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👨‍🏫 Stop Starting, Start Finishing

Back in 2016 when I was working at ExxonMobil as an automation engineer, my mind was heavy with all the things I felt that I should be doing.

I was trying to “boil the ocean” (ie; do so many things all at once that I was not making much progress with any of it.)

It wasn’t working.

As a young professional, I was grappling with how to manage my time effectively in this large corporate setting. I couldn’t get a good handle on my work load.

Then, I walked by an open door with a whiteboard inside. It took only a glance to read what was on the board.

“STOP STARTING, START FINISHING.”

Up to this point, I was loosely familiar with Agile principles across both popular flavors: Kanban and Scrum. However, this specific phrase hit home for me.

“Stop starting and start finishing” is all about managing your WIP, or your work-in-progress, a key element of Kanban philosophy.

I still recall stopping at that door-frame and staring at the phrase. It was like someone grabbed a 2×4 board and smacked me in the face. This phrase unlocked the obvious for me: “Ohhhhhhh, I’m trying to do too much all at once and I’m not finishing anything!”

I went back to my desk and started to prioritize “ruthlessly”.

From that point on, this phrase has become somewhat of a motto of mine in how I work.

Manage your WIP

Let’s talk Kanban 101.

Manage your WIP. That’s what productivity is all about.

The moment you begin to take on too many distinctly different activities, your impact and productivity immediately suffer.

If you take on 10 projects, you can only move each of them 1 inch.

Conversely, if you apply that same fixed capacity of time and energy to only 2 projects, the results are wildly different.

Of course, this is an over-generalization. But let’s look at a specific example while I was a TPM at Twitter in 2021.

Cutting down on initiatives @ Twitter

This idea of managing your WIP applies both to your personal time management but also to large organizations.

How many times have you worked in a company where it seems the company leaders has expectations to deliver on at least 100 different initiatives?

While I was working at Twitter (pre-Elon), this was our situation. Everyone was spread too thin.

It became such an issue that the leadership team put together a stack-ranked Jira view of every major initiative going on.

No joke, there were over 200 in that list.

This was an obvious signal that we were attempting to accomplish too much all at once given our capacity constraints.

Ruthless prioritization took place.

There was a shortened list of the top 10 strategic initiatives. These got priority access to engineering, product, and design capacity.

What was my role in all this?

My role was to make sure the business impact of my initiatives was well understood and appreciated.

A couple of my initiatives got deprioritized, except one.

I was driving a data privacy move to help us remediate bad tech debt which was causing chaos and ensuring we were strongly positioned for the future of data privacy. This turned out to be strategic initiative #5 in that list of 10.

This was an immense help to get properly staffed for completion.

(Note: limiting strategic WIP did not result in layoffs in this case, even though it is one conclusion someone could jump to. Rather, teams were reallocated to more important initiatives. ie: fuel was added to existing efforts to increase momentum.)

Do less, better.

So here’s your invitation to improve as a TPM: do less, better.

• Lead your program by managing WIP to ensure progress

• Influence your company strategy with healthy practices of managing WIP

• Work with your manager to make sure your personal workload has a health amount of managed WIP

You want to have greater impact? do less, better.

You want to see more progress? do less, better.

You want to get some breathing room for your own workload? do less, better.

This is not an easy exercise, but it is possible and the benefits are immense.

But how??

For the sake of the length of this post, we’re stopping here for today.

📧 If you’re interested in some strategies around managing your WIP, reply to this email to let me know! I’ve got some personal favorite strategies.

Alternatively, just reply to say hello, I always enjoy hearing from fellow TPMs!

Event

🎉 TPM Summit 2024 (in person and remote!)

I’m excited to be attending the conference again this year, I want to see you there.

This year’s keynote is with Jen Krieger, VP of Engineering Operations at Github. She was on a panel last year and it’ll be amazing to give her more space to speak.

Come join! Either remote or in-person in Mountain View, CA on October 4, 2024.

(note: this is not sponsored, I’m just excited to go!)

Resources

📚 Supercharge your TPM Resume (Aug 27 - Sept 6!)

I’ve worked with and met tons of Technical Program Managers ever since I launched this newsletter nearly a year ago.

A consistent challenge is landing a job, especially among the current job market. I can’t solve all those problems, but I can lend a hand.

For the next two weeks, I’m here to help you supercharge your TPM resume. Applications are open from August 27 to September 6.

What does this look like?

• 📥 Submit. Submit a request on this page to get the ball rolling.

• 👀 Review. I review each the submission to make sure we’re a good fit.

  • (For example, if someone is applying to a TPM Manager role, I don’t have much to offer you!)

• ✅ If we’re aligned, you’ll get an email on next steps to submit your resume.

• 💵 You purchase the TPM Resume Review service for $30 and submit your resume!

  • (Usually these services cost between $100 - $300, but my goal is mostly to cover my costs for this newsletter right now!)

• 📄 I dig into your resume and provide a TPM Craft Resume Scorecard, which will give you laser-targeted improvements to your resume.

  • (I won’t be editing your resume directly nor writing a new one for you)

Reminder: I only have this open until September 6! After that, submissions will be closed! (Why? I’m very intentional about managing balance in my life. A short window like this helps me manage my WIP 😏)