This Japanese Toaster Costs $270. It Only Makes One Slice at a Time

Perfectly made toast isn’t just an obsession in Japan. It’s a business opportunity.

Over the past few years, there’s been a quiet boom in the pursuit of expertly reheated bread, from high-end toasters and premium loaves, to cafes catering to connoisseurs seeking that satisfying crunch.

Joining the fray is the next best thing for sliced bread, a toaster designed for just one task: making a single piece of toast, flawlessly. Made by Mitsubishi Electric Corp., better known for its workaday refrigerators and rice cookers, the Bread Oven hit store shelves last month, retailing for about 29,000 to 30,000 yen ($270). While that might seem expensive, Japanese consumers are already used to paying top price for toasters; the popular Balmuda, which debuted a few years ago , sold for about $230.

Make Great Decisions Quickly With TOMASP

As technical leaders and managers, our job is to make the right decision most of the time. Hiring, firing, technology choices, software architecture, and project prioritization are examples of high impact decisions that we need to make right if our teams are to be successful.

This is hard. As humans, we’re naturally bad at making those types of decisions. I’ll show you how you can consistently make great decisions quickly using a simple framework called TOMASP. I made up the acronym for the purpose of this blog post but it’s inspired from many great books (see resources) as well as my personal experience of leading engineering teams for almost 15 years.

Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects

I hear more voices saying there is little point in doing time-based estimations on how long building software will take, and thus we should just stop doing it. “Let’s just use story points and estimate complexity, but not the time” and “Let’s just try #noestimates” are suggestions people around me recently brought up. I’m personally skeptical of both approaches. While I do think that doing time-based estimates is really hard, it comes with so many benefits for those who keep doing it.

SLOs Are the API for Your Engineering Team

Key Takeaways

• Establish a perimeter: SLOs give you the ability to push back when demands from other parties exceed your capacity to deliver what the business has deemed most important.
• Reach agreement faster: SLOs make interacting with other members of the organization more effective and less unpredictable because all parties have already signed off on the goal.
• Focus on what matters: SLOs mean the arguing can stop. Everyone knows what’s at stake and can make good decisions based on real data without having to waste time debating priorities.
• Drive production excellence: SLOs offer leverage and autonomy to invest in your team’s ability to meet the agreed-upon goals.
• The knob goes both ways: SLOs help you realize when it’s time to tinker and time to hunker (down) and focus on greater resilience.

If your job involves direct leadership of engineering teams, managing how and what they deliver, you’ve surely come across situations where the pressure to deliver features won out and led to poor service reliability. You’ve probably had your team’s workflow disrupted by interference from senior managers about minor individual issues. Or, you’ve seen or heard execs questioning your team’s planned work to reduce technical debt or improve your delivery processes.

Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It’s pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn’t let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

Moving Past Shallow Incident Data

Here is some data: the last incident your company experienced lasted 54 minutes. What insight does this data reveal besides a) an incident happened, and b) it lasted 54 minutes (at least according to someone interpreting an event as an incident)?

What else could we glean from this data? Hrm. What if we found that someone marked down when this incident was “detected”? Now we have more data!

What You Need to Know About Continuous Integration

The most popular software applications on the planet have a few things in common. They solve a real problem, they’re (usually) easy to use, and they offer a best-in-class customer experience. Sounds simple, right? Even if you’re just starting your career, you probably know that the opposite is true. In most cases, the “best” apps are often sophisticated projects that require ongoing testing and software updates.

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours

Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn . At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and none of them had to do with Dropbox: I learned, for instance, that a great way to get people to click on your blog post is to make them mad. I also learned about a company called Social Capital, after my soon-to-be-colleague Ray reached out to me about what I’d written. I’m certainly thankful I wrote it.

WeWork Is The Past. This Is What The Future Of Co-Working Will Be.

Top highlight

Welcome to the beginning of the end for traditional office leasing.

Kristin Wilson Oct 9 · 6 min read

Photo by Tom Parkes on Unsplash

WeWork rode its reputation as an “innovative” tech company all the way to a $47 billion valuation in August, only to crash weeks later in spectacular fashion. Yet, while Adam Neumann’s downfall makes for a good headline, contemplating the company’s next move is a waste a time.

How We Run Skillshare

Matt Cooper Sep 19 · 11 min read

The Skillshare team in a recent design sprint

I have the opportunity to meet with other CEOs on a pretty frequent basis. I’m part of a CEO group in NYC that meets monthly for breakfast, attend a few other networking groups that meet several times a year, and each of our investors has an annual portfolio company meeting. A consistent topic of discussion and sharing of best practices is the cadence of how we run the business — annual/quarterly/monthly routines, planning, communications, check-ins, goal setting, etc.

