Srinivasan Rangarajan

How do you introduce yourself

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Whenever I meet people in conferences or meetups, I experiment with how I introduce myself. Every time I talk about myself and what I do, I make subtle changes and notice what reaction the other person gave.

This isn’t something I did in the initial stages of my career. When I started (as a programmer) I just told I am a software engineer or programmer in a startup. And I noticed that people will just start saying “Oh, OK. Cool. What does the startup do?” Then the conversation ends up being about the startup and I just missed the opportunity to make an impact on a stranger.

After my failed startup, I started consulting for other companies. And this was a stage when I used to attend a lot of meetups every weekend. And this is also the time when I began experimenting with my introductions.

Freelancer

Initially, I was saying “Hi I am Srini, I am a freelancer” or some variation of that. That was the most horrible thing I could say about myself. People kept saying “Uh? Ok. So you write code and stuff uh? What kind of code?”

Programmers doing Freelancing has this weird association with a code monkey who doesn’t know how to think. I kept hearing people who have this small task that they want help with and they were confused when I started asking deep probing questions about their product.

I didn’t communicate well enough that I am more of a product guy and I can help them end-to-end in researching, prototyping, building, and launching their product. Not just write a particular module and get paid.

Software Consultant

I started saying that I am a Consultant and this was slightly better. People began asking me help with different parts of their software and how I could help them. I was no longer a freelancer. However, there were still a few people who didn’t know what consulting was and their first question was “so consultant, like a freelancer?”

I had to resist the urge to not facepalm and reply back with how I was a bit different than just a coder they could hire on Elance.

I used to say that I work with startups and program stuff. But so does every other fresh programmer out of college. How was I different?

Solutions Architect

This was the stage when I promoted myself to be a Solutions/Software Architect (hey I was my own boss). This sounded cool and people started noticing me. Mostly because I spoke with confidence and authority, but partly because I called myself as an Architect.

Even this was missing something. I realised that nobody cared about the title. Yes, it did sound cool, but only before the kids. They see someone older claiming to be an architect, they will listen to every word you say.

My target audience were people higher up in startups. Guys who take the decision whether to hire me or not. For them, it doesn’t matter what I called myself. All they care about is how I am going to solve their problem.

Solve a problem

My introductions became something like this “I am Srini, I am a software/solutions consultant/architect and I help startups build products”. This clearly explains what I do and how I can immediately solve a problem for startups (my target audience). The responses were totally different.

Whenever I used this introduction, people used to start asking “Hmm, interesting. What kind of products do you build?” and “What startups have you worked with before?”.

I stopped being that code monkey or some weirdo who calls himself funkier titles. I began to be that person who can provide a solution to their tech product. And the conversation started and eventually, I would become their trusted advisor when it comes to building their product.

Even now, after becoming a full-time employee, I always test out my introductions. I explain what I do and what I have done in the company and so on. And since I am representing the company in such conferences and meetups, I test a lot of variants introducing the company too. In tomorrow’s post, I will explain how to explain what your company does.

I want to know how you introduce yourself. Please leave them in the comments below.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Inattention to Results

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This is the last dysfunction that is discussed in the book “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”. Do read the first 4 dysfunctions I have been writing this past week – Absence of Trust, Fear of Conflict, Lack of Commitment, and Avoidance of Accountability.

All these 4 dysfunctions eventually lead to the final dysfunction, the inattention to results. When a team is doesn’t trust themselves and are afraid to have an argument, it leads to non-committal decisions being taken leading to no accountability at all and each team member works towards his own personal results instead of the team’s results.

Any team should set the goals and objectives they want to achieve. But if there is no accountability, the members would start working towards their personal goals or their own team’s goals.

Team level goals

Say the overall company’s goals are to have 100 paying customers by end of year, each team needs to commit to it. If let’s say the sales team thinks it is a huge target, they would start working on accounts which are smaller, but easier to close.

Getting 100 clients who are ready to pay a few tens of thousands is different from getting 100 clients who pay hundred thousands of dollars. The first might be easy, but it doesn’t add any significant increase to the top line.

