/Management

Heartbeats: Keeping Strategies Alive

- James Stanier tl;dr: “The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been implemented in the time since the last heartbeat. It's a chance to show how the strategy is living and relevant, and that it's not just a document that was written once and then placed on the shelf.” James shares strategies for doing so. 

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Demanding And Supportive

- Ravi Gupta tl;dr: “Most people think of demanding and supportive as opposite ends of a spectrum. You can either be tough or you can be nice. But the best leaders don’t choose. They are both highly demanding and highly supportive. They push you to new heights and they also have your back.”

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The ROI Comparison Of Building SSO And SCIM vs. Using A Pre-built Solution

- Min Kim Kristopher Hughes tl;dr: For high-growth startups, time is the single most important resource. It’s so important that months of delay in shipping SSO and SCIM can result in a potential revenue loss of $7.95M compared to using a pre-built solution. The ROI difference is staggering too: 9% for a homegrown solution vs. 1,954% for a pre-built one. This article explains the methodologies used to calculate these numbers.

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Engineering Team Meeting: Format & Topic Ideas

- Marc Gauthier tl;dr: “When I started managing the engineering department at my company, I wanted to have an interesting team meeting involving the entire team. My objective at the time was to set up a meeting that people would look forward to, going beyond simple team & company updates. It’s now been a few years since the first, and while not all presentations are a complete success, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.” Marc discusses the meeting format. 

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Let Small Fires Burn

tl;dr: “Humans are bad at judging the absolute value of things. We can't estimate tasks, can't assess what's important, and we're poor predictors of impact. But we’re really good at taking two problems and saying "Yep that one's worse than the other one". You can take this insight and use it to create an ordered list of priorities. Go pair-wise through your fires, swap to put the bigger fire on top, and after n^2 iterations you'll have a stack ranked list of fires from biggest to smallest.”

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Manager Antipatterns

- Ted Neward tl;dr: “There's a whole host of mistakes that companies often fall prey to with respect to those they have leading teams, and I thought it a good idea to collect them into one place, under the umbrella heading of "manager antipatterns”.”

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When To Write Strategy, And How Much?

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will covers: (1) When to write strategy, in particular the pain points (like cross-team friction) and opportunities (like senior hires) that are good moments to start writing. (2) How much strategy your org can tolerate, avoiding the traps of writing so much that it’s ignored or so little that there’s not much impact. (3) Using strategy altitude – how permissive a given strategy is and where it’s implemented – to manage the overhead that strategies creates. (4) Mechanisms to debug whether you’re doing too much or too little strategy work. 

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Manager Antipatterns

- Ted Neward tl;dr: “There's a whole host of mistakes that companies often fall prey to with respect to those they have leading teams, and I thought it a good idea to collect them into one place, under the umbrella heading of "manager antipatterns”.”

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One On One Meeting Format Ideas

- Marc Gauthier tl;dr: “As a manager, doing one on one meetings with your direct reports is your most important tool. I’ve talked a bit before about opening lines, but I figured it could be interesting to dig into how I handle this every week with my teams. I think it’s important to have a clear format shared to direct reports. This frames the conversation and helps the manager fullfil the objective, while giving some insights to the direct report regarding what this is all about.”

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Unlocking CI/CD Efficiency

- Sean Chapman tl;dr: Understanding the impact of each of your deployments is crucial, especially as they become increasingly frequent. Chances are, your team is either aiming to increase shipping velocity or has already started deploying “continuously”. And while CD comes with a host of well-established benefits, it also introduces a heightened risk of introducing new errors and issues. Today, Raygun takes a look at the state of continuous deployment according to survey data, so you can see how you stack up compared to other teams. 

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