/Management

Leading Effective Engineering Teams In The Age Of GenAI

- Paul Gross tl;dr: “Using AI in software development is not about writing more code faster; it's about building better software. It’s up to you as a leader to define what “better” means and help your team navigate how to achieve it. Treat AI as a junior team member that needs guidance. Train folks to not over-rely on AI; this can lead to skill erosion. Emphasize "trust but verify" as your mantra for AI-generated code. Leaders should upskill themselves and their teams to navigate this moment.”

featured in #602

The QA Wolf Advantage: Vertical Integration For Superior QA

- Jon Perl tl;dr: Traditional outsourced QA relies on inefficient, costly tech stacks that fall short of QA engineers' needs. QA Wolf took a smarter approach. They built proprietary technology that aligns with customers’ needs, enabling their QA engineers to deliver 80%+ automated test coverage for their clients in just 4 months. In this free webinar, CEO Jon Perl reveals how QA Wolf is redefining QA automation.

featured in #602

Some Mistakes I Made As A New Manager

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “I had an unusually hard time becoming a manager: I went back and forth three times before it stuck, mostly because I made lots of mistakes each time. Since then, as I had to grow my team and grow other folks into managing part of it, I’ve seen a lot of other people have varying degrees of a rough time as well—often in similar ways. Here’s a small, lovingly hand-curated selection of my prodigious oeuvre of mistakes, and strategies that helped me mitigate them.”

featured in #602

Categories Of Leadership On Technical Teams

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.” Ben shares what these are and why he finds it useful. 

featured in #602

Categories Of Leadership On Technical Teams

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “Recently I’ve been having a lot of conversations about how to structure and staff teams. One framework I’ve referenced repeatedly is to break down team leadership into a few different categories of responsibility.” Ben shares what these are and why he finds it useful. 

featured in #601

Operational Mechanisms For Strategy

- Will Larson tl;dr: “I refer to the art of making policies work as “operations” or “strategy operations.” The good news is that effectively operating a policy is two-thirds avoiding common practices that simply don’t work. The other one-third takes some practice, but can be practiced in any engineering role: there’s no need to wait until you’re an executive to start building mastery. This chapter will dig into those mechanisms.”

featured in #601

No Forks Allowed: How User-Centric Design Saved Next Edit From Compromise

- Vinay Perneti Arun Chaganty tl;dr: Augment's "Next Edit" feature uses AI to predict code changes needed across a codebase when developers make edits. When initial testing revealed UX and model behavior issues, the team faced a choice: fork VS Code or redesign within its constraints. They chose the harder path of working within VS Code's API, refining their three-model approach to be less intrusive yet helpful. 

featured in #601

How I’ve Run Major Projects

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, which means organizing them is a huge job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. Although a lot of the examples here come from crisis projects, most of the principles here are also the way I try to run any project, just more-so.” Ben describes his playbook. 

featured in #601

How I’ve Run Major Projects

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “In a company like Anthropic, excellent project management is an extremely high-leverage skill, and not just during crises: our work has tons of moving parts with complex, non-obvious interdependencies and hard schedule constraints, which means organizing them is a huge job, and can save weeks of delays if done right. Although a lot of the examples here come from crisis projects, most of the principles here are also the way I try to run any project, just more-so.” Ben describes his playbook. 

featured in #600

How To Praise

- Péter Szász tl;dr: “Construct your positive feedback the same way as you would a negative one. Ensure the situation where the action you want to comment on was well understood; focus on the actions of the person you’re giving a feedback to; and show the impact these behaviors had on you and others. This approach will help your team members recognize and build on their strengths.” Peter shares his framework for doing so. 

featured in #600