Personal Goals

If the intra-team goals aren’t achievable, then individual members would start working towards their personal goal. With the sales team example, each sales person would start getting clients who yield the highest commissions. This kind of behaviour is detrimental to the growth of the team and the company.

How to overcome this dysfunction

The simplest way to overcome this dysfunction is to publicly declare the results that they need to be achieve. Public proclamations in a team setting tend to allow the team to work passionately towards the goal.

Another way is to announce results based rewards. Link the compensation of the team member based on the results he achieved. But make sure that the goals are clearly mentioned and tracked. Have an objective way to track the goals and the results achieved.

Conclusion

Whatever I have written in these 5 posts are just a very brief gist of the book. Be sure to read the book and really understand with the story and examples of how to save your team from these dysfunctions.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Avoidance of Accountability

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For the past 3 days, I have been writing about the book Five Dysfunctions of a team. Check out the previous posts about the first three dysfunctions – Absence of Trust, Fear of Conflict, and Lack of Commitment.

When a team doesn’t trust the members and hide their weaknesses and mistakes, it would lead to the fear of Conflict. The members wouldn’t want to argue and have a healthy discussion. This would lead to a lack of commitment from each member. There will be a few team members who wouldn’t buy-in to the team decision. This leads to the fourth dysfunction – Avoidance of Accountability.

Even if a single team member doesn’t agree with the team’s decision and doesn’t want to commit, he would feel like he isn’t involved in the process. If anything screws up he would just claim “I didn’t agree to this at all. Don’t ask me.” or “I aired my opinion on this before itself, I knew it would fail.” This kind of behaviour ends up hurting the team.

Each team member needs to understand that everyone in the team is involved in the decision and is held accountable for anything that might happen. The members need to own the decision and the product/company. They need to hold each other to a higher standard and constantly drive each other to perform better to reach the end goal.

Whenever one team member shrugs off his responsibilities, the others need to point it out and make him realise that his behaviour is causing failure in the quality of work others do. The team needs to self-regulate each other.

How to identify your team has this dysfunction

It is easy to identify this as each member would wash off their hands on any difficult situation. They become a mediocre team and have a lower standard for performance. This causes deadlines to be missed and ends up with missing all the goals.

How to overcome this dysfunction

There are easy ways to overcome this dysfunction. Whenever there is a group meeting to decide something, make sure you listen to everyone’s arguments and accept their point of view. At the end of the meeting, once everyone has committed to the decisions, make a clear list of goals and standards that was decided. List them out on a paper and email it to everyone in the team.

It is up to the team leader to translate these goals to clear objectives for his subordinates. By making sure everything is recorded accurately, it would avoid any kind of ambiguity.

There should be simple and regular progress reviews. Team members should be given constant feedback on how they are performing regularly. List down the stated goals and objectives and mark against them how each team member is performing.

Finally, the team leader or CEO needs to bring about this culture of accountability by creating a disciplined environment. Whenever a team member does something against the standards set, make sure others point it out. If no one speaks it out the team leader needs to speak out.

By having this kind of culture, the team eventually learns to keep everyone at a higher standard and hold each other accountable for all the decisions that they take.

Five Dysfunctions of a team – Lack of Commitment

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This week I am writing about the book Five Dysfunctions of a Team which is about a fictional company whose executive team is highly dysfunctional and how the new CEO brings them all together to create a better company. Last two days were about the first two dysfunctions: Absence of Trust and Fear of Conflict.

I was explaining how when the team members don’t trust each other to not use their mistakes and weaknesses against each other, they will be afraid to argue and have open conflicts. When the team is afraid of facing conflicts, there won’t be a clear commitment from each team members.

Any decision that needs to be taken will have few members who don’t publicly air their opinion. This discontentment would lead to the entire team leaving the meeting without reaching a consensus.

To get a commitment from all the team members, two things are needed

  1. Clarity
  2. Buy-in

Great teams always leave a meeting with a clarity of the decision that was taken and also with the knowledge that every member had the buy-in. No single team member is harbouring doubts and disbeliefs about the decisions.

