Here’s my horoscope for today:

I was one of the early adopters of the block editor as a developer. Despite the flak that the Gutenberg plugin was catching before it was merged into core WordPress, I could see the potential. Yes, I could see the bugs, the inconsistent UI, …

👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. The publication just crossed 100,000 newsletter subscribers, only ten months after it was started. Thank you for being a newsletter subscriber! 🙌

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You heard it right – effective strategic planning is essential to outcome-focused product teams. But how do you conduct annual strategic planning and integrate it with agile product management? In this post, we’ll walk through how to run …

Last summer, camper vans and RVs arrived en masse in the town of Mammoth Lakes, California, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were looking to get outdoors. But with campgrounds …

September 2022

Stripe’s self described operating cadence is ‘run’.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

**Disclaimer: Details of this story have been altered slightly to protect the

Up until recently, I have personally been responsible for running all of our Deep-dive Interviews in our Product Engineer interview loop at Metaview. Our deep-dive focuses on the candidate’s ability to deliver impact. So we let the …

What does a 2002 HBO crime drama have to do with software engineering?

The topic of reducing friction exhausts me: Do people still need to be persuaded to help their developers go faster? Really? In this, the year 2022? But yes, in this, the year 2022, many teams require persuasion on this topic. Or rather, …

Let’s say my goal this year is to get to 10k monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

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A lot of ink is spent on the “monoliths vs. microservices” debate, but the real issue behind

Last weekend I happened to pick up a book called “Rituals For Work: 50 Ways To Create Engagement, Shared Purpose, And A Culture That Can Adapt To Change.” It’s a super quick read, more comic book than textbook, but I liked it.

I promised I would put together the posts on Better/Sooner/Cheaper/More with the actual topic of this mailing list, Tidy First? And here I am delivering.

The metaphors we use to describe new technology constrain how we think about it, and, like an out-of-date map, often lead us astray. So it is with the metaverse. Some people seem to think of it as a kind of real estate, complete with land …

In one particular context.

Better/Sooner/Cheaper/More—I began talking this week about a fundamental Extreme Programming technique for managing resources & immediately remembered why I stopped talking about it. Here are the basics.

Harrowing survival stories can feel like the lifeblood of outdoor culture, with the image of the gnarled outdoors person spinning tales over a campfire about “that time I almost died” serving as a kind of social currency in the backcountry. …

Back in 2020, as we were all locked down and forced to do everything online, we got very excited about ecommerce penetration. All sorts of charts went viral showing that we’d jumped forward anything from three to five years in a couple of …

I’ve frequently seen product thinking discussed in product management and user experience design contexts, but haven’t seen it applied to technical writing and documentation. And yet, by applying product thinking to documentation, we can …

Every three months the dreaded OKR setting process begins. People at different levels in the organization (especially large ones) start working around the clock to find the best opportunities for the next quarter, find the right ambition …

Over the past seven years, more than 32,000 professionals worldwide have taken part in the Accelerate State of DevOps reports, making it the largest and longest-running research of its kind. Year over year, the Accelerate State of DevOps …

Have you presented to company executives about a key engineering initiative, walking into the room excited and leaving defeated? Maybe you only made it to your second slide before unrelated questions derailed the discussion. Maybe you …

Low, medium, high.

You know the geology-in-a-jar lesson from Stephen Covey : Schedule big things first, otherwise you run out of time:

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

Chances are that, as little as a few years ago, most of us didn’t give much thought to where our food staples came from. Grocery store shelves were reliably stocked with an abundance of choice and supply, with basic items selling for …

Farhan Thawar is VP of Engineering at Shopify **. He joined the company after the acquisition of Helpful.com, where he was co-founder and CTO. Previously, he was the VP of Engineering at Pivotal and Xtreme Labs.

The topic of reducing friction exhausts me: Do people still need to be persuaded to help their developers go faster? Really? In this, the year 2022? But yes, in this, the year 2022, many teams require persuasion on this topic. Or rather, …

Well more than two years into the worst pandemic in a century, the accompanying economic shock continues to assault global fortunes.

“If our teams were just organized in the right way, and we adopted the agile process, we’d be so much more efficient.”

Written by Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet.

Burnout is a term introduced to the common language in 1974. With everyone working from home after COVID, there is more discussion around occupational burnout, now than ever before.

As companies grow, context can become a scarce resource. As more variables, people, teams, products, customers, and coworkers create an increasingly infinite combination of possible ways to move forward, deep context on what to do and how …

“Your employment will be on an at-will basis. Either you and the company may terminate your employment at any time, with or without cause or prior notice. My employment-at-will status cannot be changed except in writing signed by the …

Shipping is a Feature is a core principle for product managers. It proposes that you’ll never be able to build a perfect product, so you need to learn how and when to ship your imperfect one, because customer use of the product is what …

As an engineering manager at Netflix, I spend most of my time in meetings and one-on-ones. During these meetings, I collect a lot of information that’s valuable to the members of my engineering team. When my team was only four people, …

In early 2021 at Snapcommerce, we had 25 engineers working in squads. Each squad had an engineering manager (EM) acting as the people and tech lead (TL) for all projects, a product manager (PM), a designer, a QA team member, and up to 7 …

There’s a new turf war shaping up at work: managers who want everyone back in the “real” office vs. employees who prefer the one at home. And that standoff is leading to some irreconcilable conflicts.

