/Leadership

6 Tips To Overcome Scaling Challenges Like Design Decisions, Tech Debt, And Developer Satisfaction

- Rachel Potvin tl;dr: (1) Tackle tech debt to keep morale up. (2) Create processes for fan-out work, where multiple engineering teams are involved in tackling a project. (3) Use design guidance to simplify design reviews. (4) Use council meetings to make aligned technical decisions. (5) Assign DRIs for effective decision making. (6) Create a developer satisfaction survey. 

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Flo Health’s Path To The Hiring Strategy In Engineering

- Maksim Koutun tl;dr: A year ago, the company had the typical hiring problems of a hyper-growth stage startup. "If you formed a new team, hiring could eat up all your time. On the other hand, managers on stable teams did not participate in hiring, and we had an organizational bias." Maksim describes how the company instrumented a new process to reduce steps, create feedback loops, develop a "pull", vs push system, and more.

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Good Goals

- Michael Siliski tl;dr: Post covers: (1) Why set goals (2) Characteristics of good goals: focused, concise, comprehensible, objectively assessable, challenging but possible, user oriented, states not activities. (3) Heuristics for testing goals e.g. reframing actions as outcomes.

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Limiting Work In Progress As A Manager

- Erik Wiffin tl;dr: "The demands on a manager’s time are endless and sometimes it feels like you’re being pulled in every direction at once. These demands can make it hard to focus, they make it hard to move from reacting to problems to anticipating them. In this article, I’d like to talk about how I’ve limited demands on my time, counterintuitively doing more with less."

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The State Of Internal Tools 2022

tl;dr: Since 2020, we’ve surveyed developers for our State of Internal Tools report. We set out to find how companies build internal tools, who uses them, and how teams measure their impact on the business. Discover our highlights from this year’s State Of Internal Tools here.

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Remote Development At Slack

- Sylvestor George tl;dr: In this article, “remote development environments” refer to AWS EC2 instances where engineers make code changes and can see a running Slack application with those changes.

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Process Has A Bad Rap

- Paulo André tl;dr: "Why do so many processes tell people to behave slightly different from what common sense tells them to do?" Paulo discusses a framework to design processes: (1) Purpose: what is this process supposed to make either possible or significantly simpler? (2) Principles: what orients the design of this process towards its purpose? (3) Practices: how is the process to be executed? 

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Operating Well: What I Learned at Stripe

- Sam Gerstenzang tl;dr: "Operating well is a state, not an outcome." Key lessons are: (1) Reinforce your goals everywhere. (2) Focus. (3) Changing strategy feels like progress but it usually isn’t. (4) Turn up the heat in every interaction and ask uncomfortable questions e.g. What could we cut, even if it’s painful? (5) Unblock psychological barriers by asking a report what's holding them back. And more. 

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Why Most Strategies Lack Clarity

- John Cutler tl;dr: "The unlock, I think, is realizing that you can confidently communicate a coherent strategy that also acknowledges uncertainty. You know what you know. You assume what you assume. You believe what you believe." John explains that the reason this tends not to happen is we fear showing that we lack clarity, and lean towards displaying certainty. 

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Write Simply, Change Effectively

- Paulo André tl;dr: "I’ll delve into how to write well in the context of driving effective organizational change that people do understand — and buy into." Clear writing should be intentional, emotional and empathetic. Paulo cites the SCARF framework as a tool to navigate the written document away from language that may feel threatening to those impacted by the organizational change.

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