Note that there is no need for a consensus or certainty in reaching a commitment. No team can get both. There will always be one or two team members who will not completely believe in the decision, but the team needs to give a valid space to air their concerns. The team also needs to accept the concerns and move forward taking into account each person’s views.

Also, no one can be certain that the decision you take today will be the best decision. Things always change, the business landscape might cause a different outcome. Competition might get better funding. But you have gotta take a decision “today” with all the possible information available as of now. You can’t keep pushing away and not reach a commitment.

How to overcome this dysfunction

There are very specific steps to overcome this dysfunction. One of the important steps every team needs to do is to reach a decision with a deadline. They have to decide by when they need to commit and stick to it.

And once everyone buys into the decision, they need to cascade the information down to the next levels. If the executive team decides that they are going increase number of customers by 100, this information needs to percolate down to the next levels. Each employee in sales, marketing, tech needs to understand the goal and start working towards it.

Always think about contingency and worst-case scenarios for each decision. This would help mitigate the risk and fear of failure. And instead of doing time-consuming research and studies, start discussing with each other with as little research as possible. Only during the discussion among the team members, various viewpoints will be exposed and it will lead to a better decision.

Tomorrow we will see how not having a fully committed team would lead to our fourth dysfunction – lack of accountability.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Fear of Conflict

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In yesterday’s post, I was explaining about the latest book that I was finished reading: Five Dysfunctions of a team and the first dysfunction – the absence of trust. If you didn’t read it, go read yesterday’s post and come back.

Continuing from where I left, when a team doesn’t trust each other, it would lead to the second dysfunction – Fear of Conflict. Any good relationship if it needs to last over time and grow continuously, needs to have conflicts. Whether it is a marriage, friends, business or in a team there need to be open conflicts.

But people try to avoid conflict, especially at work as it is many times considered negative and unproductive. Petty interpersonal politics is different from productive ideological conflicts.

The goal of having a conflict and teams intensely and passionately arguing is to produce the best possible solution for the problem. Many times having an open argument about the problems and issues at hand lead to resolving them quickly and completely. And since the team members know that there is nothing personal about the conflict, they don’t hurt each other’s feelings.

Only when the team members do not openly debate or argue on important ideas/decisions, it turns to back-channel gossip and personal attacks. This kind of behaviour is more toxic than having a healthy argument in the first place.

So how do you overcome this dysfunction?

The team members have to first understand that conflict is productive and healthy. Each member should be able to air their honest opinion about any issue and others must learn to listen to their opinions openly.

Once the first dysfunction (Absence of trust) is removed, each team member would realise that any opinion they hear is not a personal attack, but instead about the actual issue they are discussing.

When people start trusting each other that they won’t use their mistakes and weaknesses, they will have better arguments and openness in their conflicts.

Often times the arguments become heated and might become messy, but as long as the members understand the true goal of the argument, they will come to a good resolution.

How this causes the third dysfunction

Only when a team has a good and healthy argument about the decisions it takes, each member would begin asking about other’s perspectives and opinions. Unless everyone’s opinions are heard and discussed, it would be difficult to get a buy-in from the entire team. Which leads to our third dysfunction: Lack of Commitment. Wait for tomorrow’s post to learn about this dysfunction.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Absence of Trust

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Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a book I started reading recently and I think is one book that everyone who is working together with a team needs to read. This book describes the many pitfalls that almost all teams in the world face.

It starts out with a story about a fictional tech company in Silicon Valley and a new CEO comes in and finds how the executive team is highly dysfunctional. She takes them to a retreat and explains them about the 5 dysfunctions and works with them over the next few months to get the team to function together.

When you read the stories you would feel like you could relate to each character in the book with someone you would’ve worked with or currently working with. But the author clarifies that he sees the similar pattern in any company or team that he has worked with. He explains how to fix the five dysfunctions and make the team work together towards the common goal.

