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

01 Dec 2017

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

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

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

Illustration by mikoto

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

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

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

Economy

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

PHOTOGRAPHY: MARK MAHANEY INTERVIEW: NICK COMPTON

laura schneider FOR HBR

Being at an early-stage startup is a bit like being in grade school — but in this version, you have to skip a grade every 6 months and still get all As.You learn quickly because you have to. And while you manage to skip grade after grade, …

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

The condo building I live in has a property management company. This makes sense. The building is 120+ units across 12 floors with retail and office space. What doesn’t make sense is this same company’s poor communication. They are …

Sophie is a physical penetration tester and information security consultant. She specializes in social engineering security assessments including physical, voice (vishing) and text (phishing). She consults in remediation and prevention of …

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

Foo Camp, the original unconference thrown by O’Reilly every year, is one of my favorite events in the technology world. In many ways, it’s often felt like one of the safest — it welcomes crazy ideas, breaks down social barriers, starts …

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was …

Many breakthrough technologies were hatched by hobbyists in garages and dorm rooms. Prominent examples include the PC, the web, blogs, and most open source software.

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Illustration by Havana Nguyen

When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen …

Credit: Flickr / Ivan

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

This post was first published on CoderHood as From Coding to Management to Leadership. CoderHood is a blog dedicated to the human dimension of software engineering.

Metrics-Driven Development is an emerging term developing from the

The fog of war envelops every battlefield. When the plan breaks down amid the chaos and ambiguity, how do young Marines know what to do next? How can they take relevant action in the present when their carefully detailed plan has been …

To read an annotated version of this article, complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading, click here.

Stephen was a hired gun at my first start-up. His contract started a year before I arrived, but he was long gone before I walked in the door. The story goes that when Stephen started, he found a small, solid team of five engineers, a QA …

Photo by Kelly Jean on Unsplash

Most CEOs are an urgent breed.

It turned out that one of the biggest challenges startup tech leaders are facing is prioritising software development.

Matthew Handrahan

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, …

Credit: Nokia Bell Labs

TL;DR: If you are unsure whether you should pursue a career in management, ask yourself certain questions: Do you truly care about your co-workers? Can you enjoy working with people? Can you listen? Can you spot talent? Do you feel fully …

Culture is a set of norms, implicit rules and values that a group of people live by. It entails what is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable in people’s behavior. Culture is a living, breathing thing, constantly changing and evolving. …

Superb time-management skills are worthless when you’re feeling unmotivated, distracted or tired at work. Until robots take over our day-to-day workloads, our productivity is directly linked to our mental and physical well-being.

What is the best predictor of when you’ll die? That seems like a hard—not to mention morbid—question, but, incredibly, study after study is showing that simple tests of physical performance are highly predictive of future mortality.

Uber SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey vividly remembers the day Susan Fowler published her blog post alleging workplace harassment and management issues came out.

Illustration by Fanny Luor

Why are C.E.O.s and military leaders paying novelists to imagine the future for them?

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One of the greatest challenges for the Head of Product at a fast-growing startup is to maintain focus on product strategy, to enable good, fast consumer and data-driven decisions, and to pass on learnings across the organization as it …

As a founder, product lead at Pinterest and PM for a couple products at Google, as well as a growth partner for Initialized Capital, I’ve seen many product teams struggle to grow.

The other day a friend mentioned that he’s looking forward to autonomous cars, as it will help lower the accident and fatality rates caused by distracted driving. True, was my initial reply, with a caveat: what we gain on the roads we lose …

Even companies dedicated to continuous improvement struggle to stay on the path. Research suggests that’s because of deeply ingrained biases: We focus too much on success, take action too quickly, try too hard to fit in, and depend too much …

There is no inherent value in any piece of data because all information is meaningless in itself. Why? Because information doesn’t tell you what to do. — Beau Lotto

We’re outspoken about running a profitable company in an industry that so often eschews profits for potential. So why? People ask us why all the time. Why choose profit?

This summer, a friend called in a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. …

Like many people in ops-adjacent parts of the internet, I had a lot of feels around this reddit post, where a new software developer trying to follow instructions to set up his development environment accidentally borked the production …

In preparation for our 32-hour work weeks, I’ve been working with some folks on our team to help them more clearly define their roles. To achieve the same amount of work in less time, we have to make sure that we’re all working on the right …

A company with a 100 CEOs can do anything.

