I’ve written briefly about Slack before (at the end of my post on High Output Management), but this year I decided to re-read it. It’s good. Here are my notes from the second read.
This year, I finally read The Effective Executive. It was great. Here are some of the things I took from it.
Triggers is a very interesting book. The subtitle says it’s about creating lasting behavioural change, which I did not find in my case, but it is full of useful, actionable insights about day-to-day issues we face at work and at home. Here are my notes.
Earlier this year, I read What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Great title. For me, the book didn’t quite live up to my initial hopes, but it was interesting and thought-provoking. Here are my notes.
Last week, I wrote about how we worked out our tech strategy for FT.com. In this post I talk about the strategy itself: No next Next. And also about the Sugababes.
When you are launching a new product to replace an existing one, it’s easy to rally behind the mission and make the right technical decisions that will get you over the line. But after the launch, it’s very common for things to lose focus: the vision is no longer so clear, corners you cut to get the product live come back to bite, and the tech can start to feel like it’s drifting off track.
After you launch a new product and no longer have the launch to work towards, it’s very easy for things to drift off track. This is the difficult teenage years.
Last year, I met the excellent Russell Davies to ask his advice on how to create a strategy. Russell was the Director of Strategy at the Government Digital Service while I was there. He and the internal comms team did an amazing job of making sure we were all aware of what we were doing and why.
I’m the Technical Director of Customer Products at the Financial Times. In Customer Products, we run FT.com and the FT apps (as well as some other products, like Alphaville), and we have about 55 engineers.
A while ago, the excellent Russell Davies gave me a copy of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. He said it was the best book he’d read on the topic, and I found it extremely useful. Here are some of my notes, but I recommend reading it.