I’m visiting Naledi-Polokwane Toastmaster club (virtual) meeting in South Africa. I volunteered at table topic (impromptu speaking) and was given the topic: ‘Yes, we’re back to reality’… For a split seconds, I wondered what it meant. Don’t we ‘always’ live in the reality? Or the topic meant that life is back to ‘normal’ (pre-Covid)? This …
Category Archives: Inspiration
Delegate and Grow
With tech team focusing on a large project with long development cycle, we need to do things differently. I asked non-tech teams to choose/ form task forces to work on the discovery, planning works of a few key areas. I then asked the product manager to lead the task force while I support it. He …
Survive => Thrive
I visited Boston Toastmaster club meeting. At table topic (impromptu speaking), I was asked to talk about ‘not only survive but thrive’… Two recent Toastmaster experiences were great examples and thanks to Covid-19: (1) Many clubs have brought their meetings online so I ‘could’ join tonight’s meeting. I couldn’t make the meeting in person with …
Always Making Progress
Over the past two weeks, a colleague and I have been calling sales to get buy-in and prepare for customer interviews. Most sales and ops teams were enthusiastic about product/ UX team’s interest in getting customer feedback even if it may not be the right time or circumstance to talk with customers now. What we …
Karma
I watched Richard Peck to become toastmaster international president at this year’s international convention. Time goes fast. We met 9 years ago at a district 53 conference. I newly joined toastmaster then and attended the conference for the first time by the encouragement of my mentor. I remembered Rich, tall, slim man in suit, standing …
Customer Interview
My boss asked me to work with the product and UX/ research teams in designing and preparing customer interviews of a customer portal. Learning a new system (totally different from the one I’m leading and the opposite end of user journey) and about customers are very exciting to me. However, for several team members, interviewing …
Let’s Try
The product manager proposed 2 changes for communication: (1) instead of him doing the stakeholder demo bi-weekly on Monday for the new features, he wants the developers to do so after each sprint on Thursday. The benefits: stakeholders and tech team get to know each other and tech team could practice presentation, coached by the …
Listen and Slow Down
2 weeks after writing ‘Stretch: Do Less’, the 2 things I started practicing are working and I’ll continue… Daily to-do list: start with 3 Meeting, speech: plan less Yet I realized that they’re mostly related to ‘do less/well’. Fort the other 2 goals: listen more and slow down… Count to 3 after others finish before …
Shocking News
I heard shocking news at a previous company: a ‘powerful’ long-timer was removed due to harassment charges and two people ‘suddenly’ passed away; there were young, one under 60 and the other in 20s. There is a Chinese proverb:人做事天在看;善有善報,惡有惡報,不是不報,時機未到 (God/ higher force watch our action; good for good, bad for bad, if it doesn’t happen …
Stretch: Do Less
Stretch: do less? For many people, stretch means doing more and trying new things yet if you’re a super curious, highly-energetic, type A person like me, stretch would be the opposite: to listen more, slow down, and do less/ well… I decided to start with below: Daily to-do list: start with 3 (vs. 5 often …