Origin: the acquaintance with GTLC
GTLC is the full name of global Technology Leadership Summit. I have attended it for three times so far. The one held in Guangzhou yesterday was the third time, and the first time was also held in Guangzhou in March last year. As for where I learned about GTLC, I don’t remember. I only vaguely remember that I decided to pay for registration shortly after I saw the activity promotion in Guangzhou last year. My main motivation was that I had just been in the technical management position for half a year and wanted to learn other people’s management and what technical leadership is.
Figure 1: Brief introduction of GTLC guangzhou Station in 2003
After listening to the Guangzhou venue last year, I was full of expectations for the Shenzhen venue in The following November, and the result did not disappoint my expectations. Within a year, in the last half year, from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, GTLC left an impression — this conference is very dry! The theme of the conference is very realistic, and the lecturers are all sharing with concrete examples of their own experiences, which is to make the audience have a similar impression and bring a tacit understanding with a smile. This year, when an HR colleague in the company asked me for my comments or impressions on different external technical conferences, I put GTLC first.
Motivation to tidy up – have something to say
Back to guangzhou yesterday, may be because of the influence of the outbreak this year, is held on the last day of October, the distance from the last time in guangzhou, has already passed more than a year and a half, and I was just on technical management positions of seasoning for 2 years, technical management is still a long way, but this time is to have a lot of new comprehension, so the GTLC this year, It sounds more resonant. Today, on the way back to Shenzhen, I opened the lecture notes of yesterday and sorted out the brain map, which led to a stronger desire to write down these feelings, so I came up with this article, which is also regarded as a process of knowledge sorting.
Figure 2: brief introduction of GTLC guangzhou Station this year
I need to say that I only recorded the points that I agree with in the notes, which may be just one word or one sentence, because I think that since I go to the site, the most efficient study is only by listening attentively, rather than copying the content behind the lecturer like a student copying a book on the board. If the goal is to read the full text of the speech, which is not my goal, you can look back at the recorded speech of the Kunpeng Association. As for this article, as you will see later, it is not so much a summary of the meeting as a personal summary of my thoughts over the past two years.
Prepare for the meeting — know the topic, assign attention
Before you go to bed earlier in the day before at the guangzhou station to improvise, open the computer, a quick look at the theme speech at the conference, for each of these topics, I made the problem I want to learn the key, and interested in me have different color tag, the theme of the green, said very want to listen to, interested in blue, black said don’t understand the content of the topic want to share, Or the feeling is not suitable for my present level, listening to the estimate will not be too resonant, purely as a broadening of vision.
Figure 3: Level of concern and interest for each topic marked before the session
As it turns out, this improvisation helped me allocate my energy well yesterday. To tell you the truth, people tend to get sleepy at the end of the day. I don’t know how many people can do it if they try to concentrate on every speech, at least I can’t. Before attending the conference, I always listened from beginning to end without focusing, so that I often strained my ears to listen to the content that I was not interested in, but unconsciously fell asleep when I was interested in the content.
Part of the speech content summary and thinking
“Transforming business from Technology, How Managers Respond to the Challenge of Decision-making and Comprehensive Capabilities”
This is the theme of Li Jinyi, general manager of Lychee Overseas Project. He is talking about his own challenges and experience in the process of transforming the overall business management as a technology manager. Here are some of the things that impressed me.
The challenge: uncertainty
In the on-site speech, Li Jinyi emphasized that one of the challenges after the transformation of business management is to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, not sure whether a decision is right or wrong. As I think about it today, I think the problem of uncertainty should be faced every day from the beginning of transformation technology management. As an engineering background, especially for people who do technology, the thinking has formed a very strong dependence on certainty. Once you suddenly have to place yourself in uncertainty, you can think how much pain it is.
In the past, as an engineer, WHAT I faced every day was to determine what to do. There were definite work contents and definite solutions. As long as I made sure to complete the steps of the scheme one by one, there would be definite results, which made me comfortable with the development work. The biggest problem for me is that I suddenly don’t know what I should do. Even though I know that as a technical manager, I need to lead the team to achieve the goals of the team, cultivate talents, and… These are goals, and no one knows for sure how to achieve them. I need to make different decisions within the team, in fact, I am not sure how you will react and how to implement, also do not know whether this decision really can I expect the team to the other shore, not sure do what is right or wrong, I always hope to suddenly have a management of silver bullet, so I just follow suit, but in fact it’s not possible.
If you compare the uncertainty of technology management with the uncertainty of comprehensive business management, it is the latter that faces the greater challenge. I think there are several reasons: first, no matter how there is no fixed form of management, there are still more tools, methods and theories to help. After all, technical management is mostly about people, and people have some invariable essence, which makes many theories timeless. The business may change a lot because of environmental factors such as changes in time and space, so it brings a lot of unpredictable uncertainties.
Identity switch
On the subject of identity switching, there are two points in the theme that I particularly agree with:
- Willing to put down their own interests and hobbies, is a painful thing;
- Invest your time in the things that matter.
When I first started in technology management, I fell painfully into the first transition. I have always thought that as a person with technical background, I should insist on writing code more, in fact, because I always think that writing code is a happy thing. So every day I will make arrangements for your feel more challenging development tasks (which of course, the reason is that the low trust to team members, this is another myth of transformation of management, there is no open), so that every day I busy during the day the meeting communication team issues and understand the business, busy in the evening to work overtime to complete my own development tasks arranged, My team members, on the other hand, soon fell into an awkward state of having no work to do: BECAUSE I, who should have planned the tasks for them in advance, was busy completing the tasks that should have been completed by them, but they obviously could not help complete the plans that should have been completed by me…
Therefore, these two points actually echo each other. Only by letting go of your personal preference can you make your best efforts to play the role of leader of the team and do the really important things. As a technical manager, in fact, you need to be alert all the time: the manager’s time is also limited, and as a team manager, you need to ensure the completion of the work. A simple principle is that managers should focus on accomplishing things that other members can’t do for them, such as team goal setting, development plan, reporting to superiors, performance appraisal, daily interviews, etc. For those tasks that can be delegated, try to put competent people in charge. So at this point, I know that what I need to learn includes:
- Time Management: This issue is known as the four quadrants of time management
- How to effectively delegate
And perhaps most important: let go of your obsession and embrace the role of manager.
Improve resource integration capability
When I heard that, my inner reaction was: that’s so accurate. The exact point lies in what Li Jinyi mentioned:
Most technical people are more reserved,
Afraid to ask for resources.
But in fact, to know that “even a clever housewife can not cook a meal without rice”, without resources, there is no way to achieve the goal. However, when it comes to resources, we should also bear in mind the principle of “power equals responsibility”. The greater the power, the greater the responsibility, and the greater the corresponding goals to be achieved. We should not just demand resources without optimizing resource allocation.
Improve leadership
Li Said:
Most people believe because they see, a few see because they believe
I’ve always wondered, what is leadership? Now it seems clear: leadership is about making people on the team see direction and people outside the team see confidence. Personally, I think it’s simple: If you want your team to be passionate, you have to be passionate yourself. If you want your team to have hope, first you have to believe that hope is out there. So everything needs faith, which leads to another sentence from Li Jinyi:
Faith comes from persistence.
The key to transforming a business: a strong heart and careful choice
In the last PPT of Li Jinyi, she mentioned that business transformation requires “a strong heart” and needs to withstand all kinds of pressure inside and outside. I think whenever a person is no longer a person, but leading a group of time, it is necessary to have this awareness. If they shake their legs and even prevarication, how to talk about leadership and lead the team to charge?
The end of Li Jinyi’s speech is sincere (the following contents are notes, not the original PPT content, the core meaning should be consistent) :
Technology to business, need to be carefully selected, need to be used for persistence.
This is because it’s hard to switch from technology to business, but the challenge itself can be fun, so it’s for people who want to challenge themselves on a higher level. But once you choose the business, the technology may degrade or even fail to keep up slowly, and it is almost impossible to go back to doing technology.
The author summarizes
Personally, I like this topic because although it is about the challenges faced by business management, in fact, many points resonate with me, because they are both management, technology management also has many similar challenges, but the intensity of the challenges is different. Also like to feel the lecturer was the cause of sincerity, to the transformation of business management made a lot of pertinent experience sharing, even the ending is also urge everyone to choose carefully, this is a responsible attitude, in the now is prone to “XXX you have not done before the age of the position of XXX you lose” selling anxiety and encouraging environment, rare.
From Technology To Product: A Pit Prevention Guide for To B Technology
This is by know chuangyu CTO & COO, white hat security team “security focus” core member, “Network penetration technology” author Yang Jilong to share. Yang Jilong deserves to be known as the joke player in TGO. This speech was the one I noticed that the audience laughed the most and the most spirit among all the speeches that day.
The experience and lesson of the technical person to the product
In this part, Yang jilong shares the lessons that he (the investor) has learned in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars, which taught him what a customer is and how to make successful products for them.
Users and customers are different
Yang Jilong formally introduced the definition of a customer: a customer is a person, and a person (s) who has the decision-making power to pay for a product. A real product, on the other hand, needs to ensure that it meets the rigid needs of its core customers. And I was thinking, this product that I’m developing internally for the operations people, who are the customers? Are they operations people? No, they’re users? But the product manager will tell us every time: this is the demand of users, can not refuse! Now that I think about it, the customer of my business should be the CEO of the company, but what does he need in this business? I haven’t sorted out the answer yet…
Product soul: the most XXX products
Yang Jilong shared a good way to determine the direction of product design, that is, to set a clear goal for your product, and I understand it to be: for example, we want to make the fastest mobile phone!
The author summarizes
For me, this topic is more about thinking about some products. As a technician with years of experience in arguing with product managers, when you discuss requirements with product managers, am I on the right side? Is this from the perspective of the customer or the user? If one party is not in the customer’s shoes, does that mean that party is fundamentally wrong?
From Recruit to Regular Army: R&D Team Development, Management Motivation, and OKR Practice
This theme is shared by Dolphin liu, former Director of Donkey Trail Technology and THE Lingnan EMBA of CUHK. This topic mainly focuses on the summary of technology managers’ leadership of R&D teams and the practice of management incentives.
The role and responsibility of technical managers
Liu Daoping summarized the roles and responsibilities of technology managers at the beginning:
- Task management
- Cultivation of talents
- Resource relationship builder
What impressed me here is that, as a technical manager, I need to spend a large part of my time and energy on task decomposition, allocation and planning. Meanwhile, I need to comprehensively consider the current execution of development manpower, the abilities of different members, personal goals, assessment and challenges of the task itself, etc. I often think about how tedious these things add up to. But the relief for me was that I had been suffering a lot, not knowing if the pain was necessary, and now I’m convinced that task management is what I need to do, and knowing that, all I need to do is figure out how to do it well.
As for talent cultivation, it is actually a point that I tend to ignore, or a point that I lack of subconscious to do. I often thought before: why am I qualified for the position of technical Leader? What other factors are there besides technical clearance? Later, I realized that technology management is more of a need for organizational management. It requires a person who is recognized by everyone to build a team that is recognized by everyone. So instead of thinking about what’s right and what’s wrong, just ask yourself what you believe is right, and in doing so nurture and influence the team, and ensure that the team is aligned in the right direction, and there is a good chance that the results will be right. Now, when I’m assigning tasks or promoting technology sharing, as long as I know it’s going to help the people on the team, I go straight to making decisions and organizing.
Finally, “resource relationship builder”, I think, is a higher level of consciousness, which can only be understood at a certain level, after all, it is relatively abstract.
Management changes depending on the development stage of the team
In his speech, Liu Daoping summarized the different stages of team development:
- To form a
- Running in
- The canonical
- operation
- The dissolution of
For teams in different stages, it is necessary to pay attention to the differences in trial management modes. In the early stage of the team, members may be unfamiliar with many businesses and have inconsistent specifications. In this case, it is more efficient to use the leader’s instructions. For mature teams that have formed unified norms, more attention can be paid to coached management, with authorization + assistance and guidance as the main, so that team members can have more space to play and grow. In fact, this principle can be applied to each team member, depending on the person.
Authorize and assign evaluation
As mentioned above, the management style can vary from person to person and time to time. Therefore, for the matters authorized by the plan, we should make a rational and objective evaluation of different team members, select appropriate personnel from them, and adjust the space for free play according to the professionalism of talents.
Measurement mechanism
Peter Drucker, the management guru, said:
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it
Therefore, a reasonable and feasible performance evaluation method is needed. In his speech, Liu shared and showed the positive and negative OKR examples they had developed.
The author summarizes
This topic is in the afternoon my favorite topic of the speech, the reason is that this speech content itself nicely I look forward to, in addition to say content in an orderly way, although believes that the time is limited, there are a lot of management is still worth lis point not mentioned, but will discuss some, still a lot of valuable content, basic is “no don’t do it, only said”.
Technology Driven Business Growth: A Three-plate Analysis
This is gaC Huili senior architect Li Weining to share, the biggest point is that he emphasized the need to correct technology for the idea of big technology.
There is no way for technology to create value directly, but to create value through the achievements of products and businesses
Li Weining laughed in his speech that there is a cruel sentence, but I have to say:
There is no way for technology to directly create value
This is true.
On the one hand, I’ve always wondered: Am I getting paid because I’m giving my employer far more value than I deserve? But how is this value created by me? Can I create the same value outside of the platform I’m on now? On the other hand, after working for several years and changing for several different employers, I have come to understand a truth — most of the time, technology is only auxiliary, only technology, it does not create value, but without technology, why not? In the process of listening to the speech, I understand that the value of technology is “to create value by achieving products and businesses”.
“360-degree comprehensive Evaluation, Performance Assessment of landing Technical team”
This topic was brought by Shi Haifeng, CTO of Small and micro enterprises ecology of Shell Financial Services, who mainly shared the experience and summary of the 360° evaluation method used by his own team.
Quantification is the way to deal with employee doubts about performance appraisal results
In any performance evaluation, there must be a ranking or grade division, and any employee is likely to question the results of the performance evaluation, and the quantitative evaluation method can more effectively deal with the questions of employees, rather than giving people the impression of distrust based on the relationship.
360° assessment: Comprehensive, anonymous feedback from all stakeholders, but still potentially problematic
In his speech, Shi haifeng listed the evaluation dimensions in detail, such as the values and professionalism of the evaluated objects. It also lists the points that should be paid attention to in the implementation process, such as anonymity. Although people who organize the evaluation do remain anonymous, people from technical background cannot fully believe that anonymity is true. After all, technical people believe that “everything that moves will leave a mark”. There are still many potential problems with a seemingly objective set of assessment methods.
Said to 360 ° assessment, I remember once for a month on a employer will die of peer review, in essence is to do peer assessment, similar here 360 ° assessment methods, but in fact, the implementation of the made a very stupid mistake, that is the time to determine the relations of the assessment, is referring to the location distribution of employees, With each person being evaluated by colleagues in the cubicle around them, you can imagine how many problems there would be. The example I know is that although one colleague has a fixed work station, she is often away from the work station and does not have a direct cooperative relationship with her colleagues. As a result, she is not familiar with others, and the final peer-to-peer assessment can only be a formality.
Dealing with biases: Biases are inevitable. The key is to think for yourself
Hai-feng shi speech they will encounter the leader impression and evaluation results is rather divide situation, this kind of situation is inevitable, but the key is to use the evaluation results, to analyze the difference is in what place, to analysis is to assess the method itself has a problem, or indeed is the man itself have some problems exposed by the evaluation results.
Before the performance evaluation, we would often complain that the existing performance evaluation method problems too much, after each performance appraisal result, also need to individually analysis results and the actual situation of gap, need to spend a lot of time, and therefore resist and comparing the performance review the thing itself, but it would have to be done seriously. Now, however, understand that there is no such thing as a perfect performance evaluation method, and that good performance evaluation methods are not designed to make performance evaluation a purely mechanical process.
From a technical point of view, it’s about having a system that helps people grow
In fact, related to the above, the purpose of the performance review is to help people find out what they did not do well in their past work, and what they did well in their past work, rather than just to classify people into different categories. Therefore, in order to do a good performance evaluation, we must first insist on one point from the mentality: I do performance evaluation to help team members grow better. If a performance evaluation results, I can not correctly understand the strengths and weaknesses of each member, it means that my performance evaluation has some shortcomings.
Everyone is a process of gradual growth
In my past job, I was often stressed and anxious. On the one hand, I always thought the team had too many problems, on the other hand, I attributed the team’s problems to my own problems, AND I even thought it might be because of the “Will bear the nest”. Later, in order to adjust my pressure, I began to understand that no one was born to be a manager, and no one was born to be an excellent engineer. Besides, everyone is different, and it is impossible for everyone to be the same. It is better to adjust a good attitude, with sincere heart, and the team slowly explore slowly grow. Don’t be in a hurry, just go for your ideal goal.
How technology Managers cultivate their Business Thinking
That’s the theme of Zhencao Wu, chief RESEARCH and development officer at Ping An Technology, former vice president of global mobile product development at Luxor and former Chief technology officer for China/Asia at Thomson Reuters. Since this topic was the last one at that time and I had an appointment to have dinner with my high school classmates, I left without listening to the whole speech, but what impressed me most was that Wu zhencao shared many failure cases he had personally experienced.
The ending summarizes
Of the 11 speeches, only 6 are mentioned here. The reason is that I had expected these 6 speeches, which touched me a lot and brought me more thoughts. The word “taking” in the title of the article was intended to start this article with a relaxed and happy beginning, but the more I think about it later, the more I think about it, the more appropriate it is to my original intention: The speech content of the conference is a lot of dry stuff, nothing empty, it is all the personal practice of the lecturers, and they can overcome the challenge and now the wind light cloud light review and summary, is the height I expect myself to reach, this is the “service”, the service of acceptance; The conference brought a lot of thinking and resonance, but these are just the first steps. If we can’t extract the methods from these thinking and put them into practice, we may soon forget much of the above. So do it. That’s use. “Take”, easy; “Use”, not easy.
