The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness

Darius Foroux Oct 3, 2016

For the longest time, I believed that there’s only purpose of life: And that is to be happy.

Right? Why else go through all the pain and hardship? It’s to achieve happiness in some way.

And I’m not the only person who believed that. In fact, if you look around you, most people are pursuing happiness in their lives.

Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write

The exemplary manager is often shown as the outgoing guy that gives his team pep talks and high fives. In truth, though, that stereotype couldn’t be farther from the truth.

To three highly effective, seasoned, and successful executives, being a good talker isn’t just overvalued, it can actually be detrimental. Rather, there’s a subtle, often-overlooked ability that’s one of the most vital skills you can have as a manager — the ability to write.

How many reports should a manager have?

A few months back I was running down the San Francisco Bay, looking out over the dry docks and concrete factories, pondering organization structures… as you do.

I was wrestling with two pieces of seemingly contradictory management advice:

1. In order to optimize communication structures, particularly in fast paced environments, organizations should remain as flat as possible.
2. Managers shouldn’t have too many reports, if you want them to be able to adequately support their team.

Having worked in a range of different sized organizations the first piece of advice intuitively resonated. As you add layers of hierarchy, coordination becomes more complex and information gaps start to emerge. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “Iceberg of Ignorance”, where executives only see 4% of the problems experienced by front-line staff. So, aiming to reduce hierarchy where possible made sense.

How to 10x Your Own Productivity as a Manager through Writing

Managing a team is all about communication.

Contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t just mean holding meetings or updating Kanban boards. It means mobilizing others, transferring important concepts, and inspiring your team to do great things using the tools you have.

The problem of communication is also a “one-degree” problem. Get it off by just a little bit, and your team can end up in the completely wrong destination.

The Seductive Diversion of ‘Solving’ Bias in Artificial Intelligence

Co-authored with Helen Nissenbaum

The rise of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook as the world’s most valuable companies has been accompanied by two linked narratives about technology. One is about artificial intelligence — the golden promise and hard sell of these companies. A.I. is presented as a potent, pervasive, unstoppable force to solve our biggest problems, even though it’s essentially just about finding patterns in vast quantities of data. The second story is that A.I. has a problem: bias.

Building Distributed Engineering Teams

Building Distributed Engineering Teams

Bruno Miranda Nov 26

If you are only willing to look at candidates within San Francisco you are making your job 1,000 times harder from day one.With 860 thousand people in San Francisco, 326 million people in the United States, and over 1 billion people on the western hemisphere, there are massive upsides to having a distributed team.

In the next few paragraphs, I hope to share some lessons I’ve learned over the past twelve years building distributed engineering teams.

Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing – aka RFCs

I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most “aha!” moments is the one on how the planning process for engineering has worked since the early years of Uber.

Why Employee Onboarding is Holding Back Your Team, and How to Get it Right

Eric Jorgenson Apr 6, 2015

Evergreen is a weekly collection of links to the best learning resources in business, collected by a group of managers, founders, and investors. We contribute resources about one topic each week, which are synthesized and shared in this Weekly Edition. The aim is to learn more efficiently through increased context and focus. Join here to receive the next Edition of Evergreen Business Weekly.

The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps are trying to reinvent our workday

Microsoft’s vision for work is alive and well. An advertisement for Word for Windows 2.0 from 1991. (Microsoft Image)

Microsoft, more than any other institution on earth, has shaped how we work and how we think about it. If you spend your days in an office (and often if you don’t) everything you do is structured around a model that Microsoft popularized: E-mails in Outlook. Documents in Word. Numbers and project management in Excel. And presentations in PowerPoint. Like it or not, you live and breathe Microsoft’s vision of work.

Design process for the messy in-between » cog & sprocket

Stripe’s Will Larson on Designing a Performance Management System from Scratch

“In Engineering, we tend to hold this idea that these people systems—career ladders, performance reviews, calibration—are these evil things that aren’t very valuable. They’re thought of as bureaucracy. But it’s a shame. These are really powerful systems, and I’m actually excited to personally spend a lot of time with them.”

