Building Infrastructure Platforms

Software has come a long way over the past 20 years. Not only has the

pace of delivery increased, but the architectural complexity of systems

being developed has also soared to match that pace.

Not that building software was simple in the “good” old days. If you

wanted to stand up a simple web service for your business, you’d probably

have to:

• Schedule in some time with an infrastructure team to find a spare

  (more…)

Under stress at work? Just remember: Don’t believe what you think. – ideas.ted.com

Eugenia Mello

Here’s how you can take control of your brain’s knee-jerk reactions to distressing situations, says psychology researcher Lisa Penney.

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Question: When you’re under stress at work, are you able to do your best thinking?

A new era of WordPress themes is finally here — Rich Tabor

We all knew the landscape of WordPress themes was shifting with the introduction of Gutenberg.

What we didn’t know, was by how much.

With the arrival of the anticipated Full Site Editing experience into WordPress 5.9, themes are starting to look very different. This new class of block-based WordPress themes arguably introduces the biggest change to themes, since well… themes existed.

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews C. Thi Nguyen

The Ezra Klein Show

• Send any friend a story

  As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Feb. 25, 2022

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with C. Thi Nguyen. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Be Plainspoken

It takes practice to communicate well. Being a great

writer or

communicator is a kind of

superpower that makes nearly every aspect of your life easier. But with great

power comes great responsibility; the clarifying power of language can also be

used to confound.

I am worried about the escalation of document length I have observed recently.

Simple questions receive lengthy responses.

People blow past guidelines on document lengths. Paragraphs have five

Problem exploration, selection and validation. | Irrational Exuberance

Most engineering organizations separate engineering and product leadership into distinct roles. This is usually ideal, not only because these roles benefit on distinct skills, but also because they thrive from different perspectives and priorities. It’s quite hard to do both well at the same time.

I’ve met many product managers who are excellent operators, but few product managers who can operate at a high degree while also getting deep with their users’ needs. Likewise, I’ve worked with many engineering managers who ground their work in their users needs, but few who can affix their attention on those users when things start getting rocky within their team.

Preserving Optionality: Preparing for the Unknown – Farnam Street

We’re often advised to excel at one thing. But as the future gets harder to predict, preserving optionality allows us to pivot when the road ahead crumbles.

***

How do we prepare for a world that often changes drastically and rapidly? We can preserve our optionality.

We don’t often get the advice to keep our options open. Instead, we’re told to specialize by investing huge hours in our passion so we can be successful in a niche.

Refactor → Organisation

In this blog post, rather than focus just on the technical challenges, I want to share:

• Some of the organisational history that led to WebCore
• How we went about re-organising for success
• How we viewed the team topologies and interaction modes between teams
• How we view the role of the platform (and the Core teams who build it) in enabling many teams to interact with one another

First — some history…

The BBC website is made up of several digital services, including iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport. Each is a major service in its own right — with millions of visits every week — and they have grown independently of one another over several years. This was reflected in the way the organisation was shaped — with separate departments owning each digital service.

The Principles and Habits of Healthy Software

I believe both can help us be better people and drive positive change around us – in general, but in software in particular.

Principles help us go in the direction we want, towards an ideal state. Developing software with this in mind is fulfilling. (If you want to feel inspired about principles, read Design Principles Behind Smalltalk by Daniel Ingalls).

Habits are powerful. They help us to get from point A to B at a constant pace, starting small and taking many small steps. They allow us to work towards a higher goal, with purpose. It’s like developing muscles; it’s not possible to get there with a magic meal, you need strict gym activity and a lot of discipline. You also need small increments otherwise you’ll get hurt. So what are the muscles in the software we write, and what habits can we adopt to maintain those muscles and avoid injury?

What You Give Up When Moving Into Engineering Management

My wife recently took a management position for the first time. While my first management role was much different in many ways (I was with a small startup, and she works for a state healthcare system), her mixed feelings reminded me of the roller-coaster ride I felt when I was first put in charge of a team of engineers.

On the one hand, I was excited. This was an opportunity to make a bigger impact on the organization and my teammates’ careers.

