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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Kristin Wilson Oct 9 · 6 min read

Matt Cooper Sep 19 · 11 min read

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 …

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 …

Scott Follow

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 …

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

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 …

(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.

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 …

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

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.

Bryan Walsh Aug 16 · 7 min read

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 …

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 …

TLDR; Read how I cope with working remote.

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 …

Alexander Rose Sep 12 · 15 min read

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.

A ballooning spiderMichael Hutchinson

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 …

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 …

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 …

Posted Nov 26, 2013

His complaint offers lessons on how to make a point.

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 …

Joseph Jacks Jul 5, 2018 · 7 min read

Robert Chang Jul 20 · 14 min read

Andy Johns Sep 10 · 12 min read

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 …

Joe Goldberg Sep 6 · 4 min read

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