/Leadership

The Magic Of Small Engineering Teams

- James Temperton tl;dr: “Startups ship more per person than big companies – everyone knows this. But how do you retain that advantage as you scale? Our answer is small teams – speedy, innovative, and autonomous one-pizza teams where individuals can still have an outsized impact. This week we're sharing how they work, why we chose this structure, and the tradeoffs we accept to enjoy the benefits of small teams.”

featured in #533

Strategy For Directors: Tying It Together

- Anna Shipman tl;dr: “Strategy is often set by the person with the loudest voice. One of the aims of this course was to teach techniques and models to allow robust discussion, surface ideas and allow everyone to be heard.” Anna discusses steps to do this: (1) Strategic analysis: Make a diagnosis of your current situation, external and internal. (2) Strategic choice: make a decision about what you want to do. (3) Implement.  

featured in #532

Leadership For Results And Peace Of Mind

- Subbu Allamaraju tl;dr: “After years of testing various ideas and behaviors, I developed a leadership framework that has proven effective in achieving results, enjoying work, and maintaining peace of mind. While there’s no one-size-fits-all leadership recipe, I’m eager to share a few key behaviors that have helped me and could benefit you.”

featured in #532

Leadership For Results And Peace Of Mind

- Subbu Allamaraju tl;dr: “After years of testing various ideas and behaviors, I developed a leadership framework that has proven effective in achieving results, enjoying work, and maintaining peace of mind. While there’s no one-size-fits-all leadership recipe, I’m eager to share a few key behaviors that have helped me and could benefit you.”

featured in #531

Strategy For Directors: Models

- Anna Shipman tl;dr: Anna presents PESTLE and VUCA frameworks for tackling issues subject to external influences and unpredictability. “The value is in bringing the issues into the open and discussing them, as much as the end result. People are often making unconscious assumptions about the future, or the current situation, and these models help surface them.”

featured in #531

The Right Kind Of Stubborn

- Paul Graham tl;dr: Paul compares persistence and obstinance. “When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don't give up is completely different.”

featured in #530

Standups: Individual → Teammate

- Kent Beck tl;dr: Kent discusses his reasoning behind standups. “Treating standup meetings as a technical solution to a technical problem — we need to communicate this many bits of information to this many people as efficiently as possible — misses the real point. We’re people. With needs. The better those needs are met, the better we can meet the needs of others.”  

featured in #530

Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams)

tl;dr: “Based on philosophy, experience, and analysis; we hope they’ll be of some use.” The authors cover topics such as: (1) Minimum number of direct reports anyone should ever have. (2) Minimum number of candidates you should interview before making a decision. (3) Number of days before a new hire should have merged a pull request, (4) Number of days before a small support issue becomes a large support issue. And more.

featured in #529

Eponymous Laws

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: “I’m a big fan of eponymous laws such as Conway’s law, that software reflects the organizational structure that produced it, named after Melving Conway” Mike discusses his own laws: (1) The more you deny, the more you implicate. (2) If you hire a skill, you will get more of that skill demonstrated. (3) Everyone thinks they can improve on others' works. (4) The complexity of a system increases with each new feature. (5) Change becomes harder as organizations grow. 

featured in #529

Physics And Perception

- Will Larson tl;dr: In 2019, parts of Stripe’s engineering org were going through a civil war, driven by one group’s belief that Java should replace Ruby to deliver a quality platform. The other group believed Stripe’s problems were driven by a product domain with high essential complexity. Switching languages wouldn’t address any of those issues. Will discusses his approach to solving this conflict: “what I have found useful is studying what each faction knows that the other doesn’t, and trying to understand those gaps deeply enough to find a solution. Sometimes I summarize this as solving for both physics and perception.”

featured in #528