Why Your New Strategy Will Fail

As organizational transformation consultants, we’re often invited to help functions, departments, and teams of all kinds within massive enterprises recover from failed strategy implementations. Regardless of the industry or organization, the narrative of each failure follows a familiar arc. A “new strategy” is developed over several months of backbreaking creative and consensus-building efforts. It ultimately results in a key artifact (usually an exceedingly beautiful deck of slides) that clearly articulates a smart and cogent shift in priority. There is (seemingly) buy-in from all the key players and generally a sense of, “Okay, this makes sense. Now we just have to implement it.” Inevitably, the strategy fails to manifest in any major positive changes and after 18–36 months of middling returns, it’s decided that a shift in strategy is needed and the cycle begins anew.

Why Your One-On-One’s Should Probably Be Longer

Don Neufeld Mar 25 · 5 min read

As an Engineering Manager, one-on-ones with your team members are a core responsibility of your role, and often one of the largest consumers of your time.

As a leadership coach, I often work with individuals who are struggling with their calendars. One of the most effective ways to improve their effectiveness is to re-evaluate how they are scheduling their one-on-ones.

Why “Standups” are Useless and How to Run Great Product Team Meetings

Andy Johns Oct 14, 2019 · 11 min read

The majority of meetings are a waste of time. And in my opinion, one flavor of meeting that tops the charts in uselessness is the “status update” meeting. You know this meeting — the meeting where everyone gets together to share what they’ve been doing. It’s ironic that meetings like this exist because it gets in the way of people actually doing something productive. A cross-functional group of people (product, design, engineering, marketing and so on) working on a new product doesn’t greatly benefit from status updates.

Career Development: What It Really Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping them. (See Get Rid of the Performance Review.)

Another practice I’m not hugely fond of is “leveling” — the creation of a set of granular levels to classify jobs across the organization. Leveling typically results in something that looks like this:

Harnessing Everyday Genius

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Idea in Brief

The Problem

The number of “good jobs” in the United States and other countries is declining despite sustained government and policy efforts.

Why It Happens

There is a widespread assumption that low-wage jobs are filled with minimally capable people—a prejudice that has denied millions of employees the opportunity to enhance their skills and use their brains.

The Solution

Companies like Michelin have challenged that mindset and dramatically increased the authority and accountability of workers on the front lines. Michelin kick-started this change through a bottom-up process involving targeted experiments in select plants and eventually scaled up the most successful approaches across the organization.

Thinking Subtractively – Simple Thread

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In some news from my backyard, UVA researchers at the Batten School and the school of Engineering recently published an interesting paper in Nature: People systematically overlook subtractive changes.

The gist is that when people are looking at a problem and thinking about solutions, we typically think of adding something to solve the problem – even when removing something is an easier, simpler solution.

The Art of Self-Organizing Engineering Teams

So, it is no wonder that we want to know what makes those teams special. A few ideas that come to mind right away are:

• Everybody on the team is a genius and top of their class
• The team’s manager is able to perfectly define and scope the work
• Everybody is paid lots of money for the successful completion of their work.

All of the above scenarios might help, but none of them guarantee high performance. More important for the success of the team is how well people work together. It is the collective intelligence that counts.

35 Principles for 35 Years

I turn 35 today. Here are 35 principles I have accumulated and try to live by (you can listen to the narrated version here):

1. Life is too Short for Short Term Games. We only have so many years for long term games to compound.
2. Writing is Stupendously High Leverage.

• It helps to organize my thoughts and learning (aka Building My Second Brain). I win even if nobody reads me.
• It enables me to share great ideas even while I sleep (as a Friendcatcher). I am constantly shocked at the caliber of people that read my work and DM me their thoughts. There is absolutely no other way I would be on their radar.
• Blogging helped me sell $4k worth of an empty PDF on the day I decided to write my book because people trusted me.
• It’s led to multiple job opportunities from great companies (e.g. Netlify, AWS, Temporal) that I would have otherwise struggled to be hired at.

1. Learn in Public. Most of you know me for this one… (read up if you’re new round here, welcome!)
2. Good Enough is Better than Best. In a world of infinite abundance, you can lose yourself constantly chasing the hottest new thing. Satisfice rather than Maximize.
3. Less is More. Minimalism wins: Subtracting is harder than Adding. Quantity reduces perceived quality. Depth and whitespace stand out. (yes I realize the irony of this principle in a list of 35)
4. Create Clarity. Simple Explanations of What, Why, and How are extremely underrated and extremely useful. This is also a core skill of all leaders.
5. Optimize for Change. Optimizing for anything else tends to make systems MORE fragile, not less. If you learn only one lesson from React and GraphQL, learn this. https://overreacted.io/optimized-for-change/
6. Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood. Don’t get defensive about your point of view or perception of reality – understand theirs first. Either you will learn something new or you’ll understand how to better get your point across. Hold multiple perspectives in your head and be able to summarize the best arguments of all major parties in a way that THEY agree with.
7. Praise in Public, Criticize in Private.