The Data-Informed Product Cycle

I recently shared this Tweet:

Most teams jump from high level strategy/goals straight to feature ideas (w/ “success metrics”) The most successful teams 1. Have a strategy 2. Translate that into models 3. Add minimally viable measurement 4. Identify leverage points 5. Explore options 6. Run experiments

Along with this image:

A number of people asked me to write about it. Here goes!

Data-informed product is a loop (or series of loops).

The Latest E-Commerce Trend: What You Need To Know About Social Commerce

Jessica is the Founder & CEO of Valux Digital, a nationally recognized full-service marketing and PR firm.

getty

As e-commerce businesses globally are getting ready for the holiday season, one trend is shaking up the online shopping scene. Social commerce looks set to make an impact on e-commerce sales this season.

What Is Social Commerce?

Social commerce is the convergence of e-commerce and social media. Brands engaging in social commerce use social media platforms as vehicles to sell products and services. If your business relies on e-commerce sales, you are likely already involved in social commerce. However, are you maximizing the potential of this trend for your business?

Diffusion of innovations – Wikipedia

Theory on how and why new ideas spread The diffusion of innovations according to Rogers. With successive groups of consumers adopting the new technology (shown in blue), its market share (yellow) will eventually reach the saturation level. The blue curve is broken into sections of adopters.

Diffusion of innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. Everett Rogers, a professor of communication studies, popularized the theory in his book Diffusion of Innovations; the book was first published in 1962, and is now in its fifth edition (2003). Rogers argues that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system. The origins of the diffusion of innovations theory are varied and span multiple disciplines.

5 Questions Every Manager Needs to Ask Their Direct Reports

Krittiraj Adchasai/Getty Images

Sara, a departing employee, sat across from her company’s HR leader for an exit interview. As a marketing executive for a financial services company, she was resigning after five years to take a CMO role at a fintech startup.

When the HR director asked Sara, “Is there anything else we could have done to keep you here?” Sara paused. “Yes. I wish there had been conversations about my career goals and opportunities for growth,” she said.

Getting Up and Running Quickly When Joining a Project

Getting up to speed when you join a large project is not an easy thing to do.

In addition to astonishing amounts of code and history, joining a new project

usually coincides with getting to know new colleagues and wanting to cause a

great first impression, which raises the stakes and makes things even more

difficult.

Here are a few things that have worked best for me when trying to get up to

How I Learned to Onboard Effectively in an Engineer Manager Role

Understanding my behaviors from starting new roles over the years

Doug Arcuri Follow

Nov 8, 2021 · 9 min read

Photo by Zan on Unsplash

Onboarding at a new company is an immensely engaging experience, where the difference between an effective or ineffective onboarding is an action away. As a software engineer manager, I’ve reflected on the unique behaviors I prioritize. This post will cover the gestalt of my successful onboarding experiences within the first 90 days.

This scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories—and why | Science | AAAS

Being a First Time Exec at an Early Stage Startup

This week I talked with Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, a company that helps make teamwork way less work. We spoke about being a first time exec, how she navigated being a mother and exec during a pandemic and what she enjoys about early stage startups.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

So we met speaking on the same panel.

Yeah. It was about challenging the default performance management systems that companies have, and we got those mugs with our faces on them, which was amazing. My partner loves it. He’s like, “Oh, then I can use it and then you’re just there with me,” which is very sweet. It feels weird to use a mug with your own face on it.

Delicious Brains – 2021 Year in Review: Tripled, Acquired, Reborn, and Humming

TL;DR — Despite the pandemic, we had a great year as a team and as a business. We tripled the size of the team, acquired ACF, shipped and published a ton of awesome stuff that we’re proud of, and had a nice bump in revenue.

This is my seventh year in review post since I started writing them:

Minto Pyramid

In business, communication needs to be clear and efficient. People are busy and don’t have time to read long walls of text or listen to long presentations where the key info is shared at the very end.

Use the Minto Pyramid to give your communication a top-down structure and get your message across quickly and clearly. Lead with the conclusion, then provide key arguments and finally support them with detailed information.

How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg | First Round Review

Say your startup has an on-call rotation that follows the sun. Someone’s always on. One day, a member of your team gets an alert that disk space will run out on the primary PostgreSQL server in two hours. An hour later, he gets another page. Then thirty minutes later, disk space runs out and your entire site goes down. For 18 hours. The silver lining is that your two-tier architecture can keep your site and app online, but the backend of your business has come to a halt. Your CTO is furious. He says you must fire the engineer who was on call to make a point.

