Hello everyone!
Welcome to Out Of Scope! I feel honored to be delivered straight to your inbox.
To give you some ideas of what I was planning here:
Curated content I find interesting, funny, or useful
Tech industry trends, discussions, reflections, rants
Interviews with interesting peers
Perhaps some sections on career or content creation advice
Q+A
Interactive threads where I want to hear from you all - my community!
On that last note I also want to know what you would like to hear about! I have a form here for anonymous questions, comments, suggestions that will always be open for you all. If you would rather get in touch personally, my email is hello@emilykager.com.
Lastly, some housekeeping. While substack has free and paid options, paying is purely benefactorial (not sure if that’s a real word but let’s go with it) and all content will be accessible on the free tier. If I end up working any sponsored posts in here, I will make sure paid tier does not see those. Again, feel free to followup with any questions/concerns/suggestions around this. Thank you all so much for your support!
ICYMI
Last week was a tough week at work. Working on a team that builds components for other teams has its ups and downs. Luckily frustrating work weeks can inspire good content.
The real story was more like someone was trying to use a hand we built as an ear 🙄
I bookmarked this interesting thread around how designers can respond to common PM pushback and wishing it existed for the Eng<>PM and Eng<>Design relationship. Even though we are all really working towards the same goal, it can often feel like there is hostility and friction between the different teams on the same product and everyone is trying to get their way.
Off the top of my head some corollaries I thought of:
“We don’t have time for a refactor” - PM → Advocating effectively for working on tech debt
“We can’t build that”- Eng → Effectively discussing implementation tradeoffs with design + PM
Everything is a P0 problem → Working together to prioritize defects
“I don’t see any progress”, constant update fatigue → Breaking down epics into testable and demoable deliverables. Communication about blockers and things slowing down the team.
Any more I missed or great tips on how to fix these problems?
Tech Twitter can be an amazing trove of wisdom.
Or not.
This guy has the solution to our Jira hatred. No more bug tracking problems if you “just fix every bug immediately”! I will do you one better. Just don’t write bugs in the first place. Easy peasy! 😏
Russia, Ukraine, and Tech
There are much bigger things happening in the world than the launch of yet another tech newsletter. My heart goes out to everyone impacted by this war and especially those with colleagues or loved ones in Ukraine. We can contribute monetarily to support Ukrainians and I think we also have a responsibility to understand the impact our industry’s products can have in these current events. I do not pretend to be an expert in technology and policy during an invasion, but here are some articles I found informative.
Social media like TikTok is both being used to communicate about and gain support from the rest of the world for Ukraine, but also quickly spread misinformation that is hard to validate.
Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are facing pressure from Russia to censor content
How tech companies with ties to Ukraine are reacting to Russia’s invasion
Thousands of Russian tech workers sign a petition opposing Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
Corporate content-moderation policy debate: Should social media propaganda be preserved as evidence?
Companies told to prepare as risk of Russian cyberattacks grows
Please stay safe, healthy, and I’ll see you next week.
Also, so excited to be reading a newsletter you're writing!
The set of eng/design/pm <> exec relationships is another to consider. I've found this to be the toughest to navigate as an EM. Some examples:
- "don't build it until I approve the design" -> build a high trust relationship
- "why aren't you building X?" -> work towards alignment
- "why is X taking so long?" -> milestone communication, tech debt education