Launch is the beginning – 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 Glenn Beltz

Q: My team is about to launch a major new feature in our software. I’ve been working on this since I joined the company six month ago, so this is my first time shipping a product. I’m excited to bring my work to the world, but also worried it will fail. What advice can you share on how approach a launch?

Becoming Your Future Self

01 Dec 2017

In my five years as a VC, I’ve worked closely with the founders of 50+ companies. Many of these companies have grown headcount substantially since I first met them. One of the biggest challenges that founders and early employees face is scaling up personally to meet the ever-growing needs of a business. People sometimes gets stuck and become bottlenecks because they are reluctant to delegate the things they are great at, or they don’t want their role to include new tasks that arise as a company grows. As executive coach Marshall Goldsmith says, “what got you here won’t get you there.”

Asynchronous Slack Scrum

For the past four years, we’ve done scrum the same way. Standing up at 9am sharp.

Our scrum is straightforward. What were you working on yesterday? What are you working on today? Are there any changes to plans or intersecting efforts that should be discussed?

When we were small, this worked great. As we grew, we needed to tighten up our scrum updates to keep scrum an efficient use of everyone’s time. Then our web and mobile teams started participating in a combined scrum so we had to make our updates even more concise. Around this time we also made a decision to save any tangents or questions for after scrum to make sure we weren’t wasting a large portion of the team’s time while two engineers went into the weeds on something.

Why a Flat Organizational Structure will Fail as You Grow

A few years ago, having a flat organizational structure was all the rage. Well-known companies like Zappos, Medium, and Buffer were singing its praises and writing detailed posts explaining their reasoning.

Tired of bad bosses, and corporate politics, the internet rejoiced.

On paper it sounded so great. Why do we need managers? Who needs structure? We’re all adults here, right?!?

Box’s VP Engineering on Biohacks For A Better Career

Tomas Barreto, VP of Engineering at Box, takes biohacking seriously. Like sequencing-his-genome, running-currents-through-his-body seriously.

But don’t call it a hobby or a side project. Barreto draws a straight line between the biohacking work he’s done to not only a more thoughtful, healthier life but also the trajectory of his career. It’s brought him longevity and increasing responsibility at Box, where he’s been promoted five times, starting as a software engineer to his current role as VP of Engineering. He credits biohacking for giving him resilience and capacity, both of which he needed in spades to grow his subset of the engineering team from 5 to 130, from its early days through a high-profile IPO.

Working On The Right Thing

Illustration by mikoto

Using the AAA model to ensure everybody on your team is working on the task they fit the best

3 out of 5 people are either mismatched or mis-qualified for the tasks they are doing during the day. Did I just make up this statistic? A little bit. But it is probably not far off the mark.

Finding the right task for someone is not a simple process. A problem should not be too easy or hard. It has to be interesting to the individual. There has to be meaning. The team needs to work well together. As we can see there are lots of things to consider when matching someone to a task. But why is this important?

7 Steps to Learning from Our Mistakes

Here a sailor loads a torpedo. Even when operations don’t have glaring problems, an assessment can reveal areas for improvement.

Learning from Mistakes is key to Continuous Improvement. Here’s a 7 step process.

You would like the practice of learning from your mistakes throughout your organization. Learning is the key to continuous improvement and our own mistakes provide the best cases because we have more insight into what happened and more immediacy since it happened to us.

Shipping is the beginning of a process – Inside Intercom

All too often, shipping product is seen as an end. A milestone reached, a good time to move onto the next project, an even better time to move onto another team. We believe the opposite is true, that shipping is a beginning.

A few weeks ago, Fabrizio and Stephen, two product engineers, joined our team at Intercom. On his second day, Fabrizio pushed code to production, reducing our number of message types from five to three. On his third day, we designed a new in-line reply, and Fabrizio had it live a few days later. By the end of the first week, Stephen had shipped a range of product changes, including new action buttons in our inbox and a redesigned message summary.

Macro-Focus: The Most Important Skill That Can Change Your Life

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

What is the most important skill for a successful and happy life? There is an old story of a reporter who went up to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett at an event. The reporter asked each of them to write downone wordthat they believe to be the most important key to success. As the story goes, without consulting each other, the two billionaires wrote down the same word! So what was the most important key to success, according to them?

A growing number of young Americans are leaving desk jobs to farm

Economy

November 23, 2017 at 2:12 PM

Rachel Clement picks purple mustard before the first hard freeze of the season at Owl’s Nest Farm in Upper Marlboro, Md., on Nov. 9. Many women, highly educated and city-bred, are taking to the farm life. Clement has worked at the farm since August. (Michael Robinson Chavez/Washington D.C.)

Liz Whitehurst dabbled in several careers before she ended up here, crating fistfuls of fresh-cut arugula in the early-November chill.