Five Dysfunctions

  1. Absence of trust
  2. Fear of conflict
  3. Lack of commitment
  4. Avoidance of accountability
  5. Inattention to results

Each of the dysfunction will build up to the next level and cause a totally dysfunctional team which is full of ego, politics and selfish people.

A team which doesn’t have any trust in themselves, would not have any conflicts. Team members would be afraid to air their conflicting views during meetings and would not have 100% commitment towards any decisions taken. And since there is no commitment, there is a lack of accountability.

The Team members will just say, “I knew it was going to fail.” and pass the blame on others. And this causes each team member to work only for himself and his group and wouldn’t care much about the whole team or organization’s growth.

This is how each dysfunction causes a major rift in the teams and end up causing irreparable damage to the organization. In this post and the next 4 posts, I will be talking in detail about the 5 dysfunctions and how you (as a team leader) should help your team overcome it.

Absence of trust

This is the first dysfunction – absence of trust among team members. Which is caused by their unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Only if the team members are genuinely open with each other about their weaknesses and mistakes can build the trust.

This is called vulnerability-based trust, which is completely different from the other “I trust him to finish his work by this week” kind of trust. Only when the team has this kind of trust, they will feel comfortable around one another. Else they will have their shields up always on the defence.

If all your time and energy is spent trying to protect yourself from your team members, you can never focus on your job. Only when you stop worrying about your weaknesses and trust that your team won’t use them against you, you will be able to start concentrating on your strengths and use them for your team.

Also, they will hesitate to ask/provide help and feedback to others. They even doubt the intention of others who try to help them and fail to recognize other’s skills and experiences.

When there is trust

When the team has trust, they will openly admit their weaknesses and mistakes and help each other in solving their problems. Always gives the benefit of doubt before reaching a negative conclusion. Apologize for any screwups without any hesitation and don’t have any ego.

But most importantly they focus all their time and energy on solving important issues instead of petty office politics.

Building vulnerability based trust

This kind of trust is very hard to build, as we have been trained from an early age to be competitive to be a successful person. Also, it is our natural instincts to not open up to everyone and protect ourselves in such a competitive space.

The team leader needs to conduct various exercises to help each team member to open up to each other. Each team member needs to start by sharing something personal about themselves. This shows everyone that there is just another human behind one another and builds empathy with each other.

The second exercise is for the team to identify one important contribution of each team member and one area they need to improve upon. Yes, this exercise is a bit dangerous as it might cause some tension, but the feedback needs to be taken constructively.

The third exercise is to use a personality profiling tool like Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to identify each team member’s personality types. And the most riskier exercise is to start giving 360-degree feedback about one another. But there is a slight difference between usual 360-degree feedbacks. You should not tie this to any kind of compensation or performance evaluation. You should try to use this as a developmental tool to identify the strengths and weaknesses.

With all these exercises the leader can build a team which trusts each other.

In tomorrow’s post, I will explain about the second dysfunction – Fear of conflict and how a team which doesn’t trust each other fears to have open conflicts.

7 Extensions to install on your new Firefox Quantum browser

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On 14 November, Mozilla released a new version of Firefox called Quantum, which is literally a quantum leap in performance over the previous versions. Mozilla says the new version 57 is twice as fast as the previous version and takes about 30% less memory compared to competitors (cough Chrome cough).

firefox quantum

They have made lot of performance improvements to the browser core and takes better advantage of the latest hardware and better memory handling because of a better programming language.

Anyway, I have been using Firefox 57 as my primary browser for the past 5 days and there has been a significant improvement in the overall performance of my laptop as a result of this. Previously when I was using Chrome, the Memory pressure in the Activity Monitor always showed yellow and many times in red. After quitting Chrome, I have been consistently in the green and the entire computer feels responsive.

activity monitor memory pressure

If you want to use a fast and responsive browser, but don’t want to close all other applications to run just your browser, check out the new Firefox. But what good is a browser without all the extensions? Here are the 7 extensions I installed as soon as I started using Quantum.