• As satisfying as it might be to dump on someone publicly, I need to remember how it makes them feel.
• Everything is not awesome, and I despise fake positivity. But I can either help or make them feel bad about it and the former is more effective than the latter.
• Exception for companies and people that are actively harming or misleading the vulnerable.

1. Build an Empathy Check Habit. I can’t take back an impulsive response that hurts someone. When I can’t check with trusted friends, I need to think before I tweet.
2. People remember how you made them feel, before what you said. A good story has more power than a good argument.
3. Treat Others How They Want To Be Treated. The Golden Rule is -sadly- not good enough when your privilege is higher or expectations are lower than others’. Time for The Platinum Rule.
4. Complete Truths are Not Welcome.

• Most people are more interested in…
  • being entertained
  • sharing outrage
  • feeling good about themselves
  • defending their reputation
• …than debating truth or improving themselves.
• Trying to change them is ineffectual.
• Let them be, and seek out like minds.

1. Organize IRL Events. You can do a lot to create excitement and connection in a community simply by organizing dinners and meetups and conferences. Svelte Society started on a whim exactly like this. Now there are thousands of members drawn to the Svelte community that wouldn’t have before.
2. Don’t offer unsolicited help. Make Sure Help Is Wanted Before Offering It. Men – be especially wary about this when women are talking about their problems. Sometimes they just need support, not solutions. (But sometimes it really IS about The Nail…)
3. Ask For Help More. People are happy to help and like you more when they have helped you. Don’t worry about showing weakness; you are getting something far more valuable in return. Use a Help Timeout.
4. Log Your Wins. e.g. when you ship something big or small, or when someone says nice things about you. They can help when you are feeling emotionally down, or when writing a brag document. Help others celebrate their wins too. P.S. a brag slack channel can serve as an OLTP store of personal wins.
5. Don’t End The Week With Nothing. The reason you don’t see any of my work prior to 2017 is because I thought it was sufficient to just work hard at my finance job. Now all of my intellectual output from my 20’s – some of the best research and writing I have ever done – is locked up in some mailbox somewhere. Never again.
6. Pick Up What They Put Down. Guarantee feedback by giving feedback. https://www.swyx.io/PUWTPD
7. Speak Succinctly. Stop speaking in trailing sentences and double-barreled questions. Set the general direction and shut up. If they’re off-track, interject. This is preferable to preempting all conversation paths to show how smart you are.
8. Optimize for Retention, not Consumption. We are the sum total of still-relevant knowledge we still remember, not the total of the volume of content we consume.
9. Illustrate Your Point. Adding code samples or drawing 2×2’s and system diagrams makes your idea much more effective. A picture IS worth a thousand words! Even this shitty example works, you can do better than me.
10. Separate Your Identity from Your Work. You can learn a lot on the Internet for the low, low price of $YOUR_EGO.
11. Build Tools For Yourself. This is a superpower and a sandbox all rolled in one that is guaranteed to make you happy.
12. Collect Questions

• Obsess on collecting good answers and you might be precise but irrelevant.
• Obsess on collecting good questions and you will be approximately right.
• My Work-in-Progress list of questions here, but see also the Reverse Interview repo and Feynman’s 12 Problems.

1. Systems > Goals. “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear
2. Play Games You Cannot Win. Our world is full of “winnable” games – likes, retweets, #1 of the day, employee of the month. External motivators destroy our intrinsic drive. You don’t play infinite games to win. Only way to keep childlike creativity is to play games that you cannot win.
3. Use Your Calendar as a Todo List. Normal todo lists don’t force you to make tradeoffs. Sequence your work, set limits, and know when to decline or delegate tasks. When time block planning, eat your frog: Put First Things First.
4. Practice Stoicism. It’ll never stay as great as you want, it’s never really as bad as you feel. This, too, shall pass.
5. Have a Productivity Keystone. If you start a day unproductive, you are extremely likely to be unproductive the rest of the day. Instead, start off with something productive that you do every morning, you reinforce the idea that today is going to be a productive day.
6. Incorporate. Companies pay expenses before taxes, People pay taxes before expenses. (Singapore is pretty great if you have this choice).
7. Stay in the Game. Berkshire Hathaway originally had a third partner, Rick Guerin. He got caught out with margin loans and had to sell out. Warren and Charlie survived 14 recessions. https://www.swyx.io/psychology-of-money/
8. Don’t Skimp On Your Equipment. Spending a few hundred dollars on your keyboard and monitor setup will save tens of thousands of physiotherapy and pain in future.
9. Earn White Collar, Spend Blue Collar. Don’t let your expenses rise as fast as your income – you probably don’t need what you’re thinking of buying. Spend part of your white collar income making up for white collar downsides – gym, group classes, personal trainer.
10. Always Turn Lessons To Principles. When we make mistakes or have great success, we should form them into principles so we can write them down and learn from or repeat them. It is the only way for past versions of you to communicate lessons to future you.

The full thread and discussions are here:

The Paradox of Genius: Why Long-Term Thinking Wins

by James Currier (@JamesCurrier). James is a General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage venture firm headquartered in San Francisco.

By necessity, Founders are rooted in the “here and now” mental framework required for launching a new startup.