Death, Injuries and an Amputation: Is ‘Resident Evil’ Hollywood’s Most Dangerous Franchise?

Stuntwoman Olivia Jackson nearly died on the set of 2016’s ‘The Final Chapter.’ Her colleague was killed. And over the course of the billion-dollar series, many others have been injured. What happened — and who might pay for it?

It was raining on the day of the shoot. That morning, Sept. 5, 2015, Olivia Jackson mucked around on the lonely stretch of road outside Pretoria, South Africa, where Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was filming. None of the other crewmembers, decked in gum boots and rain jackets, seemed to think they would be shooting that day. Jackson, a 34-year-old veteran stunt performer, had been scheduled to film a fight scene. Instead, at the last minute, she learned that she’d be doing a tricky stunt on a motorcycle.

A forty year career.

The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains , but either way they are absolutely the protagonists. (Although, perhaps the role of protagonist is expanding a bit .) Working within the industry, I’ve worked with quite a few non-protagonists who experience their time in technology differently: a period of obligatory toil required to pry open the gate to the American Dream .

Writing Docs at Amazon

Scott Follow

Feb 10 · 8 min read

Recently, Ben Bashaw published a good article about the way that Amazon (almost uniquely) uses written documents to make decisions. This was posted to Hacker News and a lively discussion ensued. While I was at Amazon, I wrote or contributed to dozens of documents that were presented to Jeff Bezos. In the HN discussion, I was asked for some clarity on the do’s and don’ts of these documents, so I figured I’d write something up in longer form than a comment.

Building a First Team Mindset – Jason Wong’s Blog

Imagine a world where you bring together the top leaders in your organization to solve the company’s most pressing challenges, and, instead of coming together as a core group to solve that problem, they approach the exercise as a collection of factions that are more concerned about their and their team’s self interest than solving the company’s needs. It sounds tragic, but also probably like another day at work for a lot of folks, and it’s why I spend a lot of time building a First Team mindset amongst the leaders in my organization.

Compensation for remote employees

If you can employ anyone, from anywhere, what should you pay them? What is fair?

There are a few ways to go about this: You pay everyone the same, independent of location; You pay people according to local rates; or you make up your own scheme.

TL;DR: Pay well to hire great people

What companies are doing today

Companies that do not hire remotely, tend to pay local rates. They are competing for talent directly with other local companies, and have to adjust rates to be able to hire great people.

Context over control: the future of remote work

Lately, I’ve been reading quite a lot of reports on the state and the future of remote work. While I think it’s great to finally see some open resources about what still looks a very underexplored field, I couldn’t find any unique insights or anything more interesting than some generalized polls or surveys. Yet I think we still know very little about this subject and there’s a lot to be uncovered in terms of strategies, frameworks, and models. This write-up (and more generally this blog) is an attempt to provide insights and more qualitative thinking on such topics.

Microsoft’s LinkedIn loses appeal over access to user profiles

(Reuters) – A federal appeals court on Monday rejected LinkedIn’s effort to stop a San Francisco company from using information that users of the professional networking website have deemed public.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals let stand an August 2017 preliminary injunction that required LinkedIn, a Microsoft Corp unit with more than 645 million members, to give hiQ Labs Inc access to publicly available member profiles.

Why you shouldn’t use pie charts – Tips for better data visualization

I was talking to a colleague the other day who told me about a conversation they just had with a customer. The customer had asked “Why can’t I create pie charts in Funnel?” and my colleague’s response, jokingly, was “Our product team really doesn’t like pie charts”. While it’s true most of us are no huge fans of pie charts, the reason we haven’t invested in supporting a pie charting option is because we believe they are rarely a good fit for the problem they’re intended to solve.

How to Design Your Office for Improved Productivity and Purpose

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.
–Robert L. Peters

When’s the last time you thought about office design? Would you be proud to show your office to family and friends? Are you comfortable in your workplace?

The average full-time employee works 1,800 hours per year, most of which are likely in an office. Here at Bonusly, we recently redesigned our headquarters, which got us thinking about how our space impacts the team. That meant adjustable desks, modern chairs, updated layouts, and new technology. And it all started when we asked ourselves, “How can we design our office for productivity and purpose?” Now we’re sharing our lessons with you!

