/Leadership

2024: The Year In Review

- James Stanier tl;dr: “Not since the smartphone boom period in 2007 have I seen so much change happening so quickly. We've seen the culture and growth of our companies changing due to the macroeconomic climate, a proliferation of LLM-based tools and technologies, and, fundamentally, as leaders, we've had to change how we think about our roles and our output.”

featured in #578

Principal Engineer Roles Framework

- Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec tl;dr: AWS VP shares a framework for Principal Engineer roles developed at Amazon. The framework defines six key roles: Sponsor (project lead), Guide (technical expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor). This helps organizations optimize senior engineers' impact and develop talent effectively.

featured in #578

The Adaptive Chief Technology Officer

tl;dr: “Being the CTO of a small and mid-size enterprise has been a totally different ride compared to what I’ve seen in the big corporate world. One thing that’s clear to me now? The title might stay the same no matter where you go, but what you’re actually doing as a CTO can vary wildly depending on the industry and the company’s growth stage... The author dives into some of the mental frameworks that have helped me navigate these shifts.”

featured in #577

Principal Engineer Roles Framework

- Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec tl;dr: AWS VP shares a framework for Principal Engineer roles developed at Amazon. The framework defines six key roles: Sponsor (project lead), Guide (technical expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor). This helps organizations optimize senior engineers' impact and develop talent effectively.

featured in #577

OKRs For Evil And Good

- Jessica Kerr tl;dr: “My work does not reduce to measurable outcomes. Much of what I accomplish as an engineer and as a developer advocate amounts to creating conditions that make it more likely for the company to succeed. I resist and resent most metrics, yet I don’t mind OKRs the way Honeycomb does them.”

featured in #577

Problem Driven Development

tl;dr: “An easy playbook for technical roadmap development is Problem Driven Development. In short, it means you develop your technical roadmap based on fixing things that are going wrong. It sounds simple, but it can be very empowering.”

featured in #576

Layers Of Context

- Will Larson tl;dr: “All interesting problems operate across a number of context layers. For a concrete example, let’s think about a problem I’ve run into twice: what are the layers of context for evaluating a team that wants to introduce a new programming language like Erlang or Elixir to your company’s technology stack?" Will shares some layers of context and how to see across them.

featured in #575

15 Best Leadership Books

- Dr Milan Milanović tl;dr: “This is a reading guide for you as a leader to navigate and upgrade your leadership skills. It is a curated list of the best books on leadership that you can check and read during the holiday season. But it is not just a numbered list of books to read; it is a guide created by considering my selection from many books I’ve read and talked about with many leaders in the field.”

featured in #575

Are Your Standards Too Low? In Defense Of Raising The Bar

- Wes Kao tl;dr: Wes discusses why you should consider raising your standards and why this has the potential to dramatically improve your team’s chances of getting what you want: (1) Why every leader should set higher standards. (2) Challenges when raising the bar. (3) How to normalize a culture of excellence. 

featured in #574

Thinking About Risk: Mitigation

- Jacob Kaplan-Moss tl;dr: Jacob presents a simple framework to help frame discussions about risk mitigation. “It’s intentionally very simple, a basic starting point. I’ll present a more complex framework later in this series, but I want to lay more of a foundation before I get there, so we’ll start here.”

featured in #574