But *great* Founders do something different at the same time: They are obsessed with what will endure 10 or 50 years from now.

Kevin Kelly helps you rise to that level. He is the legendary tech thinker who lives in the future — he co-founded Wired back in 1994 when only a few saw the digital revolution coming. In his best-selling books he told us all our future before it happened (The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and New Rules For The New Economy).

I Could Build This During the Weekend

Every time people buy a new house, car, or TV, they say lovely things first. It’s the honeymoon phase. Then, they realize their expensive, fancy stuff has flaws too. Engineers tend to take it one step further. We enter solution mode and start thinking about solutions for those flaws and how we’d design those items. We are so intelligent. We’d make it better, wouldn’t we? However, when we do this kind of analysis, we may miss the context. Maybe the folks responsible for the design had constraints. It can be a tight timeline, low-quality, or too-expensive materials. Sometimes, it’s a waterfall process, and it’s too late or too expensive to fix it. We often ignore how most people prefer to have something that works rather than something perfect. There are plenty of reasons why some things are flawed or, at least, they look one order of magnitude more complicated than they should be. I still remember when Andrew Houston submitted Dropbox on Hackernews. The first and most infamous comment read like this:

Crazy New Ideas

May 2021

There’s one kind of opinion I’d be very afraid to express publicly.

If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person

proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I’d be very reluctant

to say “That will never work.”

Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the

history of science, knows that’s how big things start. Someone

proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then

The Other Side of Languishing Is Flourishing. Here’s How to Get There.

Research shows that the pandemic took a toll on our overall well-being and left many of us drained. Here are seven simple steps to get you thriving again.

The New York Times

3 days ago·7 min read

A Guide to Better Meetings

Dick Brouwer

Dec 6, 2018·6 min read

“Meetings are useless”

Do you also hear that all the time? But stepping back, that’s like saying “screwdrivers are bad”. Meetings are a tool, and they are indispensable for effective, transparent communication.

Transparency is critical if you want to build trust in your organization. I have been in situations where “coffee walks” were the norm. As a result, information was delivered to each individual slightly differently. This information asymmetry generates distrust in the organization and its leadership. As the saying goes “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair”. Transparent communication is a cornerstone of building trust. Distributing information in meetings that involve all relevant stakeholders is essential if you want to build trust. A friend who works at a successful analytics company even told me that “we don’t do meetings, everything is communicated in one-on-ones”. This is a sure way to inject unnecessary politics into an organization. Meetings are a tool to direct verbal and non-verbal information flow between stakeholders.

Remote work culture: Lessons from top companies – NoHQ Remote Work Guides

Are you looking to understand — and improve — your remote work culture?

While useful, digital tools are not stand-ins for remote work culture. Many remote work employers start with tools and leave culture for last, mistaking Slack, Zoom, and Calendly as their company “culture.”

Factors such as different employee cultural backgrounds, nationalities, life experiences, and more can make constructing and supporting a digital-first team difficult. This is where the importance of your remote culture comes in: a thriving company culture is what allows remote work companies to develop a well-oiled team that runs on its own.

The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth – Michelle Nijhuis | Aeon Essays

Locals at the Marienfluss Conservancy in Namibia meet to discuss conservation. Photo courtesy of NACSO/WWF Namibia

In December 1968, the ecologist and biologist Garrett Hardin had an essay published in the journal Science called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. His proposition was simple and unsparing: humans, when left to their own devices, compete with one another for resources until the resources run out. ‘Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest,’ he wrote. ‘Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.’ Hardin’s argument made intuitive sense, and provided a temptingly simple explanation for catastrophes of all kinds – traffic jams, dirty public toilets, species extinction. His essay, widely read and accepted, would become one of the most-cited scientific papers of all time.

Inside Elon Musk’s plan to build one Starship a week—and settle Mars | Ars Technica

Enlarge / Three barrels welded together are lowered onto a pressure dome for SN2 at the South Texas Launch Site this week.

BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—How badly does Elon Musk want to get to Mars? Let me tell you a story. On Sunday, February 23, Musk called an all-hands meeting at the South Texas site where SpaceX is building his Starship spacecraft.

The Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure

As an industry, we’ve gotten exceptionally good at building large, complex software systems. We’re now starting to see the rise of massive, complex systems built around data – where the primary business value of the system comes from the analysis of data, rather than the software directly. We’re seeing quick-moving impacts of this trend across the industry, including the emergence of new roles, shifts in customer spending, and the emergence of new startups providing infrastructure and tooling around data.

Your brain on progress – Increment: Reliability

My favorite engineering role was working on web page performance at Etsy. My team and I made tweaks, found small opportunities for page load time improvement, and shipped incremental updates that made the site—often imperceptibly—faster.

Management work often consists of building up your team’s resilience to organizational storms.

But no matter how small the improvement we made to site speed, you could see it on our dashboards. The graphs, they were glorious. We celebrated changes in milliseconds! We even created an internal site to acknowledge “performance heroes” on other teams, complete with graphs that illustrated our coworkers’ site performance improvements and descriptions of their implemented solutions. We’d email every designer and developer at Etsy when we updated the dashboard with a new hero so everyone could chime in and high five the person who’d improved the site.

