Why our engineering leaders focus on product over process

Who was the best manager you ever had?

Even though all of us have different people in mind, those people probably have a lot in common. Maybe he really cared about you as a person. Maybe she was a brilliant visionary who always knew how to push you to be better. Maybe their leadership styles were different — but I’d wager that their philosophies were the same.

Why and How to share your Manager README (plus here’s mine)

Photo by Zachary Spears on Unsplash

Creating and sharing a manager readme/operating manual is a great way to reflect on who you are as a leader, what your leadership philosophy is, and what folks can expect from you. I learned this from Lara Hogan’s wonderful management expectations.

If you’re a manager, you probably spend a lot of time trying to understand how your teammates work best and what they need from you. Naturally, this skews the relationship a little to one side. Opening up and sharing about myself was probably one of my scariest growth moments as a new manager. I wanted to bring my most professional “manager self” to every conversation.

How Patreon Levels Engineers (Career Ladder)

How Patreon Levels Engineers

Today we are excited to share Patreon’s revamped Engineering Leveling Guide. In Patreon’s early years, we had little in the way of objective criteria for leveling engineers. We’ve come a long way since then, and our engineering organization is much stronger and fairer for it. We want to show you how we define levels now and what it’s like to work at Patreon.

Manager Energy Drain

Manager Energy Drain

One of the most frequent questions I hear as I coach managers is, “How do I handle how tired I am as a manager?”

Some managers find themselves working long hours to do hands-on “work-work” after full days of one-on-ones. Some managers find that the labor of managing or more strategic thinking drains their energy significantly faster than the work they did as individual contributors. Some find the context-switching between meetings super taxing.

As We May Think

The telegram was a breakthrough in communication technology, which Vannevar Bush imagined could evolve in unprecedented ways.

AP

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson’s famous address of 1837 on “The American Scholar,” this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR

Prattfalls: Better Communication

A long time ago, my manager sat me down to inform me of my next year’s salary. I was receiving a reasonable raise, it should have been an easy conversation. Once we finished the conversation, I left the room and immediately started reaching out to some recruiters I knew with the intention of finding a new job.

Oops.

One of my ex-coworkers at Netflix, since retired, once told me about a book his father had written about library management. This book, Information of the Image by Dr. Allan D. Pratt, is sadly out of print now. I refer to it often because its first chapter has played a transformative role in how I think about effective communication and ways in which we utterly, delightfully, screw it up.

Ideas That Changed My Life

You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize that maybe like 10 big ideas truly changed how you think and drive most of what you believe.

Brent Beshore recently listed the biggest ideas that changed his life. A few of mine:

Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over pure analysis. There’s four parts to this:

The Stack Overflow Age

Hi, everyone! A lot of stuff has happened since I was writing all those blog posts about Aeron chairs 18 years ago. Some of those blog posts are old enough to go to college.

And, also: Stack Overflow will be ten years old soon! Wow! So I thought it would be cool to get the old band back together for a little reunion tour over the next few weeks. I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way. With some perspective, it’s clearer now what we did right and what we messed up, so I’ll try to cover the good and the bad over a series of blog posts.

How to Lead by Noticing and Filling in Gaps

Many years ago, I worked at a five-person startup.

I brought crackers and cheese and fruit that I had bought with my own groceries over the weekend and put them in the mini-fridge, so that we’d have snacks.

As we started to look for another Android engineer for our team, I put together an interview process and blogged about the process, so that we could attract even more candidates.

Addressing executive swoop-ins – The Year of the Looking Glass – Medium

This was first published on my mailing list The Looking Glass. Every week, I answer a reader’s question.

Photo by James West

Q: How can I address direction from upper management that I suspect will harm or even derail the product? i.e. What is the most effective way to push back on an executive order that I or the team feel is detrimental to the product?

An Engineer’s Bill of Rights (And Responsibilities)

Power has a way of flowing towards people managers over time, no matter how many times you repeat “management is not a promotion, it’s a career change.”

It’s natural, like water flowing downhill. Managers are privy to performance reviews and other personal information that they need to do their jobs, and they tend to be more practiced communicators. Managers facilitate a lot of decision-making and routing of people and data and things, and it’s very easy to slip into making the all decisions rather than empowering people to make them. Sometimes you want to just hand out assignments and order everyone to do as told. (er, just me??)

How to make better use of everything you read

I once downloaded a speed-reading app that would flash individual words across my phone. I aggressively set the rate to 400 words per minute and braced for the onslaught. I used this system to parse essays, primers, and long-form interviews, all in the name of advancing my career. Yet, all I had to show for it was a massive headache and a zero-percent retention rate.

Stop Start Continue Change Management Model

Stop Start Continue Change Management Model

Introduction to the model – SSCC

The stop start continue change management model is a useful ‘quick and dirty’ tool for looking at service improvement. It can also be used as a technique for generating ideas, solving problems, and negotiating behavior changes between two groups, individuals, or departments

Using the four basic titles (STOP START CONTINUE CHANGE) look at a service or offer and consider each of the actions, top stop elements (or the whole service), start doing something new, continue what is happening (it is working well) or change an element.

