Most corporations (and their employees) made the shift to remote work during the pandemic. Many of these shifts were to remote-capable workflows (moving offline workflows online), but they never made the maturity leap to fully remote-first, …

After two years of working from home, I don’t have one unified period of getting things done. I have several mini periods. Work isn’t a contiguous landmass of focus; it’s more like an archipelago of productivity amid a sea of chores, meals, …

Software has come a long way over the past 20 years. Not only has the

Eugenia Mello

We all knew the landscape of WordPress themes was shifting with the introduction of Gutenberg.

The Ezra Klein Show

It takes practice to communicate well. Being a great

Most engineering organizations separate engineering and product leadership into distinct roles. This is usually ideal, not only because these roles benefit on distinct skills, but also because they thrive from different perspectives and …

We’re often advised to excel at one thing. But as the future gets harder to predict, preserving optionality allows us to pivot when the road ahead crumbles.

In this blog post, rather than focus just on the technical challenges, I want to share:

I believe both can help us be better people and drive positive change around us – in general, but in software in particular.

My wife recently took a management position for the first time. While my first management role was much different in many ways (I was with a small startup, and she works for a state healthcare system), her mixed feelings reminded me of the …

I recently shared this Tweet:

Jessica is the Founder & CEO of Valux Digital, a nationally recognized full-service marketing and PR firm.

Theory on how and why new ideas spread The diffusion of innovations according to Rogers. With successive groups of consumers adopting the new technology (shown in blue), its market share (yellow) will eventually reach the saturation level. …

Krittiraj Adchasai/Getty Images

Getting up to speed when you join a large project is not an easy thing to do.

Doug Arcuri Follow

This week I talked with Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, a company that helps make teamwork way less work. We spoke about being a first time exec, how she navigated being a mother and exec during a pandemic and what she enjoys about …

TL;DR — Despite the pandemic, we had a great year as a team and as a business. We tripled the size of the team, acquired ACF, shipped and published a ton of awesome stuff that we’re proud of, and had a nice bump in revenue.

In business, communication needs to be clear and efficient. People are busy and don’t have time to read long walls of text or listen to long presentations where the key info is shared at the very end.

Say your startup has an on-call rotation that follows the sun. Someone’s always on. One day, a member of your team gets an alert that disk space will run out on the primary PostgreSQL server in two hours. An hour later, he gets another …

**TL;DR:**The baseline for web development in 2022 is: low-spec Android devices in terms of performance, Safari from two years before in terms of Web Standards, and 4G in terms of networks. The web in general is not answering those needs …

In a self-serve environment, your product has to sell itself.

High altitudes hold a special place in the history of human achievement. We remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese sherpa, Tenzing Norgay as the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Other altitude pioneers include Russian …

I recently stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Lemonade

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice.

This is a continuation of the original essay: The China Strategy (2018)

I’ve always struggled with commitment. In a world as grand as ours, shouldn’t we try to experience it all? Change it up. Visit every country. Try a bunch of careers. The menu of life is vast, and it’d be a shame to only order a single …

Open interactive popup

Day-to-day communication happens asynchronously when working with a remote team. While startups try to conquer the synchronous space, there is far less work happening on the other side. Let’s look at 13 of the best tools for asynchronous …

This article is written by Shivani Berry **, founder and CEO of Ascend **, which offers online leadership programs to empower women from top companies with the skills and community to advance into management. Previously, she was at PayPal, …

Daniel Korn

I’m often asked how best to interview VP Engineering or other engineering leadership candidates. It’s a hard problem. One of my standard answers seems to work for a lot of people, so here it is.

What if we could visualise the cost of attrition?

Measuring job performance is an essential practice when measuring a business. They provide valuable metrics that provide insight into the employee’s skill and cost value.

I’m a product manager for a content management system that runs some of the most-visited websites in the world. Our team reports to the CTO, and we sit within the engineering arm of the organization. Prior to this I’d had a year’s product …

There are some important differences between managing a solutions vs a platform product, in terms of providing product value. One of the key differences is in how you determine and track valuable key performance indicators (KPIs).

Adevinta May 20, 2021 · 8 min read

Management can at times seem like staring down a large block of marble — an intimidating task that requires the right tools. And in our experience, most management advice tends to focus on tackling the biggest chunks: assembling …

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

Gibson Biddle

If you woke up one morning and started to go about your business, only to realize a few small things weren’t quite right, what would you do?