The Process Is Not the Product — The Software Methodology Anti-Manifesto.

The Process is not the Product — The Software Methodology Anti-Manifesto.

Michael Karliner

Feb 20·3 min read

TLDR;
TheSoftware Methodology Anti-Manifesto – The Process is not the Product
– Leading not Managing
– Dialog not Dictation

That’s it, you can work out the rest for youselves, but for those of you who want to, read on.

The Process is not the ProductIn a (very) long technical career, I must have been exposed to the majority of software methodologies, and experience has shown that they are, by and large, more of a liability than a help. In fact, I’ll go further and say that I think that too much methodology is much more dangerous that too little. However, the cult of the One True Methodology continues to thrive, and it worth taking a few moments to consider why.

Engineering Productivity Can Be Measured – Just Not How You’d Expect

From each of our two experiences starting out as introductory-level engineers at Box, to becoming first-time managers overseeing five-person teams, then directors overseeing 30-50, and ultimately VPs managing hundreds, we’ve experienced software engineering from every angle.

At every step of the way, we asked ourselves: “how do we know if we are bringing value as engineering leaders?” Effective leadership uniquely blends human qualities – influence, empathy, courage, and results. This latter quality always brings the question of productivity – how effective are you at producing results through enabling others?

Execute Like a Rookie, Lead Like a Multiplier | First Round Review

In 1989, Liz Wiseman took her first job out of business school at a mid-size startup called Oracle. With no previous experience, she was recruited as a technical trainer, charged with teaching programming to all of the company’s new engineering recruits. She admits she barely knew what the company did, much less how to teach engineers. A year later, she was promoted to manage the training department and make CEO Larry Ellison‘s vision for what he called ‘Oracle University’ a reality. She was 24.

How to Prepare for a “Megadisaster” | Columbia Magazine

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, the director of Columbia’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, discusses the cataclysmic events that may threaten our future and how planning and research can help save us.

What does your work entail?

The center’s mission is to conduct research that helps the US prevent, prepare for, and respond to natural and human-driven disasters. Our faculty and staff investigate nearly all aspects of the country’s capacity for dealing with disasters, from the readiness of governmental and nongovernmental organizations to the effectiveness of on-the-ground emergency-response strategies to public awareness of disaster risk.

Ringelmann effect – Wikipedia

A tug of war is often used as an illustration of the Ringelmann effect. As more people are involved in a task, their average performance decreases, each participant tending to feel that their own effort is not critical.

The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. This effect, discovered by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931), illustrates the inverse relationship that exists between the size of a group and the magnitude of group members’ individual contribution to the completion of a task. While studying the relationship between process loss (i.e., reductions in performance effectiveness or efficiency) and group productivity, Ringelmann (1913) found that having group members work together on a task (e.g., pulling a rope) actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone. Ringelmann discovered that as more and more people are added to a group, the group often becomes increasingly inefficient, ultimately violating the notion that group effort and team participation reliably leads to increased effort on behalf of the members.

How to Hire an Engineering Manager: From Within or Without?

Hiring, onboarding & retention

Posted: 19 April 2021

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Who were we and what were we thinking? A return to offices frozen in time.

Ellery Frahm is an archaeologist who unearths artifacts spanning half a million years of human history, all around the globe. But he recently unearthed a perplexing ancient artifact close to home. It was a Post-it note from last March, recovered from the debris of his Yale University office.

Written on it? A phone number. Whose number? A mystery.

Director to VP Engineering: What Is Expected and How to Prepare?

Director to VP Engineering: what is expected and how to prepare?

Director to VP of Engineering

A lot of engineering leaders made it to the director level and now wonder what it looks like at a VP level, and even more importantly, how to prepare for that level in day to day job as a director.

I was there and shared the same curiosity. Now that I took both a senior director role in a $1.5B unicorn startup and a VP role in a seed stage company, I am glad to share thoughts on this topic.

7 Reasons to Get Serious About Your Open-Source Strategy

Does your company help steer the open-source projects it relies on? Would in-house software projects benefit from outside contributors? Is there somebody in the organization responsible for answering those questions?

These days, admitting that open source is a viable software-development model isn’t enough. Companies also have to set open-source strategies that make sense for their technical and business goals.

Cheryl Hung, VP of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation, heads up the foundation’s community of users and advises startups about their open-source strategies. Often, she told me, companies’ open-source programs are entirely bottom up, with individual developers taking the reins. That’s not a bad thing, but more organized programs can help companies make the most of developers’ time — and the available open-source tools.

Solve the Product Maze Backwards | Psychohistory

As the father of young children, I can tell you that there is a special place in my heart for restaurants that provide puzzles and crayons for small children to pass the time.

On a recent trip out to The Counter in Mountain View, Jordan (who is 8) was really struggling with a large maze puzzle on one of these activity sheets. It was a fairly large maze, and he was frustrated by his inability to see the dead ends ahead, forcing him to retrace his somewhat tortured crayon path.