0. Pocket

You don’t have to install the Pocket extension as Firefox Quantum has it built-in (after it was acquired in February 2017). You just have to sign in to your pocket account and start saving web pages to be read later. This isn’t a big deal if you don’t use Pocket a lot. But personally I use it and I have already written about how I use Zapier to save my Pocket entries as bookmarks in Pinboard.

0.5 Screenshot

This is also a built-in feature in the new Firefox. This screenshot tool is much better than the Awesome Screenshot extension I used in Chrome. I can take screenshots of specific div or sections on the page. Firefox also provides free storage space for the screenshots. You can also set expiry date for each screenshot. This makes it easy to share screenshots with my team.

1. Multi-Account Container

If you are a Chrome user, you must have used the built-in Profiles feature. You can start completely new browser instances with separate sessions, cookies and history for your personal and work. I used to have separate profiles for my Gmail, Work, and other domains that I manage.

This does have a problem as sometimes I open a tab in one profile, which I want to open in another. Example, every day I have setup Rescuetime to open a page to log my achievements and it opens a tab in a different browser window in which I haven’t signed in. I always wanted to have separate profiles for just a few websites and one common default profile for everything else.

Firefox’ Containers does it better. You can assign multiple Containers for each of your task, example personal, work, Shopping, banking, etc. You also have a default container, which is what opens whenever you click on any link from other applications. This makes it easy to have only specific websites to be containerized and other pages to be opened in default setting.

To manage the Containers, you have to use this Multi Account Container extension. You can customize your containers, give them names and customize it with different colors. You can also set specific domains to always open in specific containers – like your bank website to always open in Banking container.

2. LastPass

I use LastPass as my password manager – to save and sync my passwords across multiple browsers. By just installing and logging in, I am able to sign in to all my websites without having to remember any password. I just have to remember one master passphrase and I don’t care how complex my passwords on individual sites are.

I usually auto generate most of the passwords using LastPass, (sometimes with reaaallly long lengths). I don’t worry if any one site is compromised, I can just change the password on that one site.

3. uBlock Origin

Everyone uses adblockers nowadays, that’s a given. Previously Adblock Plus was the most popular extension, then uBlock became popular because it was lightweight on CPU and memory. uBlock then got forked to uBlock Origin, as the creator had some issues with the spirit of the project. So uBlock Origin is the latest and actively developed fork. It blocks most of the ads on the web and even if it misses some, you can select an ad and block it.

4. OneTab

This is an extension I was using in Chrome. When I have too many tabs open in a browser, I hit this OneTab button and all the unpinned tabs are saved in a separate tab and closed. This frees up your browser and mental space as you don’t have to be overwhelmed by the number of tabs that are open in the browser. Your memory also gets freed up, as all the tabs that were hogging your RAM is now closed. It also has an easy export tool which exports the URLs in a plain text format.

5. Video Speed Controller

Just like I like to listen to podcasts at a much higher speed, I also have an extension to speed up my videos in the browser. I typically try to watch them at a 1.3x speed, beyond which I find it hard to catch up. Once you begin watching videos at a faster rate, you would start consuming more content through YouTube videos. I even used to watch Netflix series at a faster rate.

6. Reader

This is an extension which I use to clean up web pages which are content heavy. It removes all the sidebar and unnecessary content and formats the main text in a nice clean font which is easy on the eyes to read. You can also print the page or email it to someone.

On Chrome I used Mercury Reader, which had the added feature of sending the article directly to Kindle. But it isn’t available for Firefox.

7. Grammarly

This is a new extension I have started to use more as I have started to write more. Grammarly makes sure all of your text is clear, mistake-free and not have any gramatical errors. Once you add it to Firefox, it checks all text boxes and highlights how many errors are present. You can click it and see details about the errors and fix them in one click.

This is very useful as I usually write in Sublime Editor and copy-paste it into WordPress. Once it is pasted, Grammarly checks all the typos and grammatical mistakes and highlights them. I don’t know how I lived all these days without this.

What extensions do you use?

These are the extensions I have currently on my Firefox. I still haven’t install Pinboard, Evernote, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Enhanced Steam, and others which I had in my Chrome.

What are some of the extensions which you like? Leave them in the comments below.