When finishing up a difficult project, I sometimes pause to dream

In collaboration with NEO Culture, Mind the Product conducted a short survey on OKRs investigating their use in product teams in real companies. Now, the results are in.

To leverage the huge unused potential, we need to define the primary role of product managers and their collaboration with development teams quite differently. Product managers should be assigning their teams problems to solve instead of …

#### Sarah Tavel

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Keith Adams worked on kernels at VM Ware. Then virtual machines. Then search performance at Facebook. Then the HHVM implementation of PHP. Then machine

Leading with clarity

It’s here. It happened. Did you notice?

Matt Lane Jun 25, 2020 · 8 min read

#### Annie Duke

Memento mori (Latin ‘remember that you [have to] die’) is an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. – Wikipedia

Originally posted Oct 29, 2020

In 2003, The Harvard Business Review published an article by a consultant named Fred Reichheld, called The One Number You Need to Grow. In this article, Fred described how asking a single question, on a numeric scale, could predict customer …

On the battlefield, any doorway can be a death trap. A special ops vet, and his businessman brother, have built an AI to solve that problem.

Key Point: I was revisiting the now famous set of slides developed by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and then (2012) Netflix chief talent officer, Patty McCord. The Netflix “people philosophy” was posted on the web for anyone to read. Over five …

The Product Hunt engineering team has always been remote and it’s surprisingly small for all the features and products we are shipping. One of our “secret” weapon for this is what we call “collaborative single-player mode”.

October 2020

Pinterest Engineering Oct 23 · 3 min read

I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I’d figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I’m somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of …

The decisions we spend the most time on are rarely the most important ones. Not all decisions need the same process. Sometimes, trying to impose the same process on all decisions leads to difficulty identifying which ones are most …

Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make effective decisions.

You probably believe you’re a decent communicator. You know how to fire off an email or a Slack message; you smile and nod when your colleague is talking; you have a firm handshake (remember those?).

In many organizations today there is one thing that almost always is true: there

We are always under tight deadlines, because time is our most valuable asset.

Naval: What’s considered to be true is fought over. Individuals search for truth but groups search for consensus —and society is the largest group. So the biggest problem we run into is this: What society wants for you is not always what’s …

As I played multiple roles in cross functional teams over years – developer on a small part of the product to leading engineering teams to guidance in a leadership role, I experienced feelings of frustration, anger, disappointment and at …

This essay was co-authored by Rob Litterst and Nathan Baschez

SaaS metrics should be to a management team what patient vital signs are to an emergency room doctor: a simple set of universally understood numbers that allow a doctor to quickly know how ill a patient is and what needs fixing first.

At Amplitude, I facilitate lots of workshops. Many of these workshops center around deciding what to measure. This starts, of course, with asking good questions. Good questions help teams focus their measurement/telemetry efforts, and …

Dropbox has always prioritized creativity and collaboration as key to building a thriving business, and our office spaces were designed for it. Though we make software that helps people work from anywhere, most of our employees came to an …

One element I’ve seen repeatedly is reference to “How did we get lucky in this incident?” It’s an aspect of incidents some like to discuss, because I also hear it in conversations and stories about incidents: “Oh man, we were so lucky that …

Image credit: Olivier Le Moal for iStock

Cindy Sridharan Jul 12 · 9 min read

I joined Stripe four years ago to make starting an Internet business easier, mostly by work on Stripe Atlas. This has been a series of adjustments for me: to working as an employee, to experiencing hypergrowth, to being closer to the …

Hi friend,

Uma Chingunde Oct 3 · 5 min read

As managers, we have to multitask a lot. Switching between meetings, random conversations, one on ones, status updates, planning, presentations all the time. It feels overwhelming and exhausting. Keeping everything organized is the key to …

Brian Armstrong Follow

Before joining Stripe, I had the opportunity to build, grow, and lead the Splice engineering organization for almost four years (yes, still I mix up the names). The most challenging engineering problem I’ve had to tackle so far has been …

As an epigenetic and executive coach to some of the world’s largest technology companies, I have dedicated my career to understanding the biology of belonging and the toxic, pervasive effects of exclusion in the workplace.

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If you have ever come across The Pragmatic Engineer, you probably know the man behind it, Gergely Orosz. More than a simple blog, or newsletter, it is a treasure trove of knowledge on the ins and outs of Engineering, Engineering Management …

Camille Fournier Sep 22 · 5 min read

Jason Smale Dec 27, 2019 · 14 min read

Photo by Brian Scott on Unsplash

Update: An interesting discussion around this started in hacker news

A study based on 770 people over six months analyzed which sets of traits are more effective at different levels of remoteness, thus helping us answering the question of what are the differences between remote leads and in-person leads that …

There is an expansive universe of SaaS metrics out there. Which is great for tracking performance internally, as it allows a company to customize metrics to reflect its operating realities. But what if you want to compare performance …

The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a …

This twitter thread seemed to strike a chord with people, rather astonishingly so. I am transcribing parts of it for the sake of longevity and findability.

Since Shape Up came out, many people asked some version of this question:

From Standing Rock to Syria, drones are being used to hold the powerful to account. Let’s keep it that way.

Richard MacManus had an interesting email exchange with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress and co-founder/CEO of Automattic, about the Jamstack. It resulted in an Aug 31, 2020, writeup in TheNewStack. I have a deep appreciation for Matt’s …

In 2016 I was leading supply growth with four subteams totaling 35 people, which was a pretty large scope. As a part of a reorganization, I was asked to join a much smaller team of only a PM and one and a half engineer (one person being …

I follow you on Twitter and read your blog. I particularly enjoy this post: https://charity.wtf/2019/05/01/friday-deploy-freezes-are-exactly-like-murdering-puppies / I’m reaching out looking for some guidance.

I’ve been thinking recently about anti-racism and what it looks like to support

Stephen Olmstead is the Chief of Staff at the fully remote company inVision, the well-known digital product design platform. As the right-hand to the inVision CEO he takes part in a lot of parts of a well-working fully distributed …

Strong in-person leadership skills don’t necessarily translate to being a good virtual leader. Instead, organisation and competency reign supreme. F

I wrote a piece this week about what motivates people to become managers (tldr mostly org dysfunction), and Julian Dunn replied with some typically insightful tweets:

This week we uncovered an assorted collection of signals that focus on how randomness can be used to Useful randomness & how we play

Photography is a hobby for me. As a novice photographer, I believed the camera makes the photo. Whenever I met a fellow hobby photographer, I would discuss things related to photography, but mostly would gravitate to cameras. That was until …

“The two pizza team” paradigm has become really popular in the context of organizing software teams. The idea is to have small, self-reliant teams working independently to solve problems. The “two-pizza” refers to the guidance to keep the …

It may not be instinctual to link director Christopher Nolan and Looker founder Lloyd Tabb, but the two might view the world through a shared lens. A serial entrepreneur, Tabb has assembled development teams for his startups by classifying …

Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or so they thought) re-configuration of …

Skydio Jul 13 · 3 min read