Technology Leadership Radar

How to evaluate the performance of a technology leader? Each company or individual has its own answer with engineering rubrics. And those rubrics usually focus on a specific role - IC (Software Engineer, Product Manager, Designer) or Engineering Manager. Is there a grand unified framework to evaluate the potential business impact that a technology leader could make? Here are the requirements:

1. full coverage
2. actionable
3. referenceable to building a formidable team

Answers from myself and my Friends

• Decisiveness: strategy, tactics, and making fact-based decisions faster. Play progressively from small wins to more significant wins for the individuals and organizations. Gathering information, diagnosing to gain insights, making guiding policies, and taking coherent actions. Differentiating facts from opinions and making sure that options are believability-weighted. Exploring innovations in the entire process, and innovation means making changes to do things 10x better. Making initial decisions fast within the time window, reflecting on results, and then iterating through the hierarchy of lifetime/years/quarters/weeks.

• Execution Engine: Building the system to deliver more and then in higher quality, instead of being proud of a few deliverables. Attention to detail. Nudging the cross-functional teams to your unique vision. Balancing speed, quality, and scope according to the customer’s requirements.

• Domain Expertise: pursuing un-teachable special know-how. been there/done that. The market rewards uniqueness.

• Product-sense: developing the intuition on what a great product is. Perceiving the market and industry with data. Building and operating the product with proper processes. Synthesize with other elements in the big picture. Invent and simplify. Plan and manage change. Customer-obsession.

• People and Culture: Work with others: shaping the world together with people. Lead by example. Teamwork. Making people happy and then productive. Sort people and projects often / be professionally judgemental. Incentivize people with intrinsic and then extrinsic motivations. Orgnization = People + Culture. Being both capable and warm. Telling a story that inspires your own passion first. Empowering people to achieve more. Self-driven. Listen to people and inspire people to share. hiring and coaching team. humility, low ego. best idea wins. growth mindset.

• Synergy & Resourcefulness: aligning or connecting resources. 1 + 1 > 2. optimizing the web of customers, distribution channels, products, people, technology, and capitals. playing the reputation game in a long term. turning more people into stake owners and aligning to shared goals.