Organizing my engineering management resources
A while back, I reached out to my network to try to expand my sources of engineering management / leadership / general tech-y stuff insights. A bunch of smart people were suggested, and I wrote about them. I also joined Rands Leadership Slack, which has been a HUGE source of clever humans, particularly in the #i-wrote-something channel.
So, my library of articles, LinkedIn posts, blogs, etc. has been steadily developing, and I want to make it available for sharing. A decade ago, it felt like there were tons of solutions for sharing what you've read, de.li.cious comes to mind, as does Pinboard (which I understand is still a thing), but none ever really captured me. My plan is to just create a page on here that is generated from my spreadsheet, grouping articles by theme or category.
Enter this week's problem: how I organized the stuff I'm reading.
Card sorting 101
Card sorting is the term for the research method where you have a bunch of ideas, words, whatever on 'cards' (in real life, post-it notes are very popular; online there's solutions like Optimal Workshop, Miro, and LucidSpark, among others). The participants are then asked to organize the cards in a way that makes sense to them. It's a good way to see how other people understand concepts, and what stuff they think is related (and can help you organize your content accordingly).
I am my only participant, so this is a slightly artificial example, but a card sort seemed like the obvious way for me to identify groupings that were meaningful among the stuff I'd been reading, and then try to sort out what broad themes emerged.
I didn't feel like writing out fifty post-it notes, so I decided to do a CSV import in Lucid Spark instead. They have a new feature (for pro accounts, so I'm currently doing the free trial) to import "Lucid Cards" from CSV. It's clearly intended to be a way to visualize task tickets, but it worked reasonably well for my data as well.
This created a bunch of cards that I could then organize, and I did!
Like any card sort, I started just moving stuff into vaguely related clumps, and then refined my clumps, moving stuff around as it felt right. Once I was happy with my clumps, I came up with labels for them.
My chosen categories
In the end, I have 9 categories, of which one should arguably be a sub-category, but I didn't want to bother with that level of organization.
- "People managering": resources about people management, supporting team members' growth, performance management, making teams work, etc.
- "Engineering-ing": resources about engineering management specifically.
- "Process" and "Estimation / Prioritization": arguably, the "Estimation / Prioritization" category could fit under "Process", but I'm appreciating the specificity. The "Process" resources touch on the ways teams can/should work, iteration, conceptual process stuff, etc. "Estimation / Prioritization" are specifically around estimating and prioritizing work.
- "FEELINGS (yours and others')": resources about thriving despite not being a robot, power balances, conflict, etc.
- "That wasn't very data-driven of you": resources about metrics, being 'data-driven', measurement.
- "Interviewing": stuff about interviewing (I am looking for my next role!).
- "Tech": articles of general nerdy interest, but specifically with an operational application.
- "Other interesting stuff": resources that don't fit into the other categories, but which I wanted to be able to refer back to. All classification systems inevitably fail, which is how we get 'miscellaneous' categories like this one.
Conclusions
This worked really well for me, and I'm largely happy with my categories. There are a few which I'm not certain about, and a few articles that fit into multiple categories, but this isn't a controlled taxonomy, it's one woman's attempt to bring order to her reading life. I expect I'll make some tweaks over time. I wanted to end up with 7 categories, since it's the magic memory number[1], so we'll see if I can whittle it down over the next few months.
Next up will be writing a wee script to generate a Ghost "page" that can live on here and archive my resources library. Stay tuned!