When I’m setting up a new computer, one of the tasks I need to do is set up new SSH keys to access different servers. It’s good practice not to use the same key for different services. Keys are useful so you don’t need to type your credentials in all the time when working on a trusted PC.
Instead of typing something like: ssh thekua@github.com I can just simply type ssh github without being prompted for credentials. Less typing. Win!
After you generate several different keys, you can either add them to the command line when using ssh, but it’s easier just to use the config file (typically found at ~/.ssh/config).
Here’s an example config file you might have assuming you have three different projects:
Careers ladders are all the rage in software firms. They create structure and shared expectations around different levels. Like any model, career ladders have pros and cons. Career ladders are a starting point for shared expectations across an organisation. However career ladders cannot be comprehensive, as people are unique, like snowflakes. People bring their different strengths and experiences to what they do. Everyone will do this differently. As a result, I like to explain that levels in a career ladder do not represent a checklist. Rather, levels reflect how people can have a different impact in an organisation in different ways.
In my most recent talk, “Talking with Tech Leads,” I explain how, some companies have a two-track career model. Two tracks are great, as they allow for more development and growth in different areas. Most of the research I did seemed to focus on two main tracks. In Silicon Valley they refer to these as Individual Contributor (IC) and Management tracks. I actually don’t think a two-track ladder is enough. This is why I present you the Trident Career Model below.
The Trident Model of Career Development
The Trident Career Model has three tracks. Each track represents where people spend most of their time or energy.
The Management Track
In this track, people spend a majority of their time (70-80%) on management activities. This still includes leading people, supporting people, managing structures & processes and organising. People in this track must still have some background in the topic they are managing.
Most importantly, their main value add is not necessarily through making decisions related to the specialist field (e.g. system architecture). Instead, they manage the surrounding system & structure to ensure people closest to the work have the best context and information to make better decisions. They provide enough support, time and/or budget to enable others to do what they do best.
Example roles in this track: Engineering Manager, VP Engineering, IT Manager
The Technical Leadership Track
In this track, people spend a majority of their time (70-80%) leading people on a technical topic. People in this track must have relevant hands-on technical skills and experience. They should have good but not necessarily the best skills in the team they are leading. People in this track draw heavily on refined leadership skills to be successful. Classic activities for this role (in the field of software) include:
Establishing a Technical Vision
Managing technical risks
Clarifying/uncovering technical requirements
Ensuring non-technical stakeholders understand technical constraints, trade-offs or important decisions
Growing technical knowledge and cultivating knowledge sharing in and across teams
Example roles in this track: Lead Developer, Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, Software Architect
The True Individual Contributor (IC) Track
In this track, people spend a majority of they time (70-80%) focused on “Executing/Doing”. Software engineers early in their career reflect this very well. This track still requires people to have excellent communication and collaboration skills. People in this track have impact through the deep/detailed knowledge or skills they offer. Most small companies do not need a deep IC track, as there is no need for specialisation. As an organisation grows, they may need more of these roles. The number of these roles will always be smaller than the other two tracks in a well-functioning organisation.
Example roles in this track: DB Specialist, Performing Tuning Specialist, Domain Specialist.
Conclusion
This model is indeed a simplification. In real life, the Management and the Technical Leadership tracks are not always so clearly separate. I know some companies where Engineering Managers also take Technical Leadership responsibilities, or where Tech Leads or Lead Developers are also expected to take on Management responsibilities. This is not necessarily wrong.
I have personally found that, at scale, it is often hard to find people who have deep skills and experiences at both of these areas, and that it can be useful to have a discussion around where someone’s focus, passion or development progression lies.
As the famous quote goes:
All models are wrong, some are useful.
George EP Box
I have found this Trident Model a useful starting point to contrast differences in roles or expectations. Considering using this model:
To develop skills in an area you may want to work
When building out your own company’s Career Ladder
To explain differences/focuses on existing roles and responsibilities
Looking for an example of this in the wild? This post, Engineering Levels at Carta, isn’t as visually deliberate, but points out “Senior software engineer II (L5) is the second of Carta’s two senior levels, our first terminal level.” This is made more explicit in this post about Staff Engineering at Carta, which says, “For those who wish to pursue it, our first level beyond “senior” and into focused technical leadership is staff engineer.”
I hope you found this post interesting. Please leave a comment about your thoughts of the Trident Model of Career Development.
I took part in a three day course before Christmas to better understand Large Scale Scrum (LeSS). LeSS’ tagline is “More with LeSS”. I’m pessimistic about most “Scaling Agile Frameworks.” Many give organisations an excuse to relabel their existing practices as “agile.” Not to fundamentally change them. Bas Vodde (one of the founders of LeSS’) invited me to take part in a course just before Christmas. I took him up on the offer to hear it “From the horse’s mouth.”
This article summarises my notes, learnings and reflections from the three day course. There may be errors and would encourage you to read about it yourself on their LeSS website, or post a comment at the end of this article.
About the Trainer
I met Bas Vodde about a decade ago. We met at one of the Retrospective Facilitator’s gathering. He is someone who, I believe, lives the agile values and principles and has been in the community for a long time. He still writes code, pair programming with teams he works with. He has had a long and successful coaching history with many companies. He worked with huge organisations where many people build a single product together. Think of a telecommunications product, for example. Through his shared experiences with his co-founder, Craig Larman, they distilled these ideas into what is now called LeSS.
What I understood about LeSS?
LeSS evolved from using basic Scrum in a context with many many teams. I took away there are three common uses of the term LeSS.
LeSS (The Complete Picture) – The overview of LeSS including the experimental mindset, guides, rules/framework, and principles. See the the main website, Less.
LeSS (The Rules/Framework) – The specifics of how you operate LeSS. See LeSS Rules (April 2018).