The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite

This article is by Lenny Rachitsky , a former product lead and head of consumer supply growth at Airbnb, and Nels Gilbreth , former Head of Global Revenue Strategy at Eventbrite.

It’s almost the end of Q3, which means annual (and quarterly) planning is just around the corner. If you’re like most people, this sentence just filled you with dread.

Could Climate Change Really End the World?

End Times

Species are going extinct and the climate is warming rapidly — yet at least materially, humans are doing better than ever. Welcome to the environmentalist’s paradox.

Bryan Walsh Aug 16 · 7 min read

Photo: Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images

Asteroids, supervolcanoes, nuclear war, climate change, engineered viruses, artificial intelligence, and even aliens — the end may be closer than you think. For the next two weeks, OneZero will be featuring essays drawn from editor Bryan Walsh’s forthcoming book End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World , which hits shelves on August 27 and is available for pre-order now , as well as pieces by other experts in the burgeoning field of existential risk. But we’re not helpless. It’s up to us to postpone the apocalypse.

New Productivity — Benedict Evans

We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups – there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of these things are unbundling and rebundling spreadsheets, email and file shares. Instead of a flat grid of cells, a dumb list of files, and a dumb list of little text files (which is what email really is), we get some kind of richer canvas that mixes all of these together in ways that are native to the web and collaboration.

The Single Most Important Internal Email in the History of Amazon

I never planned to do a series of articles, but this write-up almost came as a natural follow-up to the post I wrote last week about Context over Control and the future of remote work . Last week I explored the ground rules of the future of work. Specifically, I talked about how and why the fundamental prerequisites of work have changed. Here I’m taking a step further and describing some of the literature behind today’s organizations’ communication systems. What they’re made of, why they can be so impactful in today’s organizations, and how they’re related to the concept of remote working.

Five years of home office – a recap

TLDR; Read how I cope with working remote.

As it is en-vogue nowadays to talk about remote working and one’s

experiences, I thought I am gonna join the flock.

This does not mean that this resembles anyone else’s experiences, but I

still think there are some tidbits worth sharing in here.

I joined Elastic five years ago without any prior

experience in remote working.

Howard Gardner on Influence

As I continue to think further about influence and power , Howard Gardner’s Changing Minds offers an extremely helpful conceptual framework, one that I see as a counterpart to Robert Cialdini’s “Weapons of Influence” (discussed at length in Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion .) From Gardner’s 2006 edition:

[W]hat…factors might cause an individual to shift his or her perspective[?]… I have identified seven factors–sometimes I’ll call them levers–that could be at work in these and all cases of a change of mind…

(more…)

Long-term Building in Japan

Japan’s Ise Shrine and Hōryū-ji Temple offer lessons in how to make a building, or an institution, last through millennia

Alexander Rose Sep 12 · 15 min read

The Ise Shrine in Japan, which has been rebuilt every 20 years for over 1,400 years.

When I started working with Stewart Brand over two decades ago, he told me about the ideas behind Long Now, and how we might build the seed for a very long-lived institution. One of the first examples he mentioned to me was Ise Shrine in Japan, which has been rebuilt every 20 years in adjacent sites for over 1,400 years. This shrine is made of ephemeral materials like wood and thatch, but its symbiotic relationship with the Shinto belief and craftsmen has kept a version of the temple standing since 692 CE. Over these past decades many of us at Long Now have conjured these temples as an example of long-term thinking, but it had not occurred to me that I might one day visit them.

ARPA: A Framework Alternative to the RACI Model

One thing high-performance teams do well is distribute authority — they have a clear system that specifies how decisions are made, and it enables the team to move quickly.

Does making a small copy change require approval from five people? Or do processes exist that empower a single person to make a change and ship it? While it seems clear that a single person should make such a change, it’s tougher than you’d think to design a company that operates this way at scale. Why is that?

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity

A ballooning spiderMichael Hutchinson

On October 31, 1832, a young naturalist named Charles Darwin walked onto the deck of the HMS Beagle and realized that the ship had been boarded by thousands of intruders. Tiny red spiders, each a millimeter wide, were everywhere. The ship was 60 miles offshore, so the creatures must have floated over from the Argentinian mainland. “All the ropes were coated and fringed with gossamer web,” Darwin wrote .

A good onboarding experience for new hires requires two key things

In my time as a manger, I’ve encountered quite a few people who were badly onboarded. As a rule it takes as long a time or longer to fix it as it took to poorly onboard them. Sometimes we’re able to re-onboard people and make them successful… and sometimes it’s too late.

