/Management

How To Deliver Bad News When It's Not Your Fault

- Wes Kao tl;dr: “As much as we don’t want to shoot the messenger, we often associate negative feelings with people who tell us bad news. Wes’ principles for delivering bad news are: (1) Avoid negative words, like "however” and “unfortunately.” (2) Avoid giving too many details. (3) Don't accidentally accept blame. (4) Get to your point quickly. (5) Remind the person of their own agency.

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8 Game-Changing Speech AI Apps You Need To Know

- Kelsey Foster tl;dr: More companies are building with Speech AI than ever before, thanks to enhanced accuracy, speed, and accessibility. Discover innovative tools transforming industries—from next-gen meeting note-takers to conversation intelligence solutions. These cutting-edge apps are redefining customer interactions—see what sets them apart.

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Stop Avoiding Conflict On Your Teams

- Doug Turnbull tl;dr: “Can you give some space for everyone to have voice in the conflict? Can you create a space where you set up ground rules for conflict i.e. attacking the problem, not people. Can you maximize also “caring personally” dimension that gives air to the quiet voices? Can you encourage the employees who often come to complain 1-1, but struggle to speak up in group meetings?”

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Measuring Developers' Jobs-To-Be-Done

- Abi Noda tl;dr: “To provide better insights, Google researchers identified the key goals developers are trying to achieve in their work and developed measurements for each goal. In this paper, they explain their process and share an example of how this new approach has benefited their teams.”

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How I Hire Programmers

- Aaron Swartz tl;dr: “But if I had to write down what it is that makes someone seem smart, I’d emphasize three things. First, do they know stuff? Ask them what they’ve been thinking about and probe them about it. Do they seem to understand it in detail? Second, are they curious? Do they reciprocate by asking questions about you? Are they genuinely interested or just being polite? Third, do they learn? At some point in the conversation, you’ll probably be explaining something to them. Do they actually understand it or do they just nod and smile?”

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The Guide To Becoming Enterprise Ready For SaaS Businesses

tl;dr: "Crossing the Enterprise Chasm" is an inevitable transition every B2B SaaS company has to make when they start selling to enterprises. Although it's a necessary step, moving upmarket is fraught with challenges — building enterprise features takes a ton of capital, it requires aggressive prioritizations, and engineers generally don't like building enterprise features. Here's a guide for product and engineering leaders on making their SaaS apps Enterprise Ready.

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Antifragile

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “Failures happen. In engineering we often face a choice between trying to eliminate failures or making our systems handle them more gracefully. Both approaches are important but in my experience fault tolerance is the more valuable. The reason is simple: we can only eliminate failures we can imagine while fault tolerance adds some resilience to failures we could not imagine. I have found the same to be true for groups of people.” Andrew discusses how to implement this in management.

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Some Principles Of Human-Centered Computing

- John Allspaw tl;dr: (1) The Aretha Franklin Principle: Emphasizes valuing both humans and machines in a system, aiming for synergy rather than competition. (2) The Sacagawea Principle: Stresses the importance of computational tools supporting active information management and decision-making processes. (3) The Lewis and Clark Principle: Highlights the need to present guidance to users in a way that aligns with their goals and facilitates comprehension of key decisions.

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The Ruthless Edit

- Jim Nelson tl;dr: So often in design, engineering, or product, you’re faced with this decision: how do we pare down what we have to something that feels like a cohesive whole? “Rick Rubin gives this advice about working in the studio with artists when making an album: Let’s say We’ve recorded twenty-five songs. We think the album is going to have ten. Instead of picking our favorite ten, we limit it to: “What are the five or six we can’t live without?” Then you say: “Ok here are the five or six we can't live without, now what would we add to that which makes it better and not worse?” It puts you in a different frame when you start with building and not removing.” 

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Goodhart's Law In Software Engineering

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: “Goodhart's law is a warning for pointy-haired bosses who up with terrible metrics: lines added, feature points done, etc. I'm more interested in how it affects the metrics we set for ourselves that our bosses might never know about.”

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