TLC #2: Managerial leverage 🔋, OpenAI Sora 📽️, Developer productivity 👩🏻💻 and much more...
Understanding managerial leverage is critical for an engineering leader. Also, we talk about Sora, developer productivity, Disney's investment, and more. (Issue #2, 20 Feb 2024)
What is Managerial Leverage?
Managerial leverage is a term made popular by the classic book High Output Management by Andy Grove. If you haven’t read this book, you should add it to your list!
So what does it mean?
Leverage is the output or outcome generated by any managerial activity.
It means that for every activity that a manager performs, the organization’s output must improve by a certain degree.
Typically, this happens in one of the following ways:
The manager does an activity that impacts more than one employee (a demonstration of how an activity must be performed)
An individual’s output is improved over a period of time through the manager’s actions (motivating the team through actions and words)
A large group’s output is improved through the manager sharing knowledge and information (training sessions)
Then, how can a manager improve his or her productivity towards higher leverage?
Increase the rate of doing work, which will proportionately improve leverage
Increase the leverage around various activities (doing themselves vs enabling an employee to do)
Replacing lower leverage activities vs high leverage ones (training team on skills)
While being hands-on is essential for an engineering leader, increasing the high-leverage activities in line with leadership responsibilities goes a long way toward success.
5 “Must-Read” Tech News for the Week
An interesting conversation with Yann Lecun, who leads the AI group at Meta. The bits about human-level intelligence, and open-source LLM / Llama are interesting. Do give it a read.
Mark Zuckerberg trying out Apple Vision Pro (The Verge)
It is not your regular product review post. Zuckerberg tried out Vision Pro and unsurprisingly ruled in the favor of Quest 3!
The debate about the value of measuring developer productivity goes in many channels. This article reflects my views on this topic - developer experience and engineering culture are far more important than productivity metrics.
Sora was announced this week that can generate short videos with prompts. Think of it as ChatGPT creating videos for you. Currently, the beta is available for limited users.
In its foray into the gaming space, Disney acquires a major stake in Epic Games. Bob Iger sees this as a strategic move, deeming it timely amid the expanding gaming user base.
That’s it for this week. I will see you again next week with another interesting topic and tech bits.
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