Robin Rendle › Newsletters

Robin Rendle ∙ January 2021

Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me

My friend Lucy once told me that she falls in love with the way that someone thinks…

…and that’s what newsletters make possible for me; they’re a record of how strangers see the world.

Newsletters give me permission to fall in love with someone I’ll never meet…

Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving

Consider the Lego structure depicted in Figure 1, in which a figurine is placed under a roof supported by a single pillar at one corner. How would you change this structure so that you could put a masonry brick on top of it without crushing the figurine, bearing in mind that each block added costs 10 cents? If you are like most participants in a study reported by Adams et al. in Nature, you would add pillars to better support the roof. But a simpler (and cheaper) solution would be to remove the existing pillar, and let the roof simply rest on the base. Across a series of similar experiments, the authors observe that people consistently consider changes that add components over those that subtract them — a tendency that has broad implications for everyday decision-making.

We mentor early-career developers. Here’s what they need to succeed.

Note: This article first appeared on LinkedIn.

Knowing how to code is just one aspect of being a professional web developer. Another super important skill is knowing how to collaborate effectively on a software team. Most coding bootcamps don’t teach this skill or don’t teach it effectively. This leads early-career developers to stumble in interviews and require a lot of ramp up time in their first tech jobs. The Collab Lab is a program Stacie Taylor and I created to help solve this problem.

Blogumentation – Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation

Written by

Jamie Tanna
on June 25, 2017
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

Apache-2.0
4 mins

Blogumentation – Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation

Table of Contents

You may have noticed that recently I’ve been writing more articles, often tagged under blogumentation. These short articles are concerned with documenting a piece of information about certain workflow-enhancing tips, and I find they fit under a term I have coined blogumentation, that is, blog posts as a form of documentation.

“Asynchronous” Working in 2021

“…the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” — Charles Dickens

Inspired by a friend, Sahil Lavingia, and his stance over the last year to work “asynchronously” (aka, instead of having to line up “synchronous” meetings with multiple people, choose somewhat arbitrary time blocks of 30 minutes or 60 minutes, and waiting days for relevant communication to take place when calendars align), I am going to adopt an asynchronous working style in 2021.

The Feynman Technique Can Help You Remember Everything You Read

Books give you access to the smartest brains on our planet. And learning from the greatest thinkers and doers is your fast track to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Yet, reading per se doesn’t elevate your life. You can read 52 books a year without changing at all.

Member Brief: It’s Not Us, It’s Them

This report is supported by 2PM’s Executive Membership and is temporarily unlocked for the Monday letter. To be a part of what we’re building, you can join here: The Executive Membership.

The concept of opportunity is deeply personal to me. Opportunity is earned through hard work, proximity, favor, and luck. For many, luck is the variable that wavers. But for others, it is often proximity. One of the last obstacles in eCommerce is the democratization of access and proximity to opportunity.

A framework for balancing and budgeting engineering resourcing | by Matt Eccleston | Engineering Operations | Medium

Matt Eccleston Jun 25, 2020 · 13 min read

Matt Eccleston formerly served as VP of Engineering and Growth at Dropbox, and from 2013–2019 helped the company scale from hundreds to thousands of employees. Prior to that, Matt spent 13 years in various Engineering leadership positions at VMware, helping it scale from tens to tens of thousands. Matt now advises late stage startups as part of ICONIQ Growth’s Technical Advisory Board. Balancing and budgeting engineering resourcing as a company scales is one of the most frequent topics that comes up.

(more…)

American Idle — Remains of the Day

I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity. And this is that, in part. But it discusses a bunch of other topics, some only tangentially related to TikTok.

All the points I wanted to cover seem hyperlinked in a sprawling loose tangle. This could easily have been several standalone posts. I’ve been stuck on how to structure it.

People are spending millions on NFTs. What? Why?

Image: Cryptokitties.co

There’s nothing like an explosion of blockchain news to leave you thinking, “Um… what’s going on here?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being sold as one. And by the time we all thought we sort of knew what the deal was, the founder of Twitter put an autographed tweet up for sale as an NFT.

Open Source: From Community to Commercialization

Editor’s Note: The open source software (OSS) movement has created some of our most important and widely used technologies, including operating systems, web browsers, and databases. Our world would not function, or at least not function as well, without open source software.

While open source has delivered amazing technological innovation, commercial innovation – most recently and notably the rise of software-as-a-service – has been just as vital to the success of the movement. And since open source is by definition software that is free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute, open source businesses have required different models and a different go to market than other kinds of software companies.

Google Aims to Be the Anti-Amazon of E-Commerce. It Has a Long Way to Go. – The New York Times

Google presents itself to independent sellers as cheaper and less restrictive. But it is not clear whether it can change people’s habits of going straight to Amazon.

When Fritzy’s Roller Skate Shop in San Diego set up a storefront on Shopify, the owner linked her Shopify account to Google’s retail software.Credit…John Francis Peters for The New York Times

Companies are about to get pelted by employee turnover as the pandemic ends – Axios

Millions of workers are planning to jump to new jobs or new lines of work after the pandemic eases up.

