Note from the author: this post was written in collaboration with Justin Cowperthwaite, engineering manager, with additional input from Jeff Palmer, VP Engineering.

Like many of us these days, lots of our authors work remotely—whether from a home office or on-the-go as they travel. So we asked them how they make smart work of working remotely. Here’s what they said:

Every December, Adam Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things ” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the …

Bridget Frey Sep 20, 2016

“I have a very specific management style. I put my team in charge of it all.” He said as he put his feet on the table, leaning back with his hands crossed behind his head, elbows out to either side.

Greg Caplan Feb 11

Instagram. Snapchat. Twitter. Facebook. You name it. We live in a “Never-Ending Now.”

Someone once said to me “you’re good at change management” and I was like, what?

DEV.BIZ.OPS Feb 5

Howard George/Getty Images

Alon Kiriati Jan 19

In July 2018, the air temperature in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles neighborhood some 20 miles north of the Pacific Ocean, peaked at 117 degrees Fahrenheit. For 63-year old U.S. Post Office carrier Peggy Frank, that Friday marked her first …

@rezendi /

On a brisk afternoon, Denver’s self-proclaimed “punk-rock urban real estate developer” visits the latest stud in his leather jacket. The Source Hotel is all wooden planks and polished concrete, a nod to the industrial roots of its home in …

For no fewer than three years, my twitter bio has included the statement “I’m bad at writing recipes, great at cooking the food.” When I set out to define my leadership philosophy, I didn’t realize how true that statement would be.

Many effective leaders I’ve worked with have the uncanny knack for working on leveraged problems. In some problem domains, the product management skillset is extraordinarily effective for identifying useful problems, but systems thinking is …

As organizations grow complex, they’re managed through incorporeal abstractions that drift increasingly from the reality they represent.

A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, …

One of the most frequent conversations I have with teams is how to think about organization size. Or rather we have a conversation that goes something like, “We need to double/triple/quadruple our engineering team next year, and now we need …

Enlarge / No spoilers, but with the departure of a certain high profile fantasy writer, LiveJournal seems to have been left like Jon Snow here.

John Mark Jul 30, 2018

I’m a copywriter and contrary to what you may believe, my most significant responsibility is not to write. It’s to delete. Mercilessly.

Yulia Semenova Jan 9

Gov. Jared Polis outlined an ambitious — and equally expensive — agenda Thursday in his first State of the State address.

January 11, 2019 at 12:00 pm

John Mark Jan 4

Paul Adams Dec 29, 2018

Congratulations! You are in a new management role. Now what?

Conversation : CULTURE The digital revolution isn’t over but has turned into something else

Originally published Dec. 31, 1983

It was her face. But it had been seamlessly grafted, without her knowledge or consent, onto someone else’s body: a young pornography actress, just beginning to disrobe for the start of a graphic sex scene. A crowd of unknown users had been …

This article is by Rahul Vohra, the founder and CEO of Superhuman — a startup building the fastest email experience in the world.

Around 10 A.M. on Friday, September 15, 2017, Ginger Chase-Watkins called the Old Town Bike Shop in Colorado Springs looking for her husband, Tim Watkins. She hadn’t heard from him in more than 24 hours.

Robbie McClaran

Photo: Artwork by Ayatgali Tuleubek

This is a story about the question of who holds power over what we can say, hear, watch and read on the internet—an increasingly urgent issue that many ordinary people have cause to think about every day. And yet the protagonist in this …

It’s easy, at this point, to see any Facebook scandal as more white noise; a few million people betrayed by the social network, an egregious overreach into a user’s personal data — another day online. But you shouldn’t sleep on a fresh New …

Early on at Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos famously issued a memo about how software was to be built at the company. Teams would share their data through service interfaces, or APIs, the same way that they would share it with an outside customer. …

Darius Foroux Oct 3, 2016

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

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

Managing a team is all about communication.

Co-authored with Helen Nissenbaum

Bruno Miranda Nov 26

I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised …

Eric Jorgenson Apr 6, 2015

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

“In Engineering, we tend to hold this idea that these people systems—career ladders, performance reviews, calibration—are these evil things that aren’t very valuable. They’re thought of as bureaucracy. But it’s a shame. These are really …

December 1, 2018 at 6:00 am

There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord …

05 November 2018

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

When I ask leaders how they’re doing, the number one response I get is some version of “I’m busy.” I might hear: “I’m swamped,” or “I’m overwhelmed,” or “I’m stressed.” They might sigh with visibly tight or slumping shoulders, or say …

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOV. 16, 2018

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

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

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

Functional teams have four layers of communication:

Note: This is the narrative article version of a talk I’ve started giving recently at conferences, product meetups and corporate leadership teams. It is a long read, but I believe it’s a critically important topic, and it lays out for …

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

A talk given at BuildStuff 2018 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What you got a dollar in your pocket

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

When startups are just getting started, no organization is necessary for the most part. The team is so small and everyone is so connected. But, as they grow the question of how to organize quickly becomes important. Once that happens, there …

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

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to be promoted. I evaluated the role. I had a plan for how I would implement in that role. I talked to the hiring manager (my manager at the time). I talked to my network inside the company. I knew …

Getty Images/Ringer illustration

Editor’s Note: This is one of the most-read leadership articles of 2014. Click here to see the full list.

12 years ago, my talented wife and I had an idea for something known today as “Managed WordPress Hosting.”

Mazel tov! We did this in August of 2017. It was a great experience, and helped a lot of us brainstorm, problem-solve and level up in our careers. A lot of work went into making it the great experience it was. This document is designed to …

In isolated regions, JD.com is expanding its reach, creating on-the-ground jobs and testing drone delivery. Will villagers be less tempted to leave for the big city?

Milky Way, Mars and a Meteor

Originally published on JOTFORM.COM

Burnout: It’s a word that gets thrown around often, especially among busy, working professionals: “If things around here don’t slow down soon, I’m headed for burnout!”.

People paintings photo by Robin Hutton

There are a lot of resources out there that talk about salary negotiation but many tend to skew a bit theoretical. In my experience, one of the hardest things about negotiating your salary is knowing what to say in tough, ambiguous …

Ever since the Product Manager role was created to bring decision making as close to customers as possible, it has been an art and science of collaborating with stakeholders. The problem today is how to scale collaboration with your …

I’ve been a WordPress user for nearly 14 years. I’ve watched as it has grown from a plucky little blogging platform struggling to compete with MovableType to become the dominant content management system (CMS) on the internet.

As Stephen Olshansky hiked south through alpine Colorado in the crackling beauty of autumn 2015, he knew he was playing chicken with the arrival of winter. He was almost past the highest peaks along the Continental Divide Trail as fall …

This is the part 3 of 3 of an edited version of my talk on becoming strong leaders, given at Lead Dev London, June 2018. See here for Part 1, and Part 2.

While working at Lockheed during the cold war, Kelly