Recruiting is a process that we take very seriously at our company. We strive to hire the best engineers, the best product managers, and the best designers, and guess what; almost every other company out there does too.

As anybody who has worked in a startup can see, this is the wrong question to ask. These are very different roles, and the roles themselves change and evolve as the startup grows. Both are important for the business to scale.

By Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia

When you’re on military exercise, sleep is a luxury. Maybe you can only snatch a few hours each day. So there’s nothing so frustrating as lying in your sleeping bag with your eyes closed, waiting for something to happen.

If you want to be as healthy as possible, there are no treadmills or weight machines required.

I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flannel shirt. Back when you could really say you were surfing the net.

It’s hard to read exactly where GraphQL stands in the API

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We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period). …

I blinked away the tears.

I was halfway up the four-story vertical ropes course, when my course partner at the leadership retreat decided she couldn’t continue any further. We agreed she would energetically cheer me on as I continued. I kept climbing and nearly got …

Prioritization is a perennial challenge when building a product roadmap. How do you decide what to work on first?

“You’ve Got Mail” via Giphy

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Do you consider yourself “a doer”?

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

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This is the final part of a 6-part series of blog posts based on a talk I prepared called Successfully Derailed Product. It’s about the ways in which we define and talk about “success” influence what – and how – we build. See part 1, part …

The Story of Five Points

I recently published Chavah Messianic Radio, a Pandora-like music player, as a Progressive Web App and submitted it to the 3 app stores (Google Play, iOS App Store, Windows Store).

A Chaos Day is a dedicated team day focused on using chaos engineering to reveal weaknesses in your system. We’ve all heard of hack days and hack weeks, where you focus on building new features. Well, a Chaos Day is focused on building more …

I thought it’d be useful to share out some of the tools and resources that I use as part of my workflow as a manager. Below is a link to a number of Google docs, which if it sounds interesting to you I encourage you to copy for your own …

EX-99.1

I was recently tagged into a conversation on Twitter. The thread started with this summary of findings about open plan offices:

The first time I took on a tech lead role early in my career, I had little clue what I was doing.

First principles thinking, which is sometimes called reasoning from first principles, is one of the most effective strategies you can employ for breaking down complicated problems and generating original solutions. It also might be the …

When Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One was published in 2011, the reviews were ecstatic, beatific. It was an “enchanting,” “accessible ” “nerdgasm ” full of “fascinating social commentary ” that one critic claimed was “the best science …

Recently, the Strava Engineering team took a weeklong break from regular product work to focus attention on our core technology platforms. We coined this effort Guild Week. Before explaining Guild Week, it’d be useful to understand what a …

Who was the best manager you ever had?

Photo by Zachary Spears on Unsplash

Today we are excited to share Patreon’s revamped Engineering Leveling Guide. In Patreon’s early years, we had little in the way of objective criteria for leveling engineers. We’ve come a long way since then, and our engineering organization …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I once downloaded a speed-reading app that would flash individual words across my phone. I aggressively set the rate to 400 words per minute and braced for the onslaught. I used this system to parse essays, primers, and long-form …

Introduction to the model – SSCC

Whether you’re dissecting Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or relaxing poolside with 50 Shades of Grey, reading is, for many of us, a regular source of joy, perspective, and ideas, which enable us to grow personally and professionally. …

A tool for gaining a shared understanding of responsibilities

The modern web contains no shortage of horrors, from ubiquitous ad trackers to all-consuming platforms to YouTube comments, generally. Unfortunately, there’s no panacea for what ails this internet we’ve built. But anyone weary of black-box …

The simple of idea of putting a mission statement together for the team makes most managers tremble in fear. It’s a sad situation we’ve gotten ourselves into when leaders fear to express the purpose of an organization (and employees snicker …

Illustration by Laura Wright

We know Engineering interviewing can be stressful, and stress can often make interviews a poor sample of what you can do at work. We want to create an interviewing environment where you can show who you are and what you can do. Hopefully …

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

Workplaces have adopted internal social tools—think stand-alone technologies such as Slack, Yammer, and Chatter, or embedded applications such as Microsoft Teams and JIRA—at a staggering rate. In an ambitious study of 4,200 companies, …

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

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

It’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, …

Facebook and Instagram

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

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

By Rana Foroohar

“Don’t you have a loop to write?”

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

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

Employees quit. Everyone has their reasons. There are many articles about why one should quit, but there are almost none about what should one do when he or she eventually decides to quit. I haven’t found any articles discussing “the hard …

Hudson Christie

Over three years, I was promoted from Producer to SVP of Product. I learned a lot about leadership during these “trial by fire” years.

Why are more people talking about distributed teams? Why now?

In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San …

22 Feb 2018

At Initialized Capital, our share of investments outside the Bay Area has ticked up to about one-quarter of our most recent fund as the cost-of-operating and improved communication tools have made it easier and less expensive to collaborate …

A couple years ago I ran across a blog post by Paul Jackson where he mentioned in passing the idea of a tension between “default ship” cultures in relation to corporations versus startups. For some reason, those two ends of a spectrum have …

Not too long ago, users were forced to reload pages to progress from one piece of content to the next. Web designers were advised against creating websites with information appearing “below the fold,” the portion of the page. This means …

Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

I once worked with a Head of Design responsible for all the native apps for a large bank during their formative period leading to a design system. In my career, I’ve never met someone who could demo his team’s emerging work better than he …

The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a “premeditation of evils.”1

Photo by James Wainscoat

During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community. This meant that people or organizations could grow their internet …

Over the last four years I’ve been the CTO at SketchDeck and now, as I leave and hand the reins onto the team, I wanted to reflect on the experience and what I wish I’d known at the start.

picture: pixabay

I’ve been a technical person all my life. I started doing vulnerability research in the late 1990s – and even today, when I’m not fiddling with CNC-machined robots or making furniture, I’m probably clobbering together a fuzzer or writing a …

The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business, says MIT’s Bill Aulet, is a paying customer. But that’s not a sufficient requirement for a good business; instead, to use IDEO’s Tim Brown as a guide, we need to apply a ‘design …

The context behind the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) is found in a lesson learned from Steve Jobs. Steve had a habit of making sure someone was responsible for each item on any meeting agenda, so everybody knew who is responsible.

Slack is the bane and the lifeblood of my workplace communication.

This post originally given as a talk at the Product Leader Summit.

How blockchain can mobilize a community to provide Internet for each other and create a new sharing economy

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HANGZHOU, China—In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly …

As a manager, on-boarding is both tough and really important whether you’re joining a team or they’re joining yours. My very short list for on-boarding in either direction is:

Photo Credit: marcoverch Flickr via Compfight cc

I keep imagining a tradition I’d like to invent. After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need.

Credit: Lightcome/iStock via Getty Images Plus

When it comes to athletics, sports teams have a specific number of team players: A basketball team needs five, baseball nine, and soccer 11. But when it comes to the workplace, where teamwork is increasingly widespread throughout complex …

Slowly but steadily, data are forcing their way into every nook and cranny of every industry, company, and job. Managers who aren’t data savvy, who can’t conduct basic analyses, interpret more complex ones, and interact with data scientists …

Here’s a simple rule for the second machine age we’re in now: as the amount of data goes up, the importance of human judgment should go down.

Not a week goes by without us publishing something here at HBR about the value of data in business. Big data, small data, internal, external, experimental, observational — everywhere we look, information is being captured, quantified, and …

When it comes to the importance of good people management, one data point speaks loudly above the rest. That is, people leave managers not companies.

In my years of coaching managers and individual contributors, I’ve routinely heard the following complaints about their bosses: