Uncategorized

An A+ Team is Not Scalable

10 years ago Author By cumeadi

Earlier this week, I had the chance to catch up with a hr friend of mine over a couple of beers. We caught up on jobs in the  DC region, family, and challenges with filling positions for his clients.

We spoke in depth about the Mid-Atlantic region and the demand for engineers and I ignorantly thought that the demand had decreased a little more due to what I thought was a huge flow of engineers to the area over the last couple of years. The DC area is a hot destination for engineers. (always has been with the government but we are starting to see more engineers come to DC for other industries)  Did you know Bethesda, right outside of DC, has the highest average STEM salary in the country, beating the likes of Boston and Silicon Valley? (Check out the article on that here)…I digress once again.

Long story short, we concluded that there’s still a high demand for engineers in the market but its not for the reasons you’d think. Most engineering jobs are for A engineers but there are only so many A engineers in the market. There are a ton of B and C engineers but most companies don’t have the capacity to mold and develop engineers which probably would be cheaper than throwing an absorbent amount of money at an A engineer.

Most companies that are successful in the early stages do so by developing talent and skill of their B and C players. A teams are too expensive to assemble and too difficult to scale.

Moral of the story: Developing talent is as important as developing product or services….Might be more important… It’s one of the best ways to ensure the sustainability of your company.

communication · Technology

Agile Tasks: My New Favorite App

10 years ago Author By cumeadi

AgileOver the weekend, I randomly stumbled upon (Didn’t find it using StumbleUpon, but someone should make a StumbleUpon for mobile apps) Agile Tasks, a light-weight project manager app that makes it easy to manage your day-to-day projects and to-do lists. I got really excited when I found Agile Tasks because it takes a stab at the challenge of making a universal task app that everyone will appreciate while still understanding that people have unique flows when it comes to managing tasks. As a product manager, I can appreciate the agile process and how it applies to getting tasks done. The interface and the flow of Agile Tasks makes sense to me and makes it way easier for me to apply to my daily routine.

agile Agile Tasks separates tasks into specific projects, tasks that are in the queue, in the process of doing, and done. It’s a pretty simple set up. Agile Tasks also includes the ability to record voice tasks and time sensitivity/ reminders.

So far, its been a pretty smooth transition from my other task manager. (I used Zoho Task Manager because it connected to my email and project platform) While there’s no special integrations for Agile Tasks, I still find its use worthwhile. I’d love to see a desk top version. The more I think about it, Agile Tasks reminds me of a simplified Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal Tracker has been my primary project manager for my dev teams so that is probably why I find it so easy to use Agile Tasks.

I’ll keep on playing around with Agile Tasks and I’ll report back in more detail my experiences.

Education

Lean Education

10 years ago Author By cumeadi

After attending the Harvard African Business conference and participating in several conversations around the future of education in Africa, I’ve realized that a change in the education model is not exclusive to catch up economies, but a new model to survive in a more global and ever-shifting economy. Here are some reasons why the current education model is in the process of being disrupted:

  1. Technology has made the decimation of information easier and cheaper than ever. There are so many courses and learning resources available online. We’ve known for a while that a lot of learning goes on outside of the classroom but now we don’t need a classroom at all to deliver course content.
  2. Speed- Everyone probably feels like this at the point of their existence but the speed and rate of change on what we learn in the undergraduate level is changing at very fast pace. A computer science major will enter a program learning one coding language and by the time they finish, that language will be obsolete. (My education friends argue that the purpose of an undergraduate education is to teach a person how to think, thus making it easier to pick up new skills in the future. If we go by this, the main purpose of an undergraduate degree is to improve learning ability and is less about skills acquisition. I’d still argue that we need to find cheaper ways, both from a time and cost perspective, to learn how to learn.
  3. Learning at scale. Our current education system (globally) is not structured to support the amount of people we need to educate in the next 20 years. Our population is growing at a greater rate than growth of our education institutions. In order to reach more students effectively, we will need to reconsider education content delivery and think of it more as media content.

All of this points to one truth, education has to get faster. We need to educate people at a faster pace, be more effective and do it quicker. The world is moving faster and education is slowly picking up speed to adapt.

Why?

On Decision Making

10 years ago Author By cumeadi

Life is full of important decisions. We often have the luxury to think through our decisions ahead of time but that doesn’t equate to making the right or best decisions. After speaking with friends and mentors, one of the best ways to make sound decisions is to use a decision making model. I’ve studied these models before but I figured I’d run through a couple to refresh and provide you with some of the best models for decision making.

Pros Vs. Cons aka Rational Decision Making

Probably made famous by Plato or someone along that line, pros vs cons is as simple as a decision model can be. Nothing really to explain here… What are the pros and the cons of each potential outcome of your decision?

In this decision making process, its easy to assume that pros and cons hold equal weight which is not always true.

Satisficing

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Sometimes we don’t have access to all the information necessary to make the optimal decision and/or the “okay” decision will do. I find most people never want to “satisfice” when it comes to big decisions but in the long term, sometimes its the best strategy.

Opportunity Cost

In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone, in a situation in which a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives given limited resources.

So, what is the cost of missing out on other outcomes? Can you live with the cost of missing out on that opportunity?

Garbage Can Theory

In the garbage-can theory (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972) an organization “is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work”. Problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities flow in and out of a garbage can, and which problems get attached to solutions is largely due to chance.

This doesn’t make much sense to me but I guess the garbage can theory is more of a meta critique on how organizations make decisions.

Sources:

Opportunity Cost

Garbage can Theory