Will Larson, who was previously an engineering leader at Digg and then Uber, now leads Foundation Engineering at Stripe. His organization partners with Infrastructure, Data, and Developer Productivity teams to build the tools that support every Stripe engineer and keep Stripe reliable and performant.

Climate change clobbers Colorado and the West, unfurling fire, drought, insects and heat

• December 1, 2018 at 6:00 am

• Categories:

  Colorado News, Environment, Latest News, News

The devastation from the Fourmile Canyon Fire, years after in Sunshine Canyon west of Boulder, are still visible on Nov. 28, 2018 in Boulder. A recent climate change study shows that wildfires will be worse and more frequent because of climate change. Urban areas in Colorado continue to grow, and more of the population is moving into areas at high risk for wildfires.

The Digital Maginot Line

There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality. The conflict is still being processed as a series of individual skirmishes – a collection of disparate, localized, truth-in-narrative problems – but these battles are connected. The campaigns are often perceived as organic online chaos driven by emergent, bottom-up amateur actions when a substantial amount is, in fact, helped along or instigated by systematic, top-down institutional and state actions. This is a kind of warm war; not the active, declared, open conflict of a hot war, but beyond the shadowboxing of a cold one.

Takeaways from High Output Management book

High output management

05 November 2018

Earlier this year I read High Output Management. This is one of the best books I’ve read on leadership, and I really recommend you read it. Some of the things I took from it are here.

It’s really excellent on what the important things are when running a large team or business. Andy Grove was co-founder and CEO of Intel, so it’s written by someone who was actually doing the work at the time, unlike lots of other management books.

The Tools Every Product Manager Needs To Be Successful

A successful product manager can’t rely on their mind alone.

It’s essential you have the right tools to navigate the various complexities of the job and stay connected with your team.

As a PM, your duties encompass quite a few different elements such as coming up with ideas, selling them, ensuring they’re executed, and monitoring their success. You can’t manage that execution with a three-ring binder and hand-drawn frameworks. So use the variety of tools available today to make your work easier.

Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium

Busy and Bored: Two Sides of the Same Coin | Conscious Leadership Group Blog

When I ask leaders how they’re doing, the number one response I get is some version of “I’m busy.” I might hear: “I’m swamped,” or “I’m overwhelmed,” or “I’m stressed.” They might sigh with visibly tight or slumping shoulders, or say “great, move on, let’s get to coaching. I’ve got a lot to do.”

Whenever I hear this response, or feel this energy, regardless of the words spoken, I have a pretty good hunch the leader is below the line. Specifically, they’re experiencing a scarcity of time (Commitment #12) and a sense of a loss of control (Commitment #11). I imagine that most of you can relate to believing you don’t have enough time. This is why we say that most people (and leaders) spend most of their time below the line.

What are your career goals? What to do when you don’t know

You: “So what are your career goals?” “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” “What job would you love to grow into?” Them: * Blank Stare *

What’s a manager to do?!?

In my hundreds of conversations with managers in building Lighthouse, one of the common questions I’ve heard is that you don’t know what to do when your team member doesn’t have a clear answer in mind on their goals. (Ed. Note: If someone is ready for the conversation, this post on having a great goals discussion will help.)

New in Basecamp: See where projects really stand with the Hill Chart

For years we’ve used Basecamp To-Dos to track all of our design and programming work here at Basecamp. They help us make sure that nothing slips through the cracks.

However, for some projects, tracking to-dos isn’t enough. When you have dozens or hundreds of tasks, you need a way to see the bigger picture. Is the project going to be done on time? Are we making progress on the right tasks? Which things need to be solved now and what can be deferred until later?

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

Superintelligence

The Idea That Eats Smart People

In 1945, as American physicists were preparing to test the atomic bomb, it occurred to someone to ask if such a test could set the atmosphere on fire.

