HH 010 - Context Switch

What's New - September 2023

Hi everyone. It’s been a while since I’ve written a newsletter, and I want to update you on what’s going on and opportunities that are open for your participation. 

My new book is well underway and available on Leanpub. It’s called "Context Switch." It’s a book about onboarding yourself as a senior engineering leader.

What I have learned through my own experience as a former VP of Engineering and from interviewing 60 engineering and product leaders so far is that when you become more and more senior, you need to work more and more outside your domain. For some who are not prepared for this, it can feel like you’re pulled in a lot of different directions. There is a lot of context switching.

So, in my view, whether you aspire to be a CTO, VP or Director, you might as well start preparing for this context switching now. Lean into switching between four contexts in particular: the inward context, the managing up context, the peer context, and the context of your department. Onboard yourself, become more senior in how you operate today, so later, your life is easier. And that’s the point of the book!

I’m still writing "Context Switch" early every morning and releasing versions a few times per week. The book is about 80% done, and if you want to check it out with a review copy, feel free to email me. If you or a leader you know would be a great interview contact for me, I’d love an intro as I set a goal for myself to interview 100 people last December, and it feels like I have a chance in doing that! I’m getting closer each day.

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Here are some of my upcoming speaking events. If your company wants a workshop on Dynamic Reteaming or maybe a lunch and learn with your teams, we might be able to make it happen. My time is filling up, though, so reach out if you are in any of these places. We can also meet for coffee:

• November- CTO Craft, London

• December- LeadingEng, Berlin

• December- CTO Connection, San Francisco

• January- Regional Scrum Gathering, Tokyo 

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As you might know, I joined Artium in April 2023. The cool thing for me about working at Artium is that I can join your teams for engagements and I can bring along incredible software engineers, product managers, and even designers. We practice XP and can join your teams to deliver software together while learning a lot of cool techniques along the way. I’ve experienced this engagement style years ago at Appfolio, where we had a similar engagement. Read this blog post I wrote recently about discovering XP and working in small feedback loops on the Artium blog. I strongly believe in the methods we use at Artium, which is one of the reasons I joined! Feel free to reach out, and we can explore working together.

I’m also offering Dynamic Reteaming workshops and related consulting via Artium, and we just built a super cool one-hour online interactive workshop to explore the five patterns of Dynamic Reteaming. That’s a free option for you and your teams, and it’s a great primer for upcoming changes you might be encountering in your companies, such as fast growth or doubling in size. Or maybe you want your teams to become more dynamic and less static in general. We can strategize together on that and align on a really cool custom experience for your teams as well.

That’s it for this newsletter. I hope that you’ve found some value in reading this. Have a great week.