Pick up Russ Laraway ’s new book, titled “When They Win, You Win ” and the first sentence is sure to grab your attention: “Managers are failing everywhere, and no one is helping.”

Hello, Every readers! We’re excited to share this post from Sam Gerstenzang. Most recently, he worked in Product at Stripe, where he led the 75-person payment UI group. Sam’s experience runs the gamut from investing to working in startups …

The demands on a manager’s time are endless and sometimes it feels like you’re being pulled in every direction at once. These demands can make it hard to focus, they make it hard to move from reacting to problems to anticipating them. In …

For remote teams, there are more and more effective alternatives to Zoom happy hour than ever.

An Insider’s View of how Netflix Makes Hard Decisions

This post is about me figuring out what a CTO does. I tried to be methodical and deep about it, and broke it down to a few different aspects.

Today, I’d like to talk about a practice I introduced to the people I managed just a few weeks after joining Shipup. I didn’t know it would turn out to be something so useful.

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Product and engineering leaders tend to be analytical, and we think of prioritization as an algorithmic problem. Unfortunately, other execs see a different kind of problem…

I got this email recently from a CEO:

The New Year always gets me thinking bigger picture. For some that means reviewing the company mission statement. For others, it means coming up with your annual or quarterly objectives. For me, I’m partial to the Manifesto.

This has been a difficult article to write. That’s because there’s a very real risk of undermining what I would consider the most important message I try to advocate, which is the power and potential of empowered product teams.

March 2008

Summary: A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end user. Its purpose is to articulate how a software feature will provide value to the customer.

Maybe you felt awkward if you’re in a team with a hierarchical structure. Maybe you didn’t want to get ‘out of your lane’.

By

Three months into my first Big Tech gig I was talking to a mentor about the overhead involved with the way the organisation worked. Meetings for standups, tech huddles, refinements, retros and product reviews; Processes such as limiting …

Guiding principle in effective product development culture.

Jeremy King | Senior Vice President, Engineering

The Department of Justice’s 1998 complaint against Microsoft accused the company of, amongst other things, tying the Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system:

I make a living solving problems. I realize there’s roughly 5 levels of difficulty. I use that as a way to allocate my energy accordingly.

Scrum has given us a lot, but it’s time for some conscious uncoupling

Engineers hate estimating things.

Want to learn how to foster virtual water cooler moments? Whether your company is new to remote working or has been doing it for some time, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in employees struggling to find a clear boundary for work-life …

A large part of running an online store requires managing the backend operations including product updates, order management, and shipment management. These tasks can easily overwhelm your staff and potentially disrupt business operations …

There’s probably no other framework that impacted modern software development as much as Scrum. For many organizations, it’s the first step towards a mature product development organization and you will find a bazillion articles explaining …

A no-nonsense guide for product teams. Read time is 6m.

Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in …

Twenty years ago, I was a platoon commander in a classified unit in the army (that is no longer classified). Back then, making decisions and applying authority was straightforward. Officers were to make most decisions, pushing them down the …

It’s getting late on a Saturday afternoon in Denver when I lean back and take in the full weirdness of what I’m doing. I’m seated at a long plastic folding table against the wall in a windowless room, a Discord server open on my laptop. …

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The review is the primary mechanic by which teams create and maintain

Originally posted internally at Facebook on December 27, 2013

I recently held a question and answer session with a particularly talented

EM = Engineering manager EMs = Engineering managers

8 thoughts on the future of remote work

W

I received this note recently from an Evernote user in Japan:

At GitHub, we have a very specific way of working. For one, we use GitHub to build GitHub. Not just for code, but to collaborate on things like Legal, Marketing, and internal policies. But it’s not that the medium defines the workflow …

During recent discussions with friends, one common theme that crops up very frequently is how success has remained rather elusive to recent higher level hires at their companies.

I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

Recently, there has been a lot of debate about engineering levels, whether they are good, bad, or just useless. In this story, I hope to show a positive outcome of a good effort. However, before we get started, let’s take a look at what are …

Welcome to issue #41 of next big thing.

Photo by Valerie Blanchett on Unsplash

Today is my birthday. I turn 70. I’ve learned a few things so far that might be helpful to others. For the past few years, I’ve jotted down bits of unsolicited advice each year and much to my surprise I have more to add this year. So here …

We’ve regularly written about the state of WordPress searches over the years: from the first article analysing a 52% spike in searches in 2020, to an in-depth look at a search lull in the summer of 2021, looking at how search traffic and …

No commute. Flexible schedules. Boosted productivity. There’s a lot that remote work gets right.

If you are the kind of person that claims taking control of your professional growth, changing careers, and moving up the ladder are easy feats, I would love to draw on your experience.

More than 2 years ago, I decided to try to create a brief, digestible manual on the expectations of management for senior engineers at my company who are considering making the shift. At the time, I had about 3 years of management …

Charged with extending their unit’s product lines and boosting top-line growth over the next three years, product managers at one global consumer goods company wanted to identify the most attractive customer segments to target and how best …

Photo by Anotia Wang @anotia

Broadly speaking, my overarching agenda for any 1:1 is as follows:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton

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When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly train a person to have knowledge in some domain, but …

The following is a transcription of our interview with Paulo André. Paulo is a former VP of Engineering who now coaches CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and Engineering Managers. He also writes a weekly newsletter for technical leaders (sign up …