Originally posted Jul 15, 2018

You have a solid set of engineers, you’ve embraced OKRs and Agile, you’ve got standups, and you also do Sprint planning and retrospectives. But have you still felt frustrated by your team’s speed of execution? Have you asked yourself, …

One of the toughest challenges I’ve faced while running product teams in the past is knowing which level to engage a team and when. Anyone can easily get caught up in debates about specific product details and unpacking a singular OKR …

This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series Recognitions

I’ve been talking to a lot of people in different layers of the stack during my

David Sacks Jul 1 · 13 min read

Everyone wants to succeed, and for managers, that means leading highly capable teams that deliver excellent results. In order to drive team members to deliver successfully, managers need to identify what those capabilities are and harness …

DEV.BIZ.OPS Aug 13 · 5 min read

As designers, we are often very comfortable in working together using the physical space to our own advantage — critiques, workshops, brainstorming sessions, etc. It’s usually part of our education, and it evolves with our practice and …

One of my favorite “laws” is Conway’s Law, an adage that organizations will design systems that mirror their communication structure. As I’ve long said, “how you work is as important as what you work on”:

I.

My team recently embarked on a journey toward unbundling our part of Gusto’s monolithic Ruby on Rails app.

One good thing that has come out of the recent quarantine is that we’ve begun to explore what’s truly possible when all kinds of teams work from home. Though there have been growing pains for many in-person office jobs, most people have …

Pam Dineva Apr 28, 2016 · 5 min read

Note: With dad-hood I’m doing more lists. They’re easier to write while learning to care for this awesome little farting/burping/pooping/smiling human. Apologies if you’re a fan of the longer posts. I’ll get back to them …

New data show that Americans are suffering from record levels of mental distress.

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A mythology often develops around successful large engineering projects. We celebrate the end results and reflect on the positive steps taken to get there but quickly forget about all the missteps and uncertainty along the way. These …

Over the years, I’ve worked on many important, large-scale projects, from figuring out high level strategy and blue sky products, to overhauling core flows and IA, to implementing design systems from the ground up.

Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.

#### Alexis Lloyd

The Neobiological Revolution, is here. Now’s the time to put lessons from the Digital Revolution to use.

Excellent curated list of gravel bike rides in Colorado (mostly), and beyond.

Villi Iltchev Apr 10 · 4 min read

April 2019

This post is part of Blogging Futures, a collaborative blogchain-based learning adventure exploring how we can reimagine blogging. Feel free to join the conversation!

We’re forgoing our usual format this week to do a deeper dive on signals in a space that’s very close Addressable ideas & the connective tissue of the web

Teams say that they want to be empowered, but when everything is in front of you, it’s really hard to make decisions, defend them, and show how you measure against them.

ALAMOSA — The protesters, about a dozen in all, gathered on June 4 in the intersection of State Avenue and Main Street. Like protesters across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by police, they were demanding police …

As a leader, you often feel short of time. Blocking time for yourself — free of meetings and calls — is vital for boosting your creativity and setting you up in a pro-active mode. Oftentimes great people have their escape; they run …

Most (all?) of our portfolio companies have been working remotely for over three months now. So have we at USV.

A conversation with InVision and Automattic, two organizations with a combined 24 years of office-less work experience

This is a place where you can quickly reference elements from wp-admin. You can use them in your own plugins.

Contents

Monolith by Rene Aigner

In most of the previous companies I have worked with, our goal was to keep empowering teams, yet there was somewhat of a confined matrix around it. So much so, that the teams never truly felt empowered. What we were going to do in the …

We had video calls in science fiction, and we had video conferencing in the 1990s, just as the web was taking off, as a very expensive and impractical tool for big companies. It was proposed as a use case for 3G, which didn’t happen at all, …

Many engineering leaders are finding that remote work in today’s circumstances is causing fatigue. Kids and roommates are home, you may not have a proper desk setup, there’s no commute time to zone out and collect your thoughts, and you …

Editor’s note: We’ve anonymized the interview subject’s identity at his request.

February 3rd 2017

Amazon launched 22 years ago this week.

How are you feeling right now?

Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

@rezendi /

Angela Lashbrook May 19 · 6 min read

By Tom Moon, MFT–

Nowadays there are more opinions on how to develop software than there are firms actually doing the development. Some people call programming a science. Others call it engineering, a craft, or even art. Just as coding’s 70-year history has …

For the past 3 years, I have been running a platform engineering organization. Since that term is vague, where I work it means the software side of infrastructure. Compute platforms like kubernetes, storage systems, software development …

I expect I’ll annoy everyone with this post: the anti-JavaScript crusaders, justly aghast at how much of the stuff we slather onto modern websites; the people arguing the web is a broken platform for interactive applications anyway and we …

Here are the 50 ideas that changed my life.

I thought I was done with the series of articles on the importance of empowered engineers, but then an article came out a few days ago criticizing the Spotify model of Agile at scale, and I could not pass up the opportunity to try to turn …

“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong”

When given the opportunity to establish a process, we’re all biased to advocate for one in which we would be successful ourselves. In hiring, this plays out in two main ways: “A” players build monocultures, hiring people just like them, and …

Gabriel Grinberg Mar 30 · 8 min read