We are the people they warned you about – Chris Anderson – Medium

As the “Slaughterbots” video of (fictional) killer drones goes viral, here are some quick thoughts from a guy who helped start the “hey, open source drones, what could go wrong?” movement. (I also run Dronecode, the leading drone software consortium)

I’m not super concerned about the particular scenario in the video (swarms of microdrones carrying shaped charges hunting down individuals and putting holes in their head) because it seems technically unfeasible — microdrones are less maneuverable than insects, and we can swat bugs away easily. But in general, I have a bigger problem with the message of the video: I’m an enabler of what’s described in that scenario, but I have no idea what I should do differently.

In the loop: Jony Ive on Apple’s new HQ and the disappearing iPhone | Design | Wallpaper* Magazine

IN THE LOOP

Jony Ive on Apple’s new HQ and the disappearing iPhone

PHOTOGRAPHY: MARK MAHANEY
INTERVIEW: NICK COMPTON

The glass fins provide shade from the Californian sun. Foster + Partners and Apple’s design team considered fabric and fibreglass fins before settling on the final design

Anticipation was higher than usual – and it always runs to feverish – when the press and other interested parties made their way to California’s Silicon Valley last September for the latest Apple keynote presentation. The most titanic of the valley’s tech titans was due to unveil its most significant update to the iPhone since its launch, ten years previous. In that time the iPhone has upended industries and transformed how we do just about everything. The update was a big deal. But most of the golden ticket holders were as excited about where they were as what they were about to see.

Research: Vague Feedback Is Holding Women Back

laura schneider FOR HBR

Although companies have invested heavily in programs to advance women leaders, the number of women in executive roles has not changed significantly in the last decade. Even if women are well represented as middle managers, their numbers drop off when making the jump to VP-level executives. Why are women not rising to executive ranks?

One reason is the feedback men and women receive along the way. Our research shows that women are systematically less likely to receive specific feedback tied to outcomes, both when they receive praise and when the feedback is developmental. In other words, men are offered a clearer picture of what they are doing well and more-specific guidance of what is needed to get to the next level.

What I Learned Helping Blue Apron Grow 25X in 3.5 Years

What I Learned Helping Blue Apron Grow 25X in 3.5 Years

Being at an early-stage startup is a bit like being in grade school — but in this version, you have to skip a grade every 6 months and still get all As.You learn quickly because you have to. And while you manage to skip grade after grade, there are many times when you fall short. Then, once you’ve graduated, you look back and realize just how much you’ve learned, and how much you wish you could help others have an easier time with their path.

Six Things I Learned From Spending almost 72 Hours off the Social Grid, and Why You Should Do it…

Long story short: I learned that going completely off the social grid for a few days has tremendous benefits, and very few downsides. The hardest part is starting.

This past weekend, starting Friday at 8am, and ending Monday at 4:30am, I went off the grid completely. I kept my mobile phone on airplane mode. I kept my laptop closed (with the exception of the flights to write.) The only time I turned on my phone was to show my boarding pass Friday morning and again Sunday afternoon to come home. I didn’t check email, I didn’t check Facebook or Twitter, I didn’t post to any social outlet, I didn’t even Instagram.

Three rules of maintenance – Andrew Spittle

The condo building I live in has a property management company. This makes sense. The building is 120+ units across 12 floors with retail and office space. What doesn’t make sense is this same company’s poor communication. They are consistently unclear and underwhelming, particularly when it comes to maintenance.

Today they were servicing the fire safety system. This also makes sense. Fire is an existential threat to a 12-floor building and maintaining that safety system is key. But during this maintenance the alarm system speaker in our unit continually blipped on and off. Imagine the sound of plugging headphones in-and-out, in-and-out. Just a little blip. But that blip emanates from a unit typically used to signal a fire alarm or emergency. So let’s call this a disconcerting blip.

How I Socially Engineer Myself Into High Security Facilities

Sophie is a physical penetration tester and information security consultant. She specializes in social engineering security assessments including physical, voice (vishing) and text (phishing). She consults in remediation and prevention of security incidents through creation of policy and procedures, as well as customized training for your individual office culture. Prior to working in infosec, Sophie was a journalist, photographer, and a mom.

What I Learned From Reading Every Amazon Shareholders Letter

A new mentor of mine suggested I read Jeff Bezos’ Letter to Shareholders to refine my thoughts around building a career and a business.

So I read them all dating back to 1997 and here are my takeaways:

Amazon – Investor Relations – Annual Reports, Proxies and Shareholder Letters
Annual Reports, Proxies and Shareholder Lettersphx.corporate-ir.net

1/ Jeff Bezos is still Jeff Bezos

Despite memes (below) to the contrarian, the core operating principles of Amazon hasn’t changed much if at all since the company went public in 1997.

Robert Scoble and Me – Quinn Norton – Medium

Foo Camp, the original unconference thrown by O’Reilly every year, is one of my favorite events in the technology world. In many ways, it’s often felt like one of the safest — it welcomes crazy ideas, breaks down social barriers, starts cross disciplinary conversations. Their format encourages people to contribute to sessions, or leave them, not if they’re angry, but just if they’re not getting much out of it or have much to contribute. People bounce around the space and ideas and conversations, and so many of the normal social distances break down into collaboration. This format is creative, and gave me access to both people and ideas that helped me shape my work and get it in front of a wider audience.