Forem: Stephanie Mifsud

5 easy steps for choosing the right goals

Stephanie Mifsud — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 06:13:17 +0000

Thinking about goals you want to achieve in six months can be challenging. Here are some questions and suggestions that can help you find the mental space for paving the way to a better version of yourself.

At Hotjar we have performance reviews every six months. This process generates a lot of peer feedback on one’s strengths and career opportunities—plus it provides a space for thinking about future growth. Susanna has posted some great tips on how to digest this feedback and make it actionable. As peer feedback tends to get more generic as one becomes more senior, this post outlines some resources that are helpful in specific goal setting for the next few months.

I invite you to grab a cuppa and some pen and paper and follow these few steps to identify which goals matter for your career progression.

1. [5m] Brain dump—what’s on your mind?

Our mind is usually cluttered with thoughts about the present or near future. Let’s start by listing those thoughts so we can consider them later.

Make a list of the things on your mind, things you have been postponing, things that worry you because they are close to their breaking point, pending follow-ups, etc. Write it all down. Now put that list aside for now.

2. [15m] Tech laundry list—what needs to be done

Write out (or type out) a laundry list of tasks/projects you think the team needs to work on in the near future.

Think of it as a backlog of tech tasks to bring the code and infra to a better place where you can be proud of how well it serves our users.

You might want to look into the team backlog for inspiration. If you have a North Star document for your team, now is a good time to resurrect it and see what steps you need to take to reach it.

3. [20m] Focus on the destination — keep your eye on the prize

Now it’s time to think about how you want to grow in your current role—or what you need to do to switch roles if you are aiming for that.

Consider these questions:

What are your career aspirations?
What do you want to know in a year that you don’t know now?
What interests you? What articles/books do you read?
Look at the seniority criteria for your current role and your aspired role. What skills do you need to hone to help your growth?
What opportunities came out of your last performance review?

You guessed it, put all these responses in a list, we’ll need it later.

4. [25m] Look for the opportunities — watch for blind spots

After this introspective phase, it’s time to zoom out, to take into consideration higher-level goals. Different companies have different ways of communicating strategy and focus areas. Whether it’s KPIs, OKRs, KPAs or something else, dig up strategic guidance and investigate how it dribbles down to your team and role.

There might also be more horizontal initiatives to become familiar with such as Chapter Group Projects, North Star Initiatives and Golden Path direction.

Here you may see gaps that you are interested in filling, for example. suggesting a new chapter topic or pitching a new initiative for your team in alignment with the Department OKRs. These are excellent material for open-ended goals (see section 5)

5. [30m] Write your plan — pulling it all together

The plan

The follow up of a performance review is a development plan. A development plan is how we describe and track goals for the next six months. It provides a basis for one-on-one conversations on growth and helps your lead highlight practical opportunities for reaching those goals.

A development plan is in essence a set of personal OKRs. It includes a couple of broad goals — think of these as the areas you want to focus on. For each goal, we set two outcomes, where we describe the better situation we want to be in in a few months' time. These outcomes are split into specific actions that will lead to the improved situation we want to achieve.

Broad goals

Take a look at your answers and ideas in numbers three and four. From this, try to come up with two broad and open-ended goals.

The best goals will overlap between what you want to achieve and what the company is trying to achieve. Try to find aligning themes, as it will increase your chances of success.

Examples of broad open-ended goals

Identify opportunities for improvement/innovation in our area of ownership
Improve knowledge sharing and collaboration around data visualization
Invest more time in increasing technical expertise

Outcomes and outputs

Now try to come up with an outcome-based objective. This is probably the hardest part.

So I suggest you try to aim for a direction here, rather than a specific output. This allows for flexibility in your approach—and as time goes by you can adapt the outputs which achieve the outcome if the original ones no longer become outdated.

The list you made in step two will help you here. Your list likely contains actions or tasks, but you can group them if they achieve a common outcome, for example:

Increasing our test coverage by 50%
Working with multiple teams on a shared vision for DataViz
Build awareness to be able to propose a NorthStar direction

Putting it all together

The result will look like this:

Invest more time in topics related to the expertise criteria

Build awareness to be able to propose a North Star direction (outcome-based objective)
Complete a Micro FE course (specific task)
Document modern libraries and how our code can benefit from them (specific task)

If you get stuck in the writing part, just list the open-ended goals and specific tasks, and reach out to your lead or manager to help you put it all together in a coherent way.

If you made it to this point, you might have noticed that you haven’t used the list you made in stage one. Take a look at it again — did any long-term themes surface in your goals? Do you need to tweak anything in your development plan based on this list? Probably not, the aim of this list was mostly to help clear your mind of the imminent needs and focus a little bit more on the long term!

Prioritizing brilliantly: better alternatives to grind and guilt

Stephanie Mifsud — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 15:27:00 +0000

As software engineers, we’re always in pursuit of high-quality solutions against a ticking clock. But spending too much time perfecting solutions before delivery increases cost and delays learnings.

What’s more, the standard approach of grinding to the finish line is not sustainable. I quickly realised I had to learn how to pace myself for a marathon, not a sprint, while also enjoying the views. In other words, I needed to work smarter rather than harder.

