er) what management is about in general and why an IC (Individual Contributor) is nowadays more than ever empowered to not become a manager for the wrong reasons.

Sneak-peak reasons from the episode:

• Manager role is totally different from a lead IC role
• ICs are paid more than managers
•  Missing short reward cycles, a.k.a "It's not about you anymore"
• and more in our lovely conversation ;)

Recommended reads on the topic:

• Charity Majors' 17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager
• Tanya Reilly's Not all engineering leaders are engineering managers

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan speak with Rony Lahav about the role of QA and Automation, Why do we need QA people (or why developers shouldn’t be the only testers), Different Test - Component, Integration, System, E2E, Is Manual QA dead?

We also touched on:

• Automation is a software project
• when should testing/QA stop? / what kind of bugs/edges cases are fine to be ignored or not covered?
• QA vs. Product Acceptance. How much do they conflict, and do they complement each other?
• what areas QA covers on top of "functional": performance, accessibility, usability, fault tolerance/recoverability, etc.
• In presence of QA team/role, what should Software Engineers test?
• Tracking data quality: tracking QA, and Functional QA (OSS tool from King https://github.com/king/tratt-api)
• Phases of QA: development, build, release, on-call
• What QA and TE gets that devs, PMs, and DS don’t get and what do we get when there are better collaboration and comms
• Team testing

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan speak with Alexandra Paun (@ale_paun) about the Functional Manager hat that she often wears as part of her current job at King.

We learn from Alexandra the many intersections this role has with many, if not all functions and departments in the organization, even extending outside of it to negotiate, collaborate and continuously work with external partners and organization, to bring a great business initiative from conception to life.

In this episode we talk about the skill set of a functional manager, the phases a project goes through under their supervision and the challenges and rewarding aspects of this role.

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

A quick episode where Raz Shuty, Noa Tamir, Alaa Sarhan (@TweetingAlaa) are randomly asking themselves a question and trying to see how they feel about it, in 20 minutes:

Have you used any persona framework at work. If so what did you like about it? What was it good for? What’s the downside of using them?

Nothing scientific here, more like a quick conversation about it :)

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

Noa Tamir and Alaa Sarhan meet with our lovely guest Phil Bennett to chat about Emotions at work

Triggered by an article Phil Bennett wrote called The Crying Game: It’s OK to Cry at Work!

Emotions are unavoidable and normal, but you have to understand the emotional Labour you’re putting on other people. That said, sometimes high emotions are the only way people can express what they really feel. Especially in times of frustration. 

In the episode:

• Intro to Phil, and his experience from working in agencies 
• Wearing your heart on your sleeve and its effect on others 
• Perspectives on differences between individual contributors and managers
• Going through personal difficulties while at work 
• Emotional labour, empathy as a skill, and fairness
• Support frameworks we know: 
  • Step away or take a walk
  • Ask people if they are OK
  • Managers, HR, Trust keepers, Coaches, Psychologists

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

A quick episode where Raz Shuty, Noa Tamir, Alaa Sarhan (@TweetingAlaa) are randomly asking themselves a question and trying to see how they feel about it, in 20 minutes:

How do you battle the common "too many meetings" problem? 

Nothing scientific here, more like a quick conversation about it :)

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

Alaa Sarhan (@TweetingAlaa) Fullstack Engineer at Doodle is inviting Armin Bognar Product Advisor and Head of Product at Orderlion and Marc Sandifer Senior Product Manager at Contorion for a conversation to exchange and share their knowledge and experiences around measuring success in product companies; a topic that is or must be near and dear to every Product Manager, Product Designer and  pretty much any Individual Contributor in a product team.

• What success do we want to measure?
• How do we shift from output-driven to impact-driven process and culture?
• How can we measure impact of our changes, small or big, operational or strategic?

In this episode, we mentioned:

• ICE Scoring Method as a useful tool for trying to quantify your ideas, which might be even more helpful to do when you can't rely on data to back those ideas with.
• Disney's four keys to Guest Experience as an example of how prioritized goals help teams and individuals act in an aligned and autonomous ways while carrying their day-to-day work.
• OKR framework as one way to align teams around prioritize goals as well as flip the natural inferior way of approaching development which is starting with the idea and later figure out what it is useful for, to starting with the goal and then figure out good ideas that might get us there.
  
  Also Available on:
  Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM
  
  Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

Raz Shuty, Noa Tamir, and Alaa Sarhan meet to chat about open plan offices, and how working in them makes them feel..

We mention in this episode: 

1. The (recent) history of open plan offices
2. Our personal experiences working in open plan offices, and other office plans
3. Cubicles!
4. HBR's "The Truth about Open Plan Offices"
5. Clear glass rooms
6. How are we dealing with the circumstances as individual contributors, and as managers
7. Lots and lots of feelings!

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn,PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It!
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License 

A quick episode where Yael Schweiger, Raz Shuty and Noa Tamir are randomly asking themselves two questions and trying to see how they feel about them:

• Can you be a Manager without being an IC in the role? 
• Can managers be friends with the people they manage? 

Nothing scientific here, more like a quick conversation about it :)

Also Available on:

Spotify, iTunes, Google, Stitcher, TuneIn, PlayerFM

Music credits: Dan Lebowitz: Come and Get It! Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License