How would you measure these?

[aaronpowell]

Here's a couple of points that I'm unsure how I would go about measuring someone against:

1. [ ] I am learning how to pull together the Lego blocks of a product
2. [ ] I am a "boy scout". I recognise problems early and get in and fix them regardless of whose fault it is
3. [ ] I happily tackle the most difficult problems the team is facing and usually solve them with an impressive balance of finesse and pragmatism
4. [ ] I am devoted to learning; it's become a natural part of my life
5. [ ] People want to go on the journey with me because they know they'll be richer for the experience

I've put a checkbox against each point so they can be discussed/closed off and marked as such.

[aaronpowell]

I'm not really a fan of the Lego Block analogy, it feels a bit cheap. I get the point that it's trying to address, bringing multiple components together, or at least that's what I'm assuming it's meant to be.

The devoted to learning point, again I get where that's going, but how would you measure success? It's it somewhat akin to the "you must check yammer 3 days a month" of the old skills matrix that seems overly arbitrary?

[rbanks54]

Lego metaphor... how about we reword to something that covers SOLID principles and loosely coupled components.

[droyad]

Lego blocks refers more to things like EF, Nimbus, Nancy, etc.

[cottsak]

There are always going to be elements required of a person that are subjective and difficult/impossible to measure in absolute terms.

I suggest that:

• For those that can be measured objectively and in absolute terms, that we clarify those such that we almost have 'acceptance criteria' so that any reasonable interpretation would arrive at the same result.
• For those that can not be measured, we simply come up with a series of statements for each which describe the expected state when the competency is satisfied. Obviously there is interpretation bias / subjectivity but if we say come up with 2 or 3 statements each which "paint a picture" of that "success state" then hopefully at review time, both the reviewer and the person being reviewed can easily agree whether they're "there yet". Additionally, because of the subjective nature, I think these elements should be weighted less somehow relative to the objective competencies. This is akin to a "good faith" gesture from the business telling consultants that Readify understands that because these are harder to measure, the impact of the outcome is not as great as the objective elements.

I hope this all makes sense. What do you guys think?

[chriswithpants]

I had a similar discussion about the 'devoted to learning' part today, explaining that I'd had difficulty thinking about that section when running through this with someone last week. After chatting to @andrewabest and @michaelnoonan I switched my mentality about this around. I was thinking of this as a review tool, which it's not. It's a retrospective tool. This is a guide to trigger the conversation during a retrospective about how someone has been going, rather than you telling them how they've been going.

[chriswithpants]

The other thing to keep in mind is that we're not meant to be rating on those examples - they're just examples to help initiate the conversation. It's the headings we want to be thinking about.

[andrewabest]

@cottsak your suggestion of having acceptance criteria is already covered by the examples under each 'heading', that is the nice thing about this.

We need to avoid over-thinking this list or over-engineering the solution to the problem we were facing upfront, and look to refine it through real world usage.

The headings and points are supposed to drive conversations to help people introspect, identify their strengths and help amplify them where possible, along with helping identify their weaknesses and turn them into strengths. We are fostering growth through this process, and this list is a tool to aid us in helping people grow in the ways that fit our values and strengths as a company.

Ensuring you have pinpoint accuracy on some sort of 'rating scale' does not help to accomplish this goal. You're either awesome (the thing is a strength of yours and in your current capacity you excel at it), you could do a couple more things and then be awesome (amplify your strengths), or you need to work on it (turn weaknesses to strengths).

[aaronpowell]

@chriswithpants I was under the impression that the points under each heading are what we're rating people on and that we:

• Have a rating against each point
• Aggregate the rating up to the category

[chriswithpants]

That's not the intention, no. Just the headings. The points underneath are just examples designed to get people thinking.

And we're not rating people, we're having a discussion ;)

[aaronpowell]

So that's not the impression that I got from the call with had with @michaelnoonan and the following discussions.

[chriswithpants]

Just found a section in the document that talks about the ratings:

Each of these sections seeks to describe some defining characteristics about each role and provide some concrete examples along the way.

and later on

Consider rating ourselves at the defining characteristics level so it's not too hard to maintain over time. The examples could be used as a frame of reference for the rating

[michaelnoonan]

Ooh, sorry to let this linger. It's the first iteration of madskillz, and I was personally using this more as a tool for driving a fruitful conversation with my peers - which in my mind is the core reason for the retrospectives. Hence I've been leaning towards recording "ratings" against the "headings" (3-4 per role) which would be a loose aggregation based on examples.

One part of this puzzle is what we can provide for the People team in order to help them do their jobs. Bria has been leaning towards explicitly rating at the example-level and aggregating those together, and that's what she mentioned in the teleconference.

I think we'll have to balance out how and where to rate with the People team after the first round with madskillz and see what works best.

I'm hoping we can strike a good balance that enables the fruitful conversation with minimum overhead/ceremony/effort, and also provides enough perspective for the People team and a person's future team leads.