Successful leaders must recognize that their role is much more than the endgame of a specialist. Leading requires constant learning and a balance of specialized and broad knowledge.
Source: Don’t be a “leader”
Tag: quick note
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Don’t be a “leader”
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Introducing TensorFlow Recommenders
TensorFlow, the open-source machine-learning library, introduced a library to make recommendations easier. Recommendations are a crucial component for e-Commerce but also other web-services. Good recommendations help build a better user experience and drive customer engagement. The more time consumers spend on a site, the quicker customers find what they are looking for, the better their satisfaction. Recommendations help achieve this and TensorFlow now makes it easier to improve such functionality.
Introducing TensorFlow Recommenders, a library for building flexible and powerful recommender models.
From the blog.Source: Introducing TensorFlow Recommenders — The TensorFlow Blog
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Working in Agile Mode
“We are not working in this a ‘Agile‘-mode that you’re working in.” she said. She actually tried to disparage the lack of structure in the other team she has been assigned to work with. The team this lady belongs to consider themselves a marketing team. In a high-tech company. Marketing, but still: for technology.
After the assignment to the new team, this lady actually tried to mock the lack or absence of procedures in the new team. Her comment meant to refer to any processes but literally trying to differentiate herself.
The team she is working with initially tracks their tasks of deliverables in a so-called Kanban board. The same team conducts daily standup meetings, that are facilitated by a process owner. About once every other week there are so-called review meetings with the team manager and external stakeholders.
Simple Kanban All of these are fragments from agile methods.
Of course, it is conjecture. At the same time, this pattern that can be observed in many places. People try to differentiate themselves from the working class, the programmers, the technical guys. While in reality, all colleagues contribute to the same product.
So ultimately, the differentiation between being technical and the business ends up being more hurtful to the companies culture. Not to mention the effects of digitalization, that is based on the assumption that technology will improve everybody’s life. Assuming more technical acumen, even as a business person, will make you a better, more efficient person. Being technical is independent of working in agile mode.
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Tech layoffs spread (a bit)
Are January layoffs just a few post-WeWork jitters? TechCrunch has found itself writing about layoffs at a few notable tech companies this week — and not just Softbank-backed ones. The focus is very much profits, as Alex Wilhelm summed up on Thursday, especially after the failed WeWork IPO and subsequent valuation and headcount decimation. We’ll […]
From the articleSource: Startups Weekly: Tech layoffs spread (a bit) | TechCrunch
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2020: The year of ARM?
Rumors, that Apple would switch to ARM for their computers have been floating around for a while. MacWorld just recently reaffirmed these with Annual ARM predictions.
Another important product that was announced at this years Re:Invent, AWS has ARM servers in their cloud portfolio. The Graviton2 is a custom-built 64bit processor available for EC2 workloads.
A clear signal ARM becomes ready for primetime.
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Product Team FAQ
Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group published an article only yesterday, comparing Product and Feature Teams. Apparently, the article generated so much feedback that Marty found it worthwhile clarifying a few of his thoughts and collect the gist of the feedback he received.
Every so often one of my articles seems to strike a chord, and this latest one on the difference between Product Teams and Feature Teams certainly seemed to do that. I am grateful for the very positive response. This morning I woke up to well over a hundred people that took the time to e-mail […]
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Tesla explodes in Russia
Monday morning. Apparently a Tesla exploded on a Russian highway after a crash.
A Tesla vehicle involved in a collision burst into flames and exploded on a highway near Moscow last night, local media reported. The occupants were slightly injured, but the car is toast.
Source: Tesla explodes after crash on Russian highway – TechCrunch
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Culture and Organizational Change
Just a small observation I made during AWS Transformation Day. While the entire theme for the event was on transforming business, the schedule had one track for “Culture and Organizational Change” alone. While Culture and Organizational Change is a broad and huge topic, but it is necessary and makes the difference for agility in rapidly changing and competitive markets. Amazon has been talking about this for years and they share their knowledge with their partners.
On an attempt to find out how organizations actually master this, the perspective most consultants and companies I talked to during the event shared with me was rather sobering. Anyone exhibiting at that event merely offered to run any software project under an agile management. No support, consultancy or even efforts to drive actual change, whatsoever, at least nothing that would exceed a traditional software project scope.
Cultural and Organizational Change is something requiring executive buy in and is killed quickly by means of exhaustive efforts to plan ahead. Culture needs to embrace the possibility to change quickly, throughout the process. And the wish for management is human, to have transparency and perspective early in the process, it is just as natural in the process for developers to stay vague for items that are not yet clear.
Any cultural change needs to embrace bi-directual communication and the ability to break down complex. On first thought this sounds easy, but requires plenty of cooperation and trust in a clearly defined team. Culture is rooted in clear understanding of roles, responsibilities and not to mention last, trust of all members.
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Apple’s 2019 WWDC announcements
Good & Quick summary of everything announced at this years WWDC edition. A little bit of everything for everyone.
Apple kicked off its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose this morning with a two-and-a-half hour keynote, showing off everything the company has been working on for the past many months. Want to know everything they announced, but don’t have time to watch the whole thing yourself? We’ve wrapped it all up for you […]
Source: TechCrunch