This was a legitimate concern. Nitrogen, which makes up most of the atmosphere, is not energetically stable. Smush two nitrogen atoms together hard enough and they will combine into an atom of magnesium, an alpha particle, and release a whole lot of energy:

Roadmap Course Lesson 5 –

When you move to a theme-based roadmap, you shift from a feature-driven mindset (“What feature should we build next?”) to a problem-solving mindset (“What is the best way to solve this problem?”).

So how do you get a feature-driven company (or a feature-driven boss) onboard with your new, flexible framework? Show up to meetings with two documents: your roadmap and your release plan.

This prepares you for two separate conversations: a tactical one around your release plan and a strategic one around the product roadmap.

Roadmap Course Lesson 4 –

Today’s lesson is pretty short. So far we’ve been talking about the importance of communicating themes and ideas – but when do you finally plug them into a release plan?

The answer is: Just a few weeks ahead of the release itself.

Remember that the benefit of working with a theme-based roadmap is that you don’t have to plan features ahead of time. You don’t have to be stuck with dependencies. You don’t have to set a plan months in advance.

I hate manager READMEs – Camille Fournier – Medium

I got feisty on twitter today and wrote up some tweets on manager READMEs, a recent hot trend in management. Let’s break them down:

Dropping f-bombs is one of my “quirks”

Well, what can I say, I’m sick of this trend. I’ve been a skeptic from day one, but what pushed me over the edge was watching one of my senior engineer friends react to this article on the concept. It mirrored the loathing I’ve heard from several senior engineers as well as the general negative reaction most managers in my trusted circle have about the concept. But we’ve got a lot of people trying to popularize the idea, so enough’s enough, and today I’m willing to be the critic to this well-intended exercise.

The ‘Geno-Economists’ Say DNA Can Predict Our Chances of Success

NOV. 16, 2018

Critics counter that their methods are naïve, offensive or both, but all agree: Either way, multigene testing will lead to a social upheaval.

The Tech And Design Issue

Critics counter that their methods are naïve, offensive or both, but all agree: Either way, multigene testing will lead to a social upheaval.

By JACOB WARDNOV. 16, 2018

How much money are you wired for?

Roadmap Course Lesson 3 –

The “trust me on this” attitude is no way to communicate the future of your product, and yet this is how a lot of companies still declare product decisions.

What you should be communicating – and what your teams would really like to know – is “WHY?”

Why are we working on this? What’s coming up next? Why are we doing this thing first and not the other thing? What should we tell the customers?

(more…)

Roadmap Course Lesson 2 –

Today, we’re looking into what themes are for and how to use them for your roadmap.

Leading product consultant Jared Spool calls themes, “a promise to solve problems, not build features.” As Spool suggests, themes are a way for you to set high-level initiatives you plan to address on your roadmap without committing to a solution ahead of time. It gives you time and flexibility to consider a problem from different angles and discover what is really required to solve it.

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

An 72-meter ice core drilled in the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps entombs more than 2000 years of fallout from volcanoes, storms, and human pollution.

NICOLE SPAULDING/CCI FROM C. P. LOVELUCK ET AL., ANTIQUITY 10.15184, 4, 2018

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he’s got an answer: “536.” Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, “It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

The four layers of communication in a functional team

Functional teams have four layers of communication:

1. A mission (also known as a vision)
2. Strategy (made up of proximate objectives)
3. Tactics and process
4. Execution

This list might seem like it includes categories of action—it does. But it’s not just doing these things, but also communicating them that ties teams together. Communicating the items on this list plays a major role in scaling teams and leaders. With these things in place and communicated, it’s much easier to add people to a team, and then entire teams to an organization.

Empowered Product Teams

Note: This is the narrative article version of a talk I’ve started giving recently at conferences, product meetups and corporate leadership teams. It is a long read, but I believe it’s a critically important topic, and it lays out for people many of the topics I will be writing more about in the coming months.

Introduction

The main topic of my work, and the central topic in my book INSPIRED, is product discovery.