1 Exercise on a Monday night (nothing fun happens on a Monday night).

Most engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. They should focus on milestones instead.

Alex Komoroske

Handling conflicts carefully is important. Conflict Resolution Diagram (also called “Evaporating Cloud”) is a tool that will help you resolve them peacefully while making sure that needs of both sides are met.

Have you had that feeling of being several weeks into a project, and you find yourself wandering around, struggling to wrangle the scope back to what you thought it was when you started?

Marianne Bellotti

Managers have to wait for permission, because management requires authority.

Polynya

Although the ghost of the Great Man still haunts leadership studies, most of us have recognized by now that successful organizations are the product of distributive, collective, and complementary leadership. The first step in putting …

Ask executives why they’re desperate to get workers back in offices, and productivity—the corporate north star and initial obsession of pandemic anxiety—suddenly has nothing to do with it. Many sound like Judith Carr-Rodriguez, the chief …

Leer en español

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment I write a bit about burnout, exhaustion, and rest. It doesn’t end with any neat solutions, but that’s kind of the point. However, I’ll take up …

Hi! It’s me, Joris.

In the early days of the pandemic, Matt Mullenweg didn’t move to a compound in Hawaii, bug out to a bunker in New Zealand or head to Miami and start shilling for crypto. No, in the early days of the pandemic, Mullenweg bought an RV. He …

The way that the FAANG companies use metrics to build products is vital to their success. They invest an army of people and homegrown tools to pull it off. My last article, Balancing short-term and long-term product bets, describes Google’s …

My favorite fintech product of all time was a mobile wallet, launched by Square in 2011. Originally called Card Case (and later Square Wallet), the app created a startlingly seamless and enjoyable mobile payments experience.

A couple of people have asked me to share how I structure my OOPS write-ups. Here’s what they look like when I write them. This structure in this post is based on the OOPS template that has evolved over time inside of Netflix, with …

Planet-wrecking money laundry or the next phase of human evolution? Why not both?

Kevlin Henney

I made my team waste two years of their lives building and refining the wrong product. Yes, we had a good time and we learned a few things, but nobody wishes to spend two grueling years on something that doesn’t matter.

Last time, I explained that, although estimating software project timelines is hard, you should do it anyway. With that background, I want to go into some detail and share the technique I use when I need to develop a project timeline.

You don’t have to be able to follow the intricately complex plot threads of HBO’s hit sci-fi series Westworld — who can? — to see the hypothetical picture in its fabric: by the early 2050s, theme park robots will be so lifelike that it’ll …

As the dust settles on COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, the results do not look good. Despite a flurry of headline-grabbing pledges, national commitments bring us nowhere near to meeting the Paris Agreement target …

Work life for many is in a mushy middle ground, and what’s at stake isn’t just who is getting talked over in meetings. It’s whether flexibility is sustainable, even with all the benefits it confers.

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other spreadsheets, and they realize …

This was written sometime in 2004, I think

It is natural to need things from other teams. It can be tempting to wait for them or depend on them to provide something for you. This happens because they own the area you need to do work in.

By Courtney Nash | November 4, 2021

Leer en español

We’re hiring for the Data team at Bevy. One of our core values is “communicate like a legend,” and it’s about communicating with respect, candor, clarity, courage, and empathy. We are building for the long term at Bevy, so it’s also about …

Clive Thompson

Stand-up meetings. Is anyone happy with them at this point? They were supposed to help teams work in a more agile manner but they were already controversial in the before times and moving to fully distributed teams hasn’t made things any …

Welcome to BigCo Inc!

All of the business of software, but especially the delivery of product capabilities, is inextricably bound up in questions about time. What’s the estimate? If we have N people working on it, how long will it take? When will we ship?

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an entity with no central leadership. Decisions get made from the bottom-up, governed by a community organized around a specific set of rules enforced on a blockchain.

Lars Tunbjörk / Agence VU / Redux

Protocol | Fintech

For many years I’ve subscribed to the idea that in a product organization, there are essentially two types of contributors: makers and managers.

There are a handful of actors who are the most likely to cause a global catastrophe, but their power goes unchecked, says Luke Kemp. I

In the past few years, much has been written about problems like discoverability, observability, data quality, and the need for data teams to become more “engineering oriented” in their mindset. Movements like analytics engineering and open …

[

David Masters Follow