The baseline for web development in 2022 – LINE ENGINEERING

**TL;DR:**The baseline for web development in 2022 is: low-spec Android devices in terms of performance, Safari from two years before in terms of Web Standards, and 4G in terms of networks. The web in general is not answering those needs properly, especially in terms of performance where factors such as an over-dependence on JavaScript are hindering our sites’ performance.

Hello there! I’m Alan Dávalos, a front-end engineer at LINE. You might have thought this article’s title is just clickbait but bear with me for a while, I promise it’s worth it. The main reason for that is that there were some big changes in the web between 2021 and 2022 and those affect the way we should face web development as a whole.

Your guide to self-serve onboarding: How to get your product to sell itself – OpenView

In a self-serve environment, your product has to sell itself.

The first-day experience is the most critical part of the user journey. And it’s where most products fall flat.

It’s on the first day that you have a user’s full attention and you have an extremely narrow window to impress them.

Why should you care?

The Three Altitudes of Leadership | INSEAD Knowledge

High altitudes hold a special place in the history of human achievement. We remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese sherpa, Tenzing Norgay as the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Other altitude pioneers include Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in outer space, and Neil Armstrong, the first person on the moon. More recently, in 2012, Austrian Felix Baumgartner skydived from a capsule at 127,000 feet.

Managing Managers: Words of Wisdom From Experienced Engineering Executives

I recently stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Lemonade

Though I’ve been leading teams for quite a few years now, managing managers is a new challenge.

Left to right: Eti Noked, Shay Cohen, and Anton Drukh.

I turned to managers of managers, whom I value and don’t work with on a daily basis, to gain a wider perspective on what it takes to succeed in this role:

Everything Must Be Paid for Twice

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice.

There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.

But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

Memo: China Strategy Revisited

This is a continuation of the original essay: The China Strategy (2018)

At 8 am on May 10, 2003, Taobao went online on the fourth day of the SARS quarantine. The homepage read: “Think of those who start a business in trying times.” Nineteen years later, and China’s online retail economy is the envy of the world. Currently with a nearly 37% online penetration and growing, analysts estimate that rate will reach 63.9% by 2023. It’s evident that online retailers like Alibaba, which owns Taobao, used the crisis to move China into eCommerce leadership that then belonged to the United States. China owes its eCommerce dominance to Alibaba, but its future may be with JD.com. This as the U.S. Government is becoming increasingly adversarial with Alibaba.

The Power Of An API

Hugging the X-Axis

I’ve always struggled with commitment. In a world as grand as ours, shouldn’t we try to experience it all? Change it up. Visit every country. Try a bunch of careers. The menu of life is vast, and it’d be a shame to only order a single entrée.

When I say I was allergic to restraint, I mean it. I was the tantrum-throwing 3rd grader who refused to RSVP to birthday parties because I didn’t want to be tied down on a Saturday afternoon. Early in my career, I was also the guy who kept up with ten different industries so I wouldn’t have to define myself by any single one of them. But recently, my values have started to change. I now want multi-decade friendships and a professional life where I can build things that compound in value at an exponential rate; I want a place I call home and a large family I can share that home with; and I want to become an expert in the ideas that resonate with me most instead of suffering from shiny object syndrome.

Reborn in the cloud | McKinsey

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Over the past five years, Adobe Systems has remade itself as a cloud company. It no longer offers its publishing and design tools in the form of physical, shrink-wrapped products to be deployed at customers’ sites under a perpetual

license—where customers pay once and can use the software indefinitely. Rather, customers subscribe to Creative Cloud, the company’s online suite of publishing and design tools, and receive frequent software upgrades as well as a range of new online-only and mobile services.

(2022) 13 Best Asynchronous Communication Tools for Remote Teams – NoHQ Remote Work Guides

Day-to-day communication happens asynchronously when working with a remote team. While startups try to conquer the synchronous space, there is far less work happening on the other side. Let’s look at 13 of the best tools for asynchronous work.

The Classic: Slack

With asynchronous communication apps, there’s the well-known combination of Slack + Zoom. The two tools perfectly complement each other and make synchronous and asynchronous communication perfectly.

