Kelley Marsh

I make things better. I amuse myself in the meantime.

Author: Kelley

  • how are you?

    Rand nails 1 on 1s. Just go read it. Your people are your greatest strength, your greatest asset, the most precious thing. They’re constantly looking at your actions and lack of action, your voice or lack of voice, a thousand tiny signals you give to the people you manage that let them know how you…

  • the balance of leadership

    There’s a great post on the Reforge blog about people manager responsibilities that lays out the balance of being a manager quite nicely. It’s a balance I’ve always tried to achieve but never really put into words. I love teams. I love working in a team, I love creating teams, leading teams, helping craft a…

  • a thousand times – this.

    via rawsignalgroup: …what we know about high-performing teams is that none of this management-by-abuse shit actually works. We can have empathy for the bosses who are sitting in the discomfort, reaching for anything to make themselves feel better. We can understand that impulse. We have felt that impulse. But the reality is that, when you…

  • i’m looking at the man in the mirror…

    I ran across this article in a Product Management group I frequent. A screenshot excerpt: That last line is a major WTF moment. Half your time is spent on firefighting? That’s insane. I mean, sure, shit happens. But… if you’re spending half your time fighting fires, then something else is wrong, my friend.

  • riding off into the sunset

    So we have this product – an MVP from 2 years ago that never got the love it needed. The little social platform that never was, but with a rich set of profile and content creation tools. And then we built another product on top of those content creation tools with a divergent experience for…

  • communication paths restrict the solution devised

    Couple items that stood out to me today from Team Topologies, chapter 2: Communication paths (along formal reporting lines or not) within an organization effectively restrict the kinds of solutions that the organization can devise. This was an interesting chapter. When I think about lines of communication between engineering teams that I work with currently,…

  • conway’s law for product teams

    I picked up Team Topologies the other day and am reading it with the product team mindset – trying to parse some of the example applications of Conway’s law for engineering teams to product teams. Conway’s law, as a refresher: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is…

  • a collection of thoughts on one pagers

    Great One Pagers, John Cutler on Medium. According to medium, this is a 14 minute read on how to produce a document that can be read in 3-6 minutes. Despite the extensive questions to be answered, he recommends conciseness, leaning toward brevity. In particular, I enjoy the behavioral change framework, the clear distinction between a…

  • making something from nothing

    Making something from nothing is hard – 0 to 1 product management is full of really hard choices and ruthless prioritization. You’ll question your definition of “necessary” and find ever smaller slices to carve off on your path to making A New Thing… particularly under the constraint of tight timelines. Having done it twice, I’m…

  • Kill your piles

    I am a notorious stockpiler. I like to be prepared. Use the last of the toothpaste? Don’t worry. There’s 2 more in the closet. That’s not the last of the napkins, that’s just the last of the pile I have out on the table for convenient use. I get anxious when there’s less than 4…

  • Scarcity and Abundance

    There’s a theory in this book that, while too little of something may be a bad thing, too much of that thing may also be bad. That more is not always better. It’s only better to a point, and then the benefit may not only level off, it may actually decrease. It’s a U shaped…

  • Are you my leader?

    If you asked me what I’m good at, I’d say administration. I’m not always the big idea person, but I know how to get big ideas done. I’m reading this book about leadership, and I’m no where near as comfortable with that moniker. Am I a leader? I lead my team, surely. Why don’t I…

  • Believe the actions, not the words.

    In many ways, I’m an idealist. An optimist. I want to believe the best in people. People are nice, respectful, and well-intentioned. Their words match their actions. There are not hidden agendas. In my world, high trust is the default mode of operation. I maintain this perspective by never reading comments on anything online, clearly.…

  • There’s nothing stopping you.

    It’s one thing to have an environment where an individual’s initiative is not discouraged. Where if your team member goes out on their own to implement a new idea, they are not punished. It’s quite another to foster an environment where initiative is perceived as desired. To make a place where your team is cultivated,…

  • On Motivation

    I have this little cube on my office desk. It’s a timer. You flip the cube over so that a number is on top, and then it beeps after that many minutes have elapsed. This is useful in many ways. Got a meeting in 15 minutes? Flip the timer to 10 min. You can ignore…

  • Paperweights and Change

    I’m sitting at home, watching these big fat flakes of snow fall, waiting for a call. We’re currently a 1 car household, the other car having just transformed into the world’s largest paperweight in the parking lot of Wegmans. We’ll head back to meet the tow truck driver when he calls to say he’s on…

  • Failing at Full Screen February. Already.

    5 minutes into my first meeting, and I’ve already failed at Full Screen February. I was mostly on the meeting to report on any status questions asked, while the account managers negotiated a contract. And so I busily applied myself to organizing a different project for the week, while they discussed. And then I realized…

  • Full Screen February

    You know what is really irritating? When you make the effort to get up out of your car to walk into Starbucks, and then the people in the drive-thru get served before you do. I mean, you put all that effort into actually stepping foot into the store, to really *be present* with your barista,…

  • A Discourse on No

    I’m a member of a few Project Manager-ish type groups on LinkedIN. Recently, there was a big discussion about how to say No to a client. Some of my favorite answers from the discussion: Just Don’t Say No Use data and options to deliver the message instead of outright No to the receiver. Threaten With…

  • Empathy, Engineering, and People

    A discussion of empathy in engineering: Erin Cech at Rice University agrees that empathy is essential and names our current culture in engineering a ‘culture of disengagement,’ one in which engineers focus almost exclusively on technical details with little or no attention to empathy and moral issues. Cech’s recently published results show that engineering students’…