Tech Reflections, Ideas, and Sparks of Innovation

My name is Melvin Rook. I am a technical leader, software engineer, and entrepreneur. I have a passion for building and leading software engineering excellence, and I love to share my experiences and insights with others. I began my journey in technology at the age of 15 and have been driven by a lifelong passion for it.

I can help your startup, scaleup or growth company with my CTO-as-a-Service subscription model.

Feel free to reach out to me at melvin@techflection.nl or connect with me on LinkedIn.

My LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/MelvinRook

For 20+ years I've been classifying work into five main categories. Over time, this grew into the Work Type Focus framework. It helps teams to focus on the right work at the right time.

As a technical leader it's easy to grow and expand on the hard skills. However, to pave the way for growth and collaboration, you'll need to foster the soft skills and educate yourself on how other business departments work. For example, to grow business acumen, grasp commercial knowledge and experience the support customers need. You can achieve this by roaming across other departments, and take one day internships.

Throughout my career, I have actively pursued internships in areas such as customer support, bookkeeping, project management, product ownership and advisory boards to gain practical experience and cultivate a robust business acumen.

Capacity allocation is a key aspect of managing a team. It's important to understand the capacity of each team member and allocate work accordingly. This ensures that the team is working efficiently and effectively, and that everyone is contributing to the team's success. Interruptions and context switching can have a significant impact on capacity, so it's important to minimize these as much as possible, but also accept that they are a part of the job and plan for them accordingly.

It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of building new features, but it's important to remember that your engineering capacity is limited, and the work type focus should be in balance. In fact, it's so important, as it can have a significant impact on the user experience and the success of the product.

Up-scale capacity by outsourcing/nearshoring is a great way to increase capacity and get more features done, while maintaining the work type focus!

Well, that's possible! Let's decide which feature we want to build later and which feature we want to build now.

Software estimations are hard. Still looking for an estimation? Here's a quick way to get a high-over estimation.

Ask your team: Based on what we discussed can we give a high-over estimation?

Quick Time/Impact analysis

Time: Minutes / Hours / Days / Weeks / Months
Impact: How many people are needed? How many systems are affected?
Certainty: Low / Medium / High

Based on the certainty level, we can adjust the estimation or define a range:
High -> 1X: Optimistic
Medium -> 2X: Realistic
Low -> 3X: Pessimistic

Under-estimating the time it takes to do anything
Yes, it's difficult to estimate how long it takes to do certain tasks, but it's mandatory for keeping a business running. The CEO of Staff experiences this a lot with his development jobs, he suggests this antidote:
“Fix the features to the absolute minimum requirement. Double the time that you expected it to take (or triple, depends on the person or team). Don't think of a job as being finished or not finished. Instead, finish enough to get people using the product and then constantly improve.”

You can have low cost, speed or quality. Pick two.

Just ask: What would you like to achieve? What's needed to make it happen?

Just ask: What can I do to help you put this in motion? No need to answer now, but think about it.

As levelsio said: "If you're depressed, you need to get sand, get a shovel, start shovelling, doing something..."

This is a great metaphor for getting out of a rut. Just start doing something, anything, and you'll feel better.

Out of the comfort zone

There is a famous quote by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn:
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

"It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." - Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs on Hiring Truly Gifted People


Steve Jobs talks about managing people


Steve Jobs passion in work

"Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles." - Steve Jobs

My approach centers on achieving our goals while empowering people to take ownership. This means flexibility in working hours, allowing team members to balance their personal time throughout the day. However, with this flexibility comes high responsibility. Team syncs should always be prioritized, and it's essential to keep teammates informed and respond promptly to Slack messages.

Some individuals may choose to work beyond regular hours, accelerating both personal growth (think the 10,000-hour rule) and compensation. This extra effort directly ties to salary increases during performance reviews, making the additional time both valuable and compensated—without the need for a complicated time-tracking system.

Personally, I work out of passion. For me, work and hobby are one and the same. While I dedicate significant time to my career, I also prioritize family and maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Strict business hours, on the other hand, would require tracking time and using vacation days for personal matters—something we aim to avoid.

Inspired by 37signals, this site shares my principles, insights, and notes on technical leadership, all out in the open.