It’s always baffling to me when companies do all the work to hire someone and then don’t set them up to be successful. Hiring is so time consuming. Managing people who are not delivering in their role is time consuming, too, not to mention emotionally draining. Onboarding people and helping them to be effective is—by far—the easiest option.

Leadership, Decision-Making and Emotion Management

Jurgen Appelo is an innovative management thinker whose work I admire, and his 7 Levels of Delegation is a framework that I often recommend to clients to help them determine how to allocate authority and decision-making power between themselves and their team. As useful as this conceptual model can be, its effective implementation by a leader also requires skillful emotion management at multiple levels: internally, interpersonally, and across the organization as a whole.

Essential Meetings to Have With Your People as a Manager

When I first started managing, I had no idea what meetings I was supposed to conduct with my staff to help them grow. In part because I was at a smaller organization and we were inventing processes on the fly and also because I did not have a manager who conducted or introduced me to these meetings. I learned about these meetings through years of experience, peers in other organizations, networking, mentors, and reading. A lot of reading!

The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout … Do You Have Them?

The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout … Do You Have Them?

Running out of gas? Recognizing the signs of burnout before it’s too late

Posted Nov 26, 2013

Burnout is one of those road hazards in life that high-achievers really should keep a close eye out for, but sadly—often because of their “I can do everything” personalities—they rarely see it coming. Because high-achievers are often so passionate about what they do, they tend to ignore the fact that they’re working exceptionally long hours, taking on exceedingly heavy workloads, and putting enormous pressure on themselves to excel—all of which make them ripe for burnout.

Opinion | The Whistle-Blower Knows How to Write

The Whistle-Blower’s Guide to Writing

His complaint offers lessons on how to make a point.

Ms. Rosenzweig is the director of the Writing Center at Harvard.

Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, holding a marked-up copy of the whistle-blower complaint.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

I can’t tell you what’s going to happen to his blockbuster complaint about the president’s behavior, but I can tell you that the whistle-blower’s college writing instructor would be very proud of him.

A Mental Model For Prioritizing Your Startup’s Energies

I’ve playing with a new mental model for early-stage startups: a pendulum. This pendulum oscillates between the limiting factors of the business at different stages. There only two limiting factors in this mental model: product and go to market.

At the moment a startup is founded, the business is product limited. You can’t do much without a product. After the company establishes product market fit, the pendulum swings to go-to-market.

#2: Open Core —Definition, Examples & Tradeoffs

Joseph Jacks Jul 5, 2018 · 7 min read

In this post, we will explore the following:

• What is open core?
• How is it implemented?
• Where are examples?
• When should it be used?

Visual representation of the open core business model 😅

Data overwhelmingly shows that open core (OC) is the dominant business model used by the most successful COSS companies.

OC is the most misunderstood and polarizing business model implemented by COSS companies.

How I Build Learning Projects — Part I

A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up For A Lot of Y-Intercept

Robert Chang Jul 20 · 14 min read

Image credit : When was the last time that you built a learning project?

Motivation

Recently, I came across a blog post written by Simon Hørup Eskildsen on how he approaches reading. It was an inspiring read because I did not know anyone this deliberate about the pursuit of reading. This kind of meticulous, thoughtful, system-level design thinking reminds me of Ray Dalio’s Principle :

What Makes For a Good Product Manager?

Andy Johns Sep 10 · 12 min read

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked on product at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront, and have advised dozens of other companies on the role of growth and product. Now, as an investor at Unusual Ventures , I get exposure to an even broader collection of companies, and the product cultures within them. Despite that exposure, there is a lot about the role of product that I still don’t understand. But what I can say for sure is that there are as many philosophies on the role of a product manager (PM) as there are letters in the alphabet. And we’re nowhere near getting to a point of agreement on the basic question of, “What makes for a great product manager?”

The Product-Minded Software Engineer

Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They’re someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide to give up the joy of engineering. I’ve worked with many great product-minded engineers and consider myself to be this kind of developer. At companies building world-class products, product-minded engineers take teams to a new level of impact.

From inbox-zero to todo-list-zero (for managers)

Joe Goldberg Sep 6 · 4 min read

The most Type-A calendar you’ll ever see

[Preamble to software engineers or anyone else on maker-time : you keep doing you, the following might sound absurdly overengineered. I wrote this article with managers in mind]

Inbox-Zero

I have a confession to make: I’m the type of person who gets to inbox-zero daily. I sheepishly admit this, because in a world where busy equals productive , it almost seems like a…