Practical Ways To Increase Product Velocity
tl;dr: "This post contains my go-to steps for debugging slow product velocity, particularly in SaaS. While I believe that these tactics are generally applicable, they’re heavily informed by my personal background. I have an engineering background and a reasonable sense for when I’m getting bullshitted about how hard something is. I also have a degree of control over both what teams work on and how they work – without that, some techniques may not apply. So while your mileage may vary, I hope that it’s helpful to lay these tactics out in one place."featured in #472
Updated Pricing: 10,000 MAUs Free, And A New “Pro Plan”
- Braden Sidoti tl;dr: Clerk integrates user management UIs and APIs, purpose-built for React, Next.js, and the Modern Web. and are introducing a new, 'simplified pricing structure' for its user management services, offering '10,000 free monthly active users (MAUs)' for every application. This change includes a 'First Day Free' feature, ensuring no charges for users churning within the first day.featured in #472
The Tragedy Of The Common Leader
- James Stanier tl;dr: "The default outlook for middle management is to look up and down the org chart, but not sideways. Because you are so focused on your own team and your own manager, you often forget that you have a peer group at all! That is, until you need something from them. At this point, the underinvestment in your peer group becomes apparent: you have limited rapport and trust with them, and an ask to transfer some of your engineering capacity to them is met with hot flushes and heavy and furious typing." James prompts us to think about these peers, and how we can approach building relationships with them.featured in #472
First Decide How To Decide: “One Weird Trick” For Easier Decisions
- Jacob Kaplan-Moss tl;dr: "The heart of this process – the move that I think makes it work so well – is that it includes an explicit step to first decide how to decide. That is: when a decision appears that it’ll be controversial or difficult to make, instead of immediately starting to discuss the matter at hand, the stakeholders first come to an agreement about how they’ll eventually decide. In fact, this happens twice: first at the macro scale when the organization agrees to adopt this process overall, and then in the micro scale, for each individual decision." Jacob discusses an example.featured in #471
New Engineering Managers Have A High Failure Rate — This Figma Leader Is On A Mission To Fix It
- Marcel Weekes tl;dr: Marcel discusses the context and solutions to three common problems he sees when engineers transition from IC to management roles: (1) The best-suited folks aren’t the ones elevated to management. (2) New managers fall into a spiral that never pulls them out of IC work. (3) Managing former peers can be just plain awkward.featured in #471
Leading Successful Product Teams
- Ariel Salminen tl;dr: “We’ve been operating in a remote first culture so these rules apply in that context.” The first 5 rules are as follows: (1) Avoid meetings as much as possible. Instead of having them, communicate asynchronous to each other via tools such as Linear, GitHub, Figma, Slack, and similar. (2) Provide at least three days of focus time per week for designers and developers in the team. (3) Trust your team to make decisions, they’re the experts. (4) Default to openness. The team should be sharing what they’re doing whenever they can. (5) Define just the right amount of process. Too much process and it will slow down your team and their performance, while not enough will create inconsistency.featured in #470
Ask For Advice, Not Permission
- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: From the CTO at Meta: "One of the most common anti-patterns I see that can create conflict in an otherwise collaborative environment is people asking for permission instead of advice. This is such an insidious practice that it not only sounds reasonable, it actually sounds like the right thing to do: “Hey, I was thinking about doing X, would you be on board with that?”" Andrew argues that the problem with asking for permission is that you’re implicitly asking someone else to take some responsibility for your decision while asking for advice creates advocates for your idea but doesn't saddle them with responsibility.featured in #469
6 Tiny Wording Tweaks To Level Up Your Communication As A Software Engineer
- Jordan Cutler tl;dr: (1) Use “Would you be open to” instead of “Can you” when you want to seem less commanding but still lead to a “yes.” (2) Add “because” to your reasoning or request to strengthen it. (3) Use “can we” instead of “can you” to be more collaborative, particularly in code reviews. (4) Use “What do you think” to assert a suggestion but still leave it open for discussion. (5) Use “It seems like” when the conversation is at a stalemate and you want to call it out directly. Many times this breaks the stalemate. (6) Change the order of your “but” to negate the part you actually want to negate.featured in #469
featured in #468
Open Source Component System For Easy Auth Implementation
tl;dr: AuthKit is a pre-built, customizable sign-in UI hosted by WorkOS and supports a wide array of authentication methods out of the box. It abstracts away all of the complexity associated with building a secure authentication flow. Combined with User Management APIs, which handles all related backend tasks, AuthKit provides a complete auth stack built for devs and enterprises alike.featured in #468