The Best Leaders are Feedback Magnets — Here’s How to Become One

Introduction

This article is written by Shivani Berry**, founder and CEO of Ascend**, which offers online leadership programs to empower women from top companies with the skills and community to advance into management. Previously, she was at PayPal, Intercom, and GetYourGuide.

After interviewing dozens of top executives in fireside chats — including Kim Scott of Radical Candor fame — I started to notice a pattern. Even though they were all well-practiced with tons of public speaking experience under their belts, every single one of them asked me for feedback after the event. That’s when it hit me: The best leaders are feedback magnets. Getting actionable feedback is a skill, and the top performers have excelled largely because they’ve never stopped honing it.

Managing Managers: Words of Wisdom From Experienced Engineering Executives

I Asked Managers of Managers I Look Up To for Advice As I Transitioned From Team Lead to Director of Engineering

Daniel Korn

Jan 5·7 min read

I recently stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Lemonade. Though I’ve been leading teams for quite a few years now, managing managers is a new challenge.

Left to right: Eti Noked, Shay Cohen, and Anton Drukh.

Tweet from Marc Hedlund

I’m often asked how best to interview VP Engineering or other engineering leadership candidates. It’s a hard problem. One of my standard answers seems to work for a lot of people, so here it is.

I think it matters a lot to probe for a leadership candidate’s beliefs about their ability to create change. There are plenty of passive managers: hire to budget, run the standup, file the performance report, repeat. A leader should not be passive.

Cost of (Employee) Attrition

What if we could visualise the cost of attrition?

Here’s a team. Someone leaves. We hire a replacement.
We get lucky and manage to find someone more skilled. Looks like we’re better off?

Really when someone leaves we lose all the relationships they had with the rest of the team as well. The team is a diminished more like 40% than the apparent 20% by their loss. It takes longer to rebuild the team than is apparent. Relationships take time.

(2022) How to Do Employee Performance Reviews Virtually & Best Practices – NoHQ Remote Work Guides

Measuring job performance is an essential practice when measuring a business. They provide valuable metrics that provide insight into the employee’s skill and cost value.

Many employees scoff at the idea of performance reviews because they feel they are not appropriately appraised of nonperformance factors.

Therefore, in an employee performance review, it’s important to only review based on performance and nothing that can get the business in trouble with the courts based on protections under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Changing Lanes – Becoming a Platform Product Manager

I’m a product manager for a content management system that runs some of the most-visited websites in the world. Our team reports to the CTO, and we sit within the engineering arm of the organization. Prior to this I’d had a year’s product experience at a customer-facing SaaS company and naively I believed I could copy-paste this experience. I was wrong. At its heart a CMS is a platform, not a product. I quickly found that I needed to become a platform product manager.

Measuring KPIs for a Platform vs a Revenue-Generating Product

There are some important differences between managing a solutions vs a platform product, in terms of providing product value. One of the key differences is in how you determine and track valuable key performance indicators (KPIs).

This post focuses on the differences for managing KPIs not just for platforms overall, but for content management systems – products used by web sites to build their content, which include the tools that editors use to publish content to the site.

Measuring output, outcomes and impact in platform teams at Adevinta

What we learned from implementing a metrics-based approach to measure results in a platform team

Adevinta May 20, 2021 · 8 min read

By Xavier Gumara Rigol (Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn), Senior Engineering Manager for Experimentation and Analytics Solutions at Adevinta

As a manager of an internal platform team at Adevinta (that is, a team whose customers are other employees at the company) it has been hard to deliver results in our team by following a metrics-driven approach. This has been accentuated by the fact that our platforms can be used by employees from our marketplaces around the world.

25 Habits of Highly Effective Managers

Introduction

Management can at times seem like staring down a large block of marble — an intimidating task that requires the right tools. And in our experience, most management advice tends to focus on tackling the biggest chunks: assembling high-performing teams through hiring, delivering tough feedback and checking in regularly. Of course, holding regular 1:1 meetings and honest performance reviews are critical items on your manager checklist to get right — but sculpting a magnificent piece of art also relies on the finer chiseling work of shaping that rock, bit by bit. After all, it’s the smallest movements and the intricate detail work that makes a statue worthy of display in a museum. However, this tends to be overlooked.

