Role and Company

Senior Manager Professional Software, realtor.com

Expertise

23 years experience in information technology

Location

Morgantown, WV

About Michael

As a manager, I like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), realtor.com is embracing the concept and running with it. Along with OKRs comes Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition (CFRs) these are harder to grasp as a replacement for yearly reviews but in weekly 1-1 meetings if you embrace CFR the yearly review contains no surprises, making life easier. To learn more about OKRs and CFRs take a look at Measure What Matters from Doerr.

From an operational perspective, I like continuous and agile. Agile can be a bad word to some, I like Agile as a means of measuring tasks, tracking backlog, and committing a constant stream of updates but I am not strict about it. Figure out what works for the team you have and stop doing the things that do not work. For continuous there are a few really good resources including The Phoenix Project from Kim, Behr, and Spafford as well as Accelerate from Forsgren, Humble, and Kim. Accelerate does an excellent job of proving continuous and validating the data throughout the book.

I like to rebuild older German cars as a hobby.