How to read more effectively

Whether you’re dissecting Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or relaxing poolside with 50 Shades of Grey, reading is, for many of us, a regular source of joy, perspective, and ideas, which enable us to grow personally and professionally. But here’s the catch: We live in a world of never ending content and constant competition for our attention. One study, back in 2009, found that we’re exposed to 100,000 words each day, the equivalent of one quarter of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. And that was before most of us started using our phones for reading texts, emails, or articles instead of just for talking.

Team Leader Venn Diagram – Making Meetup – Medium

A tool for gaining a shared understanding of responsibilities

Upon arrival at Meetup as a “fractional” VP of Engineering, I began to hear something that I hear at lots of organizations: confusion about team leaders’ roles and responsibilities.

Product teams typically have an Engineering Manager, a Product Manager, and sometimes an Engineering Lead; though Meetup’s Engineering Ladder includes descriptions of each of these roles, the overlap of their responsibilities can lead to ambiguity and confusion. This is definitely a common problem, and not unique to Meetup!

It’s Time For an RSS Revival

The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there’s no panacea for what ails this internet we’ve built. But anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that’s been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It’s time to head back to RSS.

Write Useful Mission Statements in 3 Easy Steps

How To:

The simple of idea of putting a mission statement together for the team makes most managers tremble in fear. It’s a sad situation we’ve gotten ourselves into when leaders fear to express the purpose of an organization (and employees snicker with cynicism at the idea of any attempt.) Why is that? Surely people are more effective when they understand the meaning behind what they do. Why shouldn’t having a clear mission be something that is met with optimism and anticipation?

Becoming A Manager Of Managers

Illustration by Laura Wright

Lessons learned on how to shape the next generation of leaders

The move into management is an often discussed topic. We all want to climb the career ladder, yet some dread the day where the only way up is to join management. This is especially true in engineering.

Whether we want to admit or not, hierarchy and management are necessary to run a large company successfully. And while there should be career paths for all kinds of specialisations, it is equally as important to shape the next generation of leaders.

Lean Startup’s Eric Ries on How to Make ‘Gatekeepers’ a Source of Power and Speed

Engineering Interviewing at Strava – strava-engineering – Medium

We know Engineering interviewing can be stressful, and stress can often make interviews a poor sample of what you can do at work. We want to create an interviewing environment where you can show who you are and what you can do. Hopefully this blog post will help you present your best self during your interviews at Strava!

Our principles for interviewing

Our goal during your interview process is to figure out if you will succeed at Strava. We tailor our interviews to gauge how you would do in everyday situations, rather than test intelligence or ask brainteasers.

“Just”

I feel like an idiot while doing my job. A lot.

Now there’s a damn good chance I’m actually an idiot, but the self-respecting part of me wants to challenge that notion.

When I get stuck on a task or am looking for recommendations for tools/resources/strategies/solutions/whatever, I often take to Twitter to ask for help.

Seconds after posting my quandary, my stream gets flooded with a host of advice, links, insights, and opinions. This “crowd-sourcing my knowledgesphere” is a wonderful thing. But one word in all those proffered solutions tends to stick out in my mind like a jagged, rusty nail ready to figuratively jam itself into my eye socket.

What Managers Need to Know About Slack, Yammer, and Chatter

Workplaces have adopted internal social tools—think stand-alone technologies such as Slack, Yammer, and Chatter, or embedded applications such as Microsoft Teams and JIRA—at a staggering rate. In an ambitious study of 4,200 companies, conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, 72% reported using them to facilitate employee communication. That figure grabbed our attention, so we asked leaders of both large and small organizations for more insight into why they were turning to social tools and platforms. They said things like “Other companies are, so we should too” and “That’s what you have to do if you want to attract young talent.” Although the bandwagon effect was not a surprise, this was: Few of the rationales were based on a solid business case, which leaders normally require when considering other technologies, such as CRM software or computer-simulation tools.

The Software Engineering Job Ladder

Software companies should put careful deliberation into their engineering job levels, and make available a job ladder explaining what is expected of employees, the distinction between roles, and areas for career growth.

In this post, I’ll discuss why having a job ladder helps everybody; what makes for a good job ladder; the way I think about software engineer job levels; and I’ll end with some related advice. While the intended audience is management, engineers may gain some insights by seeing things from the company’s point of view.

The #1 Growth Metric 86% Of Founders Are NOT Measuring

I sent this to my personal email list of 25,000+ founders, but thought it contained enough value to share on Medium too. Edited for brevity.

The number one metric we focused on at BigCommerce to grow it from zero to $100,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue was Net Promoter Score, or NPS for short.

If you’re not familiar with my background, I’m a “serial entrepreneur”. I’ve built 8 companies so far and I co-founded BigCommerce in 2009, ran it as co-CEO until 2015 and then hired a great CEO to “take the reigns”.