LeSS (for 2-8 teams) – Basic LeSS is abbreviated to LeSS and is optimised for 2-8 teams. They have LeSS Huge for 8+ teams, and modifications to the rules. See LeSS Huge.
Practices & Rituals in LeSS
LeSS has a number of practices and rituals as part of its starting set of rules. Some of these include:
A single prioritised Backlog – All teams share a single backlog with a priority managed by the Product Owner.
Sprint Planning 1 – At the end of this, teams have picked which Backlog Items they work on during a sprint.
Sprint Planning 2 – All teams do this separately. Like in Scrum, Sprint Planning 2 focuses on the design and creation of tasks for their Sprint.
Daily Scrum – Each team runs their own Daily scrum as per standard Scrum.
Backlog Refinement – Teams clarify what customers/stakeholders need. Good outcomes include Backlog Items refined into sizes where teams can take 4/5 into a Sprint. LeSS encourages groups, made up of different team members, to refine Backlog Items. This maximises knowledge sharing, learning and opportunities to collaborate.
Sprint Review – Teams showcase their work to customers/stakeholders for feedback. The Product Owner works to gather feedback and reflect this in the overall Backlog. Sprint Reviews should not be treated as an approval gate. It’s about getting more input or ideas.
Sprint Retrospective – Each team runs their own retrospective. As per standard Scrum.
Overall Retrospective – Members from every team plus management hold a retrospective. This retrospective focuses on the system and improving the overall system.
Shared Definition of Done – All teams share an overall Definition of Done, which they can also update. Teams can build on the basis of the shared Definition of Done.
Sprint – There is only one sprint in LeSS, so by definition all teams synchronise on the same sprint cadence.
Roles in LeSS
Scrum Master – Like in Scrum, LeSS has the Scrum Master whose goal is to coach, enable and help LeSS run effectively. The Scrum Master is a full time role up of up to 3 teams.
Product Owner – The Product Owner is the role responsibility for the overall Backlog prioritisation
Area Product Owner – In LeSS (Huge), Area Product Owners manage the priority of a subsection of the Backlog. They also align with the Product Owner on overall priorities.
Team – There are no explicit specialist roles in LeSS, other than the team (and its members).
Principles of LeSS
A key part of LeSS is the principles that guide decisions and behaviours in the organisation. People can make better decisions when taking these principles into account. You can read more about LeSS’ principles here. Like many other agile ways of working, Transparency is a key principle. Unlike other agile methods, LeSS calls upon both System Thinking and Queuing Theory as principles. Both are useful bodies of knowledge that create more effective organisations.
Another explicit difference is the principle of the Whole Product Focus. This reminds me very much of Lean Software Development’s Optimise the Whole principle. I also like very much the description of More with LeSS principle. This principle challenges adding more roles, rules and artefacts. So think carefully about these!
Overall observations
In LeSS, having LeSS specialisations is a good thing. This encourages more distributed knowledge sharing.
LeSS explicitly priorities feature teams over component teams to maximise the delivery of end to end value. Both have trade-offs.
A lot of LeSS has big implications about organisational design. Agile teams showed how cross-functional teams reduce waste by removing hand-off. LeSS will be even more demanding on organisations and their structure.
LeSS Huge
The creators of LeSS made LeSS Huge because they found a Product Owner was often a constraint. Since Product Owner’s focus on prioritisation, it’s hard to keep an overview and manage the priority of 100+ Backlog Items. (Note that teams still do the clarification, not the Product Owner). With 8+ teams, they found even good Product Owners could not keep on top of the ~100+ refined Backlog Items (which normally covers the next 3+ sprints).
LeSS Huge addresses this by introducing Categories (aka an Area). Each Backlog Item has its own category, and each category then has an Area Product Owner to manage the overview and prioritisation of Backlog Items in that category.
Guidelines for creating an area:
This should be purely customer centric
Often grouped by stakeholder, or certain processes
Could be organised by a certain market or product variant
No area in LeSS Huge should have less than 4 teams
Conclusions
After taking the course, I have a much stronger understanding of LeSS’ origins and how it works. After the course, it feels much LeSS complex than when I first read about it on their website. It includes many principles which I run software teams by. I can also see many parallels to what I have done with larger organisations and LeSS. I can also see how LeSS is a challenging framework for many organisations. I would definitely recommend larger product organisations draw inspiration from LeSS. I know I will after this course.
If you have worked in IT for some time, you will have come across the name Jerry Weinberg (Gerald M Weinberg). I first came across Jerry when I first read his book, “The Secrets of Consulting.” Jerry impacts great wisdom through his use of stories. He shared his knowledge generously with our industry and set a great example.
He was a prolific writer and I was lucky to inherit many of his books when a contact moved house. I devoured them rapidly, learning much in the process. As a proud Systems Thinker, I enjoyed “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.” As someone passionate Technical Leadership, I inhaled, “Becoming a Technical Leader.” I refer and recommend many of his books time and time again.
I never had the opportunity to meet Jerry but I met many people who he had personally influenced. I heard amazing things about the “Amplify Your Effective (AYE)” conference. I felt people who frequented the AYE conference came away with more drive to have a greater impact. I regret not taking the one opportunity I had to take part, given the wrong timing and place in my life.
As someone who believes in agile values, I was lucky to meet Norm Kerth. I forgot he co-authored the “Project Retrospectives” book with Jerry Weinberg. Continuous improvement is the basis for better organisations, teams and processes. Call it retrospectives, kaizen or some other name. I count myself lucky for reading this early on in my career.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. Jerry was definitely a giant among giants. In the world of software we often have a negative association with the word, “legacy.” We forget that sometimes that legacy can be a good thing. I am particularly grateful for the legacy Jerry left behind.