# 6 A Strategy for Each Swimlane

How to define the strategies, proxy metrics, and projects for each pod

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·3 min read

The “Ratings Wizard,” part of an explicit taste strategy, collected many ratings in the late 2000s.

So far, I have focused on defining the overall product strategy for a company. It’s essential that each product leader within an organization also articulate their pod’s strategy. I’ll provide an example from the personalization team at Netflix, circa 2006. At the time, Todd Yellin was the product leader of a group of engineers, designers, and data analysts. (Today, Todd is VP of Product Innovation at Netflix.)

#7 The Product Roadmap

A roadmap is an expression of your strategy. It shows how projects fit together, along with a rough time estimate

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·3 min read

I’m a lover of Bojack Horseman.

Roadmaps are a richly debated topic. On the one hand, they help teams to see how all the projects fit together. And with technology teams, who have long lead-time projects, it’s good to have advance notice of upcoming projects. On the other hand, a four-quarter roadmap provides false confidence, given uncertainty about what will work or not. It’s especially hard to guess the timing of projects, given this uncertainty.

#4 Proxy Metrics

How to define a metric to prove or disprove your hypotheses and measure progress

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·6 min read

At Netflix, the metric we used to evaluate overall product quality was monthly retention. This high-level product engagement metric improved significantly over twenty years. In the early days, about 10% of members canceled each month. In 2005 the monthly cancel rate was around 4.5%. Today, it’s close to 2%.

#2 From DHM to Product Strategy

You have ideas to delight customers, to build hard to copy advantages and experiment with your business model. Now what?

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·5 min read

In 2007, Netflix’s exclusive content effort, “Red Envelope Studios,” failed. But by 2012, with its economies of scale, Netflix had a hard to copy advantage through its original content.

The next step is to tease out high-level hypotheses that combine delight, hard to copy advantage, and margin. Achieving two or three of these objectives with a single strategy is at the heart of an effective product strategy.

#1 The DHM Model

Product strategy answers the question, “How will your product delight customers, in hard to copy, margin-enhancing ways?”

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·6 min read

The audience at my Product Strategy Workshop at TomTom in Amsterdam

When I join a company as a product leader, advisor, or board member, I brainstorm ideas to answer three questions:

1. How will the product delight customers?

2. What will make the product hard to copy?

   (more…)

#3 The Strategy/Metric/Tactic Lockup

How to assign metrics and tactics to each product strategy.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·2 min read

Learning comes from equal part success and failure. Above, John Oliver reflects on Netflix’s failed attempt to separate its DVD-by-mail and streaming services, and the failure of “Qwikster.”

In 2005, Netflix explored six key product strategies. For each strategy, we had a team focused on experiments to prove or disprove each theory. Here’s the 2005 high-level product strategy for Netflix, coupled with metrics and tactics/projects:

#5 Working Bottom-up

Scan your project list to identify themes and define your product strategy.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·2 min read

Teams at Glassdoor define their product strategy at one of my Product Strategy workshops.

The key to the Strategy/Metric/Tactic lockup is to identify a high-level product strategy, assign a proxy metric to measure the strategy’s effectiveness, then brainstorm a set of projects that will move the metric. If you get “stuck,” however, sometimes it helps to turn this process on its head.

#10 The Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting

#10 How to Run A Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting

How to keep strategy “front and center” and accelerate both results & learning.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 11, 2019·6 min read

That’s me, many years ago at the end of a Netflix Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting. (Photo: Michael Rubin.)

As companies grow, one of the critical challenges is to keep everyone aligned. Product strategy helps folks to stay on the same page, but I’ve learned to overcommunicate to ensure the strategy is fully understood and remembered. My peers describe my communication style as “Lather, Rinse, Repeat,” which is a fair assessment.

#8 The GLEe Model. A long-term, phased approach to create… | by Gibson Biddle | Medium

A long-term phased approach to crafting a product vision.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 12, 2019·6 min read

I confess. One of my guilty pleasures on Netflix is “Glee.”

As companies grow, there are a few common criticisms about the product strategy:

• Teams see and understand the projects, but not how they fit together.
• Investors complain that there’s not a big enough product vision.
• The product team feels too focused on the short-term.

The GLEe model helps product leaders to form a product vision to address these criticisms. The model encourages teams to think big, think long-term, and describes a phased, step-by-step approach to build a product that “dents the universe.”