Why it matters: High-skilled workers with plenty of opportunities are the hardest to replace. This massive reshuffling also will create major headaches for employers, and will likely expand the gaps between men and women in the workplace.

You Might Not Realize How Much You Miss the Office

How to Build a Life

Switching to Zoom forever might be convenient, but it’s a recipe for loneliness.

Arthur C. Brooks

April 1, 2021

JAN BUCHCZIK

” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

Arthur C. Brooks will discuss the science of happiness live at 11 a.m. ET on May 20. Register for In Pursuit of Happiness here.

Fifth-Generation Management

In today’s episode, I want to talk about an idea I call fifth-generation management.

1/ Fifth-generation management is an emerging style of management we don’t know much about because it doesn’t actually exist yet. But it is guaranteed to emerge post-Covid because historically, big sharp disruptions have reliably triggered discontinuous changes in management culture, and it is already clear that this one is doing that.

2/ The idea of generations in management, in the form I’m going to lay it out, is causally related to the idea of generations of warfare, and in particular the idea that contemporary styles of warfare strongly shape future styles of management. So if there are generations in warfare, they are going to cause generations in management. Military ideas are not the only cause of course, but I’m going to argue that historically they’ve been the strongest one. Strong enough to almost be determinative. During WW2 for instance, business and military culture became almost the same thing for a few years.

Things Your Manager Might Not Know

When people talk about “managing up”, sometimes it’s framed as a bad thing –

massaging the ego of people in charge so that they treat you well.

In my experience, managing up is usually a lot more practical. Your manager

doesn’t (and can’t!) know every single detail about what you do in your job,

and being aware of what they might not know and giving them the information

What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App

I spent the last week building an App for the Shopify Marketplace. It was unlike anything I’ve done before on the Web. Knowing some of the things I’m going to share, before you start building, could save you some headache.

Here is the summary of my experience, more details below.

Key insights

• They expect you to make a onepage application (SPA)
• The polaris design system officially only supports react
• Integration with the shop frontend is difficult if you’re not making a theme
• Integrating functionality via webhooks is more tedious than it needs to be
• Payments are simple to implement, once you understand how
• The API is constantly changing in big ways
• The API is surprisingly unreliable
• Backend reliability isn’t great
• Local development of integrated apps is hard
• Modifying the checkout is not possible

They expect you to make a onepage application

Once you start studying the documentation and examples you’ll quickly notice all the examples use NodeJS and React. No big deal, right? That’s what’s all the rage these days, so it makes sense to build the docs to match that.

The Passion Economy and the Future of Work – Li Jin

Also published on a16z.com

The top-earning writer on the paid newsletter platform Substack earns more than $500,000 a year from reader subscriptions. The top content creator on Podia, a platform for video courses and digital memberships, makes more than $100,000 a month. And teachers across the US are bringing in thousands of dollars a month teaching live, virtual classes on Outschool and Juni Learning.

Those Pesky Pull Request Reviews

They’re everywhere. In Slack: “hey, can I get a review on this?” In email: “Your review is requested!” In JIRA: “8 user stories In-Progress” (but code-complete). In your repository: 5 open pull requests. They’re slowing your delivery. They’re interrupting your developers.

How can we get people to review pull requests faster??

We could blame the people. We could nag them more. We could even automate the nagging!

Building Products at Airbnb

“Snow White Storyboards” at Airbnb

I asked Bring the Donuts readers to tell me more about the product culture at their own companies. I figured I’d get a handful of volunteers that I could interview. Instead, more than 150 of you offered up detailed thoughts and observations from a diverse set of companies. There are familiar big tech names, of course, but also startups, non-tech companies, and even government agencies. I’m overwhelmed by your response and grateful.

Making the case to decision makers: the presentation format to follow

I wrote before about the five questions you should be asking yourself before putting together a presentation. These questions should offer guidance on what you need to think about as you prepare your content, but they don’t offer a simple format to articulate that content well.

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a good amount of time presenting to our executive leadership team. A couple of years ago, one of these presentations was directly to our CEO. As I prepared for it, I spent dozens of hours, 50 different presentation styles and outlines, and many different pre-meetings to test out my template until I came around to this one. Since then, I’ve been using this as my guiding format to build the case for decisions makers. It’s also the format that runs in my head as I get a presentation where I need to make a call.

Bidenomics, explained

“When the formula stops working, you change the formula.” — Arin Hanson

“The era of ‘big government is over’ is over.” — James Medlock

I know this post has a very Vox-like title, but in fact I’m not going to go through Biden’s new infrastructure plan point by point and tell you what’s in it. if you want that, you can check out the actual Vox explainer, or the always-excellent writeup by the WaPo’s Jeff Stein et al. You can also check out Brad DeLong’s thoughts and David Roberts’ deep dive into the climate aspects. I’m sure there will be more in the days to come, and I’ll have plenty of thoughts on the specific provisions as well.

The Let-Down Effect: Why You Might Feel Bad After the Pressure Is Off | Wellness | US News

How to Successfully Join a Company as Engineering Manager

Shut up and listen

Before joining the company, a friend, who’s also kind of a mentor, gave me invaluable advice: “Use the first three months to learn as much as you can about the organization and its culture, decision-making methodologies, processes, ownership, development cycle, and more. Observe, ask many questions, document, but keep feedback and suggestions for changes to yourself.”