In this post, I would like to share a few engineering-adjacent skills I’ve found useful for a successful career as a Senior Engineer and Team Lead.

What I learned (and how)

At Hotjar we use industry benchmarks that set elite performers apart from the rest. These benchmarks favour an iterative approach to learning quickly, reducing waste, and keeping up the momentum.

I’ve also picked up a few tips from my mentors, who inspire me to be intentional in my work and align my efforts in the same direction as my team or company. The book Coherence by Dr. Alan Watkins has also been a great inspiration during this ongoing journey.

Both these sources have helped me develop a few valuable ideas of my own.

Align your goals

One of my major time wasters was flitting from one thing to another without first gauging the importance of each task. I needed a mental representation of the priority areas, to differentiate between what was a high-impact activity for my goals and what was merely a distraction. I started by combining all my goals for the quarter.

It’s all too easy to be pulled into different directions by:

OKRs
Tech briefs and guidance
Performance Review opportunities
My own interests and goals

So now, I put all these goals on one list. Then, I pick a theme to focus on for the month. The theme helps me prioritise activities that increase the impact of my work—especially if some groundwork is required before focusing on a particular area. For example, if the theme is to tackle tech debt, it also helps to look at the north star direction.

For an individual contributor, these goals may be squad-related, chapter-related, north star-related, etc. Maintaining a laundry list of bottlenecks or implementations reaching a stress point also helps allocate the right amount of effort. Some of these areas might be aligned with the squad’s current focus area, and thus tech debt can be addressed as preparation for feature work. If not, laundry lists at the very least make good material for a proposal for upcoming focus areas.

Alternate between breadth and depth

Goals and themes require frequent alignment and refinement to continue serving their purpose. I often ask questions when our decisions seem to be drifting away from our original squad goals. As we update our direction with learnings and results from data, it helps the team align and evolve their understanding of what’s next. Then we shift our focus to the tasks in our backlog and identify what’s missing for us to reach the goal we’ve identified.

We’ve reached a point several times where we know in our hearts that we are not going to manage the original target we set. Or perhaps we’ve gained new knowledge that changes our approach. This is either an invitation to grind to the original deadline or rise to the challenge of slicing the deliverable differently.

Some questions I ask here are:

What resources do I have at my disposal to help me de-risk this work?
Can I spike the riskiest part to check for feasibility?
What is the minimum work I can do to get the whole system working from end to end?
Will excluding part X from this work still make it a successful release?

Slicing work into smaller deliverables maintains momentum and ensures timely feedback, so a pivot will not lead to a lot of waste. (Sometimes we even replace the original task with one of higher value to our customers as we adapt to new learnings.)

Use sync-meeting agendas for broad-picture thinking

The switch between breadth and depth is costly—and sometimes painful—because the brain wants to return to its previous train of thought. I like to use sync meetings as a time to address this: syncs can help switch focus faster. If I know a planning meeting is coming up, I spend 30 minutes preparing my contributions. The end of a sync meeting is also an excellent time to revise what was decided and identify any gaps or misalignments.

Ask for feedback

After aligning on the right priorities and keeping a bird's-eye view on the end goal, the next time-suck I realized I needed to avoid was perfection. Contrary to popular belief, perfection is more a vice than a virtue! I remember a time when I used to polish and perfect my work before asking for feedback, mostly out of fear that my work would appear sloppy. However, getting someone to give me feedback on the initial direction, scope, and size proved extremely helpful in structuring my thoughts.

When a draft is spending too much time gathering dust on my desk, I ask my lead or peers whether it’s valuable to continue pursuing it.

Set the right expectations

Naming conventions matter to help set the right expectations from reviewers. Here are a few examples:

Artifact name	Feedback expectations
A brain dump	High-level feedback is required to validate the direction of ideas.
DRAFT: Merge Request	The reviewer will not nitpick with the incomplete parts but instead provide direction on boundaries and code structure.
A proposal or RFC	Needs to be well thought out, and address a clear business case, to receive feedback on specifics.

Iterate quickly

Perfectionism has value when it comes to the polishing stage of an article or deliverable. However, the prior WIP stages are how we work together to achieve a higher impact. Hiding my work simply because it wasn’t perfect yet was not helping me. Iteration is more powerful than perfectionism because it refines the deliverable to the right audience, whether it is the company or the customer.

Energy Management

All the strategies I’ve discussed continue to help me reduce waste and distraction—but being focused still takes up a lot of my energy.

Energy management is more impactful than time management. Having hard stops in my day allows me energy for activities that make my life more meaningful—like spending time with friends, family, and pets. This increases my motivation and sense of self overall. And restoring myself before I crash helps me work more consistently.

Crashing is expensive; it takes time to recover from. I’m still learning to notice the signs I’m slowing down and find healthy pick-me-ups.

I’ve also redefined success to represent my whole person—I’m not simply a brain attached to a body. Our life is so digital that sometimes our bodies become an afterthought. We eat and move on autopilot. Being intentional about improving my physical and mental strength has made my energy more consistent and reliable, helping me do better at work and in my personal life.