#9 The GEM Model

Prioritizing growth, engagement, and monetization to keep organizations aligned.

Gibson Biddle

Jul 12, 2019·3 min read

That’s me, explaining the GEM model at our Product Leader Summit in 2018, using Chegg as an example.

As companies grow, product strategy helps teams maintain focus. But misalignment, especially across product, marketing, sales, and finance, happens often. One of the biggest causes is differing opinions on how to prioritize growth, engagement, and monetization. The GEM model forces cross-functional teams to prioritize these factors and helps build a metrics-focused organization.

The Mysterious Story of the Man from Taured | by Trevor Mahoney | Predict | Medium

If you woke up one morning and started to go about your business, only to realize a few small things weren’t quite right, what would you do?

Your warm coffee maker has been replaced with a metallic looking object with a green liquid inside. You could have…

100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying

1 Exercise on a Monday night (nothing fun happens on a Monday night).

2 On the fence about a purchase? Wait 72 hours before you buy it.

3 Tip: the quickest supermarket queue is always behind the fullest trolley (greeting, paying and packing take longer than you think).

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Great Engineering Teams Focus on Milestones Instead of Projects

Most engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. They should focus on milestones instead.

Managing projects is hard. Companies contort themselves to do it well. Instead of playing chess, switch to checkers. Milestones are an easier game, and you get better results.

More importantly, milestones unlock powerful behavior. One example is project shaping. Milestones make it easy to play with the contours of a project.

On Schelling Points in Organizations

Tapping into the emergent undercurrents of coordination

Alex Komoroske

Dec 13, 2021·23 min read

The Coordination Headwind (AKA why organizations are like slime molds, AKA that deck with all of the 🧫🕸🏆) tells the story of how even in the best organizations — with individuals who are good at what they do, hard-working, and collaborative — situations still arise where it’s nearly impossible to get anything done.

Conflict Resolution Diagram | Untools

Handling conflicts carefully is important. Conflict Resolution Diagram (also called “Evaporating Cloud”) is a tool that will help you resolve them peacefully while making sure that needs of both sides are met.

It’s one of the thinking tools developed as part of the Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt. Let’s see how it works.

How to use it

The best time to use this tool is when you run into a conflict that seems impossible to resolve by accepting the proposal of either side. This can be a conflict with others but also internal. It can be professional or personal. You can draw the diagram on a whiteboard, piece of paper or run through it in your head.

Hard Edges, Soft Middle

Have you had that feeling of being several weeks into a project, and you find yourself wandering around, struggling to wrangle the scope back to what you thought it was when you started?

It’s an easy trap to fall into. It’s why I’m always thinking about ways to make targets smaller (or closer, if you’re thinking about real physical targets). The bigger and more ambitious you want to be with an objective, the more confidence you need to have that the objective is the right one. What happens often is we decide a project scope — a feature or product prototype we think has legs — but the scope gets bigger than the confidence that we’re right. A few weeks in and there’s hedging, backtracking, redefining. You realize you went down a blind alley that’s hard to double-back on.

Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

Marianne Bellotti

Dec 20, 2021·8 min read

Knowing where to look for problems by figuring out who reports up to whom

“Let’s see…. no backups, twenty convoluted stored procedures and old C++ code”

After a couple years in government I used to blow peoples’ minds with a fairly simple party trick. Before going into our first meeting with a new agency stakeholder I would predict several key details of what their problems were going to be. All I needed was the name and title of the person we were meeting.

Lead by Leading

Managers have to wait for permission, because management requires authority.

But in every area of our lives, if we choose to lead, we can lead. Simply by beginning.

It might be that few will choose to follow, but then we can learn to get better at leading.

First we begin.

The web3 stack: how web3 will offer superior UX than web2 | by Polynya | Medium

Polynya

Oct 30·5 min read

Please note that this is my semi-informed opinion, and only one possible outcome on how web3 plays out.

A lot of web3 skeptics are quick to criticize the terrible UX. Even web3 advocates have often conceded that UX may not be as good, but we’ll make up for it with the nice properties enabled by decentralization. Turns out, all of the building blocks for better UX than web2 already exists, and in this post, I’ll attempt to put it all together to give a clearer vision of one possible outcome where web3 out-UXs web2.