At the time of writing, my electricity has just been switched back on after 10 days.

Most people have days they’ll never forget. For me, that day is April 26, 2011.

Back in 2006, when the iPhone was a mere rumor, Palm CEO Ed Colligan was asked if he was worried:

Time is the only element in the world that is irretrievable when it’s lost. Lose money and you can make more. Lose a job and you can find another.

For my whole life, people have commented on my ability to get things done. I am a productive person, constantly tackling projects and tasks and using my time and my energy to produce results.

For years, Jacques Hopkins wanted to make money online with a flexible side gig. Now the former electrical engineer has found a niche that has become his career: teaching people to play modern songs on the piano in 21 days, all over the …

Jennifer Maravillas for HBR

Almost a year ago, I was lucky enough to be given an Amazon Echo from someone whose family wasn’t that comfortable with an always-on device listening to them, so he gave it to me to play with. My life is quite boring, listen away devices.

Over the past few months, I’ve been reminded about the difference between “can do” and “must do” and how companies often confuse the two.

Amazon is the first destination for most US consumers searching for products online. For venture-backed startups building direct-to-consumer brands, Amazon is often an afterthought. They fear ceding any level of control over the brand …

Dave Winer, “Why I Can’t/Won’t Point to Facebook Blog Posts ”:

Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

“There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” the economist Milton Friedman famously wrote in 1962. And that is “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Those words helped establish …

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Mar 7, 2017 –

Over the past few years, we’ve learned a lot about building product at Intercom.

Yu Yang | Pinterest engineer, Data

“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Evan Williams says. “I was wrong about that.”

The bestselling novel of 1961 was Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. Millions of people read this 690-page political novel. In 2016, the big sellers were coloring books.

Welcome, Player One, to a strategy guide for the game known as life.

If you’ve read our blog, or heard us speak at conferences, you probably know by now that DNSimple is a completely distributed team. We have team members all over the world, often travelling from one location to another while still working. …

Kris Niles Product Designer at Basecamp, working remotely from the Rockies. Previously at InVision and Citrix May 4

Three years ago, I shared 10 lessons from working 4 years remotely, and today I passed another milestone while working at a remote company. After almost 7 years of working at Automattic, today I published my millionth word.

Zack Kanter

Code is central to Stripe: we build APIs, software tools, and infrastructure that are in turn used by other software engineering-driven businesses. And of course code is also central—by definition—at other software companies.

The nation has spoken: weird useless $400 wi-fi enabled juicing company Juicero is the perfect symbol of Silicon Valley.

M.G. Siegler General Partner @ GV (formerly Google Ventures). In past lives I wrote at TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and ParisLemon. A man of few words. Except when writing. 🍻 Apr 20

Wandering the conference halls I overhear…

You probably already know why it’s so helpful to have your team write

Later this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook is going to unveil the iPhone 7, and when he does, the familiar litany of complaints will almost certainly be aired. “This new phone is evolutionary, not revolutionary.” “Apple’s very good at making …

Continuing our exploration of health-related companies that are fundamentally shifting our understanding of the industry, meet Emily Leproust, the Parisian founder of Twist Bioscience. An industrial chemist with a PhD in bioscience, …

Photo Credit: Heisenberg Media

The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity.

There is no shortage of advice for how to navigate power dynamics within organizations — from managing toxic or exceptionally gifted subordinates to dealing with unpredictable and narcissistic bosses. Researchers have devoted entire careers …

It’s public knowledge that Google uses a single repository to share code — all 2 billion lines of it — and that it uses the trunk-based development paradigm.

In September 2016 I gave a presentation on managerial focus at the Calibrate Conference. In that talk I outlined the responsibilities of a manager and shared the tools I have been developing to decide which responsibilities to focus at any …

Does it feel like everyone is working very hard, all the time, and yet not accomplishing as much as everyone would like?

This is part three of a three-part series on how we created a career path framework for the individual contributors at Spotify. Part one discussed the process we used to formulate the framework. Part two contained version 1.0 of our …

In 1927, an enterprising magazine writer named William Dutton got an idea: Let’s find the most average man in America and see what he’s like. He scoured the country to find America’s most average town — Fort Madison, Iowa — and then …

Learn JavaScript using… JavaScript. Image via learnyounode.

sorting.at

When you’re scaling quickly, you get a lot right, but you inevitably get some things wrong. The best companies — like Pinterest — are the ones that learn from those mistakes and adjust quickly.