If you knew me, you’d know that this isn’t my nature, yet I followed his advice. I resisted the urge of pointing out problems that seemed crucial because I knew I didn’t have the full picture. It’s a good thing I did, because many times, these problems turned out to be marginal when I became aware of the greater context. I kept reminding myself not to try to fix things that are not broken, simply because I’m used to doing them differently.

A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother

Energy loss in your daily life is just like heat leaking out of a badly sealed house. Credit: Passivhaus Institut, CC BY-SA

Life is full of small decisions: Should I pick up that sock on the floor? Should I do the dishes before bed? What about fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom?

Leaving a sock on the ground is a manifestation of a concept from physics you may have heard of: entropy. Entropy is a measure of how much energy is lost in a system. If a system loses too much energy, it will disintegrate into chaos. It takes only a little bit of energy to pick up one sock. But if you don’t take care of your yard, let pipes stay clogged and never fix electrical problems, it all adds up to a chaotic home that would take a lot of energy to fix. And that chaos will leach away your time and ability to accomplish other things.

The Elusive Pursuit of Getting It (all) Done

20 Mar The elusive pursuit of getting it (all) done

Posted at 12:37h in Blog by

Growing up, my French-speaking parents always warned me about having “plus de gueule que de sac.”

While the Google translation is entertaining, English has its own version: “Having eyes bigger than your stomach.” Growing up, this idiom always stayed with me, whether it was at the all-you-can-eat hotel buffet or a post-soccer practice McDonalds run.

Healthy Goals

Goal Setting by Julian Cutler

I worked with a manager once who explained his rationale behind goal-setting:

Without goals, no one will do anything! There’s no accountability on the team. People don’t take their commitments seriously. They give me silly excuses. Whenever I turn around, they are chatting on Slack or on Reddit. I’m not sure what they do all day. It feels like we are going in circles. Without goals, it will be impossible to keep score, and if I need to manage someone out, it will be hard! So yes, goals are important!

(more…)

Outgrowing software — Benedict Evans

Ten years ago Marc Andreessen wrote an article in the WSJ called ‘Software is eating the world’, arguing that there was a fundamental shift in the role that software plays in the economy. In the past, IBM, Oracle or Microsoft sold technology to other companies, as a tool. They sold computers and software to GE, P&G and Citibank. Now there’s a generation of companies that both create software and use it themselves to enter another industry, and often to change it. Uber and Airbnb don’t sell software to taxi companies and hotel companies, Instacart doesn’t sell software to grocery companies, and Transferwise doesn’t sell software to banks.

Terror in a Boulder supermarket: How the King Soopers shooting unfolded

BOULDER, Colo. — Dean Schiller was nearby shopping when he heard the shots. So Schiller, who regularly live-streams crime scenes on YouTube, hustled over to the entrance of the King Soopers supermarket.

Immediately, he came upon two bodies, sprawled on the pavement.

“Whoa, someone’s down right here,” he narrated. At the store entrance, he asked a man, “Did you see which way the shooter went?”

Presentations — Benedict Evans

The Great Unbundling

Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The Great Unbundling’.

Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind – technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years.

Your Engineering Team Is (probably) Too Big

David Adams Nov 5, 2019 · 5 min read

Source: Rob Curran via Unsplash

Of all the places you can spend money in a tech company, the engineering team is often by far the largest cost-centre. Similar to digital ads, it’s also a place where, if you aren’t careful, you can waste a lot of money.

If less is more, think how much more more would be

Short Fat Engineers Are Undervalued

Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep. They can also be T-shaped—knowing a lot about a little and a little about a lot—but in this metaphor, that’s a compromise. After all, even a T need not have a 1:1 aspect ratio.

Should we prefer either dimension over the other when studying or hiring? Both dimensions can be useful; but breadth gives us perspective, and thus wisdom. On a long enough time line, wisdom is always more valuable than knowledge.

Leading Without Managing

What does it mean to lead when you don’t have coercive power to get your way?

Good managers are often good leaders. But managers don’t have to be good

leaders to get their way because they have authority to make decisions

unilaterally.

What if you don’t have that authority?

Perhaps you’re an individual contributor. Perhaps you are a manager, but

want to show leadership when you’re the junior person in the room. In both

Take Your Full Lunch Break. Schedule Your PTO.

Christina M. Tapper

12 hours ago·3 min read

Photo: Westend61/Getty Images

Many of us are either caught up in multitasking a day’s worth of work (for both for the job and home) or frozen on our couches, trying to make sense of the stunning events of the last year. Our bodies are fatigued; our minds are fogged. And while we may already have an intimate (and unfortunate) relationship with exhaustion due to oppressive societal demands, the indefatigable enervation that we are experiencing is on a whole new level.

Shopify — Benedict Evans

This is an impressive story of entrepreneurship, and of the acceleration of ecommerce in lockdown, but it’s interesting more generally because it illustrates three pretty important trends in tech and ecommerce.

1: “No-one can compete with Amazon”

Shopify isn’t doing what Amazon does – it isn’t competing directly and it wouldn’t fit inside a competition lawyer’s market definition (I wrote more about the market definition challenge here). But it challenges Amazon at a very basic point of leverage by doing something different, but relevant. This is very often what competitive threats look like in technology. In markets with strong network effects or winner-takes-most effects, it’s very hard to displace a new incumbent directly, but pretty common to address an underlying customer need in another way. So, Google doesn’t think about Bing nearly as much as it thinks about Amazon and Facebook, and Amazon thinks about Shopify, because they change what the businesses might be, and offer your customers a different way to solve their problem.

Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

It’s been two weeks since I left Google and I keep getting asked “why did I leave now”? I think the better question is “why did I stay for so long”? When Waze was acquired by Google, most of the people who know me did not believe I would last 7 weeks, let alone 7 years…

So the question of why I stayed has many different aspects to it. When we were evaluating the offers to sell the company, we asked ourselves what would really change by being acquired? Due to a bunch of mistakes early on, we did not own substantial amounts of equity and had a pretty bad relationship with some of our board members. I remember the bottom line: “wouldn’t you rather work for Larry Page than our current board”? We were committed to our mission and saw this as a change in the cap table rather than a change of mission. This counted on the fact that Google had promised us autonomy to continue to act as Waze and we believed them.

Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce

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Teams that don’t communicate. Market disruption. Unidentified logjams. Employee burnout. Lost efficiency. As part of a group of data scientists, management consultants, and engineers at Microsoft, we help companies harness behavioral data to measure and solve these kinds of challenges — the kinds that firms feel but usually cannot see.

Read more on Workspaces

or related topics

Change management,

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) | GitLab

1. You are here:
2. About GitLab
3. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Maintained by:

[ Stella Treas

@streas](https://gitlab.com/streas)

On this page

Most recent OKRs

All our OKRs are public and listed on the pages below.

• FY22-Q2
• FY22-Q1 (active)

What are OKRs?

OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results and are our quarterly objectives.

OKRs are how to achieve the goal of the Key Performance Indicators KPIs.

The Jagged Stones of Dublin

This is a true story about my last trip to Dublin. It happened over two years ago. Some details may have blurred over time. You have my permission to laugh at my discomfort.

Sunny Dublin

I was going to Dublin, Ireland for a payments conference. This was my second trip to Dublin. I love the pub food. I love the Guinness. And I love the people. I think we resonate on a similar frequency. There’s a blue collar, wise-cracking attitude that reminds me of growing up in the Midwest.

Be a Schedule Builder, Not a To-Do List Maker

Imagine you bought a new phone, but at the end of each day, every day, the operating system crashed. Would you keep using the faulty phone? Of course not. You’d take it back to the store, complain, and get a new one.

And yet, many people run their entire lives on a faulty operating system. It’s called the to-do list. Have you ever met someone who runs their day using a to-do list and actually finishes everything they said they’d do? Me neither.

There Are Spying Eyes Everywhere—and Now They Share a Brain

Security cameras. License plate readers. Smartphone trackers. Drones. We’re being watched 24/7. What happens when all those data streams fuse into one?

One afternoon in the fall of 2019, in a grand old office building near the Arc de Triomphe, I was buzzed through an unmarked door into a showroom for the future of surveillance. The space on the other side was dark and sleek, with a look somewhere between an Apple Store and a doomsday bunker. Along one wall, a grid of electronic devices glinted in the moody downlighting—automated license plate readers, Wi-Fi-enabled locks, boxy data processing units. I was here to meet Giovanni Gaccione, who runs the public safety division of a security technology company called Genetec. Headquartered in Montreal, the firm operates four of these “Experience Centers” around the world, where it peddles intelligence products to government officials. Genetec’s main sell here was software, and Gaccione had agreed to show me how it worked.

Strategies for Learning from Failure

The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare. This gap is not due to a lack of commitment to learning. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that I have studied over the past 20 years—pharmaceutical, financial services, product design, telecommunications, and construction companies; hospitals; and NASA’s space shuttle program, among others—genuinely wanted to help their organizations learn from failures to improve future performance. In some cases they and their teams had devoted many hours to after-action reviews, postmortems, and the like. But time after time I saw that these painstaking efforts led to no real change. The reason: Those managers were thinking about failure the wrong way.

Scaling Product Delivery: The “Dirty” Secret of High Performing Product Teams

Andy Johns

Andy Johns is a Partner at Unusual Ventures, ex-Wealthfront, Quora, Facebook and co-creator of the Scaling Product Delivery program.

Matt Greenberg

Matt Greenberg is the CTO at Reforge, former VP Engineering at Credit Karma, and co-creator of the Scaling Product Delivery program.

Now Accepting Applications for All Live Programs. Click Here to Apply

The Dirty Secret of High Performing Product Teams

The dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that most great product teams follow a system that resembles waterfall (gasp!) to launch new innovative features/products repeatably. The system starts with high conviction based on judgment, intuition, and instinct rather than relying on iterative customer feedback to build conviction over time.