A silent meeting is worth a thousand words

Picture this: a room full of senior Square leads, gathered for an important review meeting. Everyone is looking at their computer, in complete silence, interrupted by bursts of clickety clack. 30 minutes later, the conversation starts.

What is going on? Is everyone waiting for the meeting to start? Are they practicing some form of silent retreat microdosing?

It turns out, this is simply how we work. Alyssa Henry, our VP of Seller, popularized at Square a modified version of this practice from Amazon. In a nutshell: the group in the meeting reviews a Google Doc in silence, asking and answering questions via Google Doc comments. After 30 minutes of this, we’ve identified key points that need to be discussed in person, and can then have a short, focused conversation. More importantly, we’ve given everyone a chance to be heard. As she says below, we’re building a culture where thoughts can be voiced (or written as the case may be) without worrying about someone talking over you.

Nondeterministic Software for the Rest of Us (Slides)

A talk given at BuildStuff 2018 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Classically-trained (if you can call it that) software engineers are used to clear problem statements and clear success and acceptance criteria. Need a mobile front-end for your blog? Sure! Support instant messaging for a million concurrent users? No problem! Store and serve 50TB of JSON blobs? Presto!

Unfortunately, it turns out modern software often includes challenges that we have a hard time with: those without clear criteria for correctness, no easy way to measure performance and success is about more than green dashboards. Your blog platform better have a spam filter, your instant messaging service has to have search, and your blobs will inevitably be fed into some data scientist’s crazy contraption.

The Storm. The Mountain. Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare.

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.”

—Ecclesiastes 7:4

It’s the second Wednesday of May in 2018, and more than 1,000 students, alumni, parents, and faculty affiliated with Oregon Episcopal School—a small private academy on a beautiful hilly campus in southwest Portland—have gathered at the base of a bell tower. Today is the 32nd annual Mount Hood Climb Service Day, and Melissa Robinson, the middle school chaplain, is offering a benediction.

Continuous Alignment of Product Management – Ross Mayfield – Medium

There’s a startup product metaphor that bugs me. Your product is a rocket, and if your targeting at launch is 1% off — you miss the moon by 4,000 miles! The thing is products, rockets and targeting don’t work that way. I have resorted to a cartoon to explain:

In Products are Conversations I explained that great products come from conversations with customers and internal stakeholders. In this post, I’ll suggest how you can improve the Product Management process of Continuous Alignment with internal stakeholders towards envisioned outcomes.

Orange Skin, Thick Bones, and All the Other Ways the Human Body Could Change on Mars

Going to Mars will change us — and not just in a touchy-feely, metaphysical way.

Over time, we should expect a fair bit of evolutionary divergence between Mars settlers and the human population on Earth, according to Rice University biologist Scott Solomon, who examined this possibility in his 2016 book Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution. That divergence will start unspooling at the outset, thanks to something called “the founder effect.” No matter how or when it happens, the Red Planet will be settled by a relatively small group of people who are not perfectly representative of the entire human population. For example, it’s a pretty safe bet that Mars pioneers will be atypically adventurous and risk-tolerant. That means, Muskton — the odds are decent that the first Red Planet burg will be named after SpaceX’s CEO — will likely feature more rock-climbing gyms and bordellos per capita than cities here on Earth.

A weird but cool combination of Jeff Bezos and aging studies that will make you think differently about (learning and) aging.

A Netflix Web Performance Case Study – Dev Channel – Medium

Improving Time-To-Interactive for Netflix.com on Desktop

tl;dr: There are no silver bullets to web performance. Simple static pages benefit from being server-rendered with minimal JavaScript. Libraries can provide great value for complex pages when used with care.

Netflix is one of the most popular video streaming services. Since launching globally in 2016, the company has found that many new users are not only signing up on mobile devices but are also using less-than-ideal connections to do so.