The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right

It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the “right” way to eat.

Really, we know how we should eat, but that understanding is continually undermined by hyperbolic headlines, internet echo chambers, and predatory profiteers all too happy to peddle purposefully addictive junk food and nutrition-limiting fad diets. Eating well remains difficult not because it’s complicated but because the choices are hard even when they’re clear.

Data Suggests Surprising Shift: Duopoly Not All-Powerful – eMarketer

Facebook and Instagram

Facebook will generate $21.00 billion in US digital ad revenues in 2018, up 16.9% from 2017. But its share of the the country’s digital ad market will dip to 19.6%, down from 19.9% last year.

“Facebook’s user growth rate in the US has slowed down, and is now about the same as that of internet users, while News Feed ad prices may be reaching their limit,” said Monica Peart, eMarketer’s senior forecasting director. “Meanwhile, Instagram—with its rapidly increasing advertiser base—will quickly become the engine that drives growth for the company overall.”

‘I created Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.

By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.

The Default-Thinking Method of Problem Solving

You’ve been here before. It’s Monday morning and you walk into the office only to have your boss call an urgent meeting to “streamline processes.” You haven’t thought about this enough to have an opinion but you go anyway.

You know how to deal with this. You’ve done it before. You turn on your default brain and start solving the problem. You build a hypothesis to determine the problem, find some data to analyze, and presto out comes some efficiency.

Want to Kill Your Economy? Have MBA Programs Churn out Takers Not Makers. – Evonomics

By Rana Foroohar

After the financial crisis of 2008, many people predicted that there would be a crisis of capitalism. The best and the brightest would forgo careers filled with financial ledgers and become teachers or engineers, or start small businesses. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. In fact, getting an MBA has never been a more popular career path. The number of MBAs graduating from America’s business schools has skyrocketed since the 1980s. But over that time, the health of American business has decreased by many metrics: corporate R&D spending, new business creation, productivity, and the level of public trust in business in general.

A Wake-Up Call For Tech Managers

“Don’t you have a loop to write?”

The most popular article I’ve written is called Why your programmer just wants to code. To date it has received over 62,000 reads.

The article tells the story of Jamie, a programmer who joins a new company full of enthusiasm and ideas. Fast-forward a couple years, and Jamie is one of those programmers “who just wants to code.” A programmer who doesn’t contribute new ideas, doesn’t offer new ways of doing things, and just wants to be left alone to write code.

How to Spot a Machine Learning Opportunity, Even If You Aren’t a Data Scientist

Sylverarts/iStock

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a niche subfield of computer science. Tech giants have been using AI for years: Machine learning algorithms power Amazon product recommendations, Google Maps, and the content that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter display in social media feeds. But William Gibson’s adage applies well to AI adoption: The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Chinese project offers a brighter farming future

A giant experiment with 21 million farmers in China points the way to sustainable agriculture.Credit: Feng Xiaomin/Xinhua/eyevine

In 1958, China under Mao Zedong embarked on a nationwide political project to increase agricultural productivity by collectivizing small farms across the country and forcing them to share agricultural tools. It was a disaster and contributed to a famine in which tens of millions died.

Has the Operating System for the Western World Crashed?

Liberalism has suffered a catastrophic failure, says political scientist Patrick Deneen. Though he’s not the first to make the claim.

Three Lions/Getty Images

By Park MacDougald

American politics has long been defined by the dominance of liberalism, understood in its broad sense as the philosophy of individual rights, freedom, and pluralism. Although Democrats and Republicans fight bitterly over a host of issues, these are largely family disagreements within liberalism. Both sides have made peace with capitalism, the primacy of the individual over the collective, freedom as the highest goal of politics, and the exercise of U.S. power abroad to backstop the “liberal international order.” Whereas the 20th century saw communism and fascism seize state power in Europe and elsewhere, here the radicals of left and right have been reliably co-opted or shunted aside. The most serious native challenge to liberalism, made by the slaveholding oligarchy of the Old South, was crushed on the battlefield, and, despite the efforts of an ever-dwindling number of apologists, morally anathematized.

AMP: the missing controversy – Ferdy Christant

Ferdy Christant Web developer, wildlife photographer, founder of www.jungledragon.com Feb 9

How Google cheats with performance

Introduction

AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a technology first launched in 2015 by Google. The main goal of the initiative is to drastically speed up the loading of web pages on mobile. Sorely needed, as the typical web page on slow 3G (a very typical network condition the world over) takes a long time to load.

The hard thing about hard things: When a manager decides to quit

By the way, I’m the manager

Employees quit. Everyone has their reasons. There are many articles about why one should quit, but there are almost none about what should one do when he or she eventually decides to quit. I haven’t found any articles discussing “the hard time of a manager”, who leads people, and yet chooses to quit. In this post, I want to share my personal experience as a manager who has decided to quit his job and the path I’ve taken to make sure that my departure will be as smooth as possible.

Opinion | The Tyranny of Convenience

Hudson Christie

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.