You’re Not Managing a Team of Software Engineers, You’re Managing a Team of Writers

I once asked an engineer who I greatly admired, how he started building the system that he (successfully) submitted for his PhD. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but probably something about careful structural design, some deep thinking about architecture, maybe some blinding insight.

Instead, he said, “I started pulling on threads”, which really took me by surprise. It was such a casual admission that he had been finding the system rather than building from a detailed plan. But I also felt a recognition: it just sounded right. It matched how I had been building my own systems up to then, but not really admitting it. I made plans, sketched some architecture, and then started pulling on threads of ideas to begin to find out what the system wanted to be.

I Know the Salaries of Thousands of Tech Employees – Power Trip – Medium

I’m a software engineer with three years of experience, working at Square, a public tech company in San Francisco. I make $130,000, plus $47,500 in stock, for a total of $177,500 a year.

I didn’t negotiate my base salary. I did, however, negotiate my four-year initial stock grant from $150,000 to $190,000. I started my job on February 5. The current value of that grant, which fluctuates by the day, is $412,390.02. If this stock price stays the same until I vest my first year of stock, my “real” annual compensation will be $233,097.51.

Upscale Food and Gear Bring Campsite Cooking Out of the Wild

The chefs John Griffiths and Leslie Peng, who are married, like to car-camp and backpack. They recently put out a spread on a fire at a campsite near Wrights Lake in the Sierras.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

Barbara Hodgin, who was once president of the Pacific Crest Trail Association, is old enough to remember a time when, if you asked a backpacker what was for dinner, the standard answer was either “brown in a cup” or “green in a cup.” A clever hack for trail pad thai was an envelope of unsweetened lime Kool-Aid.

Taking the Mystery out of Scaling a Company

“What you got a dollar in your pocket

A twenty in your wallet?

See me I’m stacking money

Matter of fact, I’ll let you watch it

Get big

Get big

Get big

Get big”

—Dorrough, Get Big

If you want to build an important company, then at some point you have to scale. People in startup land often talk about the magic of how few people built the original Google or the original Facebook, but today’s Google employs 20,000 people and today’s Facebook employs over 1,500 people. So, if you want to do something that matters, then you are going to have to learn the black art of scaling a human organization.

How Doist Makes Remote Work Happen – Ambition & Balance

When I first started at Doist, we were 3 people working from 2 countries. Today, we’re 51 people working from 20 countries and counting. The idea of building a remote company wasn’t something we explicitly discussed at the start — it simply grew out of necessity.

One of the challenges when you start out as a bootstrapped company with an unknown brand and little cash on hand is access to talent. Amir and I were working from Santiago, Chile, and at that time we hadn’t come to understand the ins and outs of the country well enough to find the right people locally. When Amir decided it was finally time to hire someone to help answer support tickets, he struck gold with Doist’s first employee, David, on the global freelance platform Elance (now Upwork).

The Canonical Startup Org Structure

When startups are just getting started, no organization is necessary for the most part. The team is so small and everyone is so connected. But, as they grow the question of how to organize quickly becomes important. Once that happens, there is a right way for almost all startups to organize: a functional organization with cross-functional teams focused on particular areas. This doesn’t mean that absolutely every startup needs to be organized this way but it should be the starting point and organizations should have good reasons for going with a different approach.

Team choreography

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

Product Management Mental Models for Everyone

Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships. These models are accumulated over time by an individual and used to make faster and better decisions.

Here’s an example: the Pareto Principle states that roughly 80% of all outputs comes from 20% of the effort.

In the context of product management, the model suggests that instead of trying to create 100% of the customer opportunity, you may want to look for how to do 20% of the effort and solve 80% of the opportunity. Product teams make this trade off all the time, and the results often looks like feature launches where 20% of customers with more complicated use cases aren’t supported.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to be promoted. I evaluated the role. I had a plan for how I would implement in that role. I talked to the hiring manager (my manager at the time). I talked to my network inside the company. I knew the competition and, in my estimation, I was a better fit for the role and for the direction the organization should take. I was certain I had the position in the bag.