Rina Artstain Follow

Nothing will change your future trajectory like your habits. We all have goals, big or small, things we want to achieve within a certain time frame. Some people want to make a million dollars by the time they turn 30. Some people want to …

It’s a hot August morning in Madison, Wisconsin, and Greg Glassman is sipping iced tea in an air-conditioned, glass-walled room perched above a preternaturally green field. Below, two dozen ripped athletes are hanging by their feet from …

Tom Peters

Big Ball of Mud was published twenty years ago and rings just as true today: the most prominent architecture in successful, growth-stage companies is non-architecture. Crisp patterns are slowly overgrown by the chaotic tendrils of quick …

During the first weeks in a new role, one of the things I’ve most recently focused on is to assess the direction of the engineering department as a whole. Will Larson has written at length about the first ninety days in a senior engineering …

Hello, Amanda writing from a rainy San Francisco this week. After attending an art show recently, my husband and I found ourselves standing outside the venue chatting with groups of other attendees. Although strangers, the discussions …

Whenever I transition to a new opportunity, I think about how to start well. How can I ramp up as effectively as possible? How do I balance the urge to “show value” early with making the right decisions?

The trendy thing to do on the internet is to start publishing a newsletter.

Congratulations—you’ve been asked to lead a change initiative! But there’s a catch—its success hinges on the cooperation of several people across your organization over whom you have no formal authority.

Credit: Pixabay / Alexas_Fotos

Steve Schlafman Oct 6, 2019 · 4 min read

January 17, 2020

Cindy Sridharan Dec 30, 2018 · 16 min read

December 2019

(Note: this is not a typical Stratechery article; there is no over-arching narrative or reference to current news. Rather, the primary goal is to provide a future point of reference)

1w agoJanuary 2, 2020 (1w ago)28,526 views

In 1999, music industry revenue in the United States peaked at $14.6 billion (all numbers are from the RIAA ). It is important to be precise, though, about what was being sold:

It seems as though the opposite of “careless” ought to be “careful.” That the best way to avoid avoidable errors is to try harder, to put more care into the work.

The unemployment rate in the U.S. is at its lowest level in more than four decades. In response, companies have been in a veritable arms race to offer bigger and better perks and win over employees, from the cliché office ping pong table to …

As someone who’s worked remotely for several years, I know the challenges of a virtual workplace. Building relationships with colleagues I’ve never actually met (in person), working across various time zones, technology that doesn’t work …

This is an outline of how I approach having 1-on-1s with my direct reports. I think of 1-on-1s as my primary tools for connecting with an individual and working on their morale, engagement, productivity and growth.

One of the great cultural events of the 2010s was the slow abandonment and ultimate death of iTunes. By the time the software was euthanized earlier this year, it had become an embarrassment, a mess of greasy preference panes and …

John Allspaw has a great tweet on problem discovery:

By Tim Copeland 4 min read; Dec 11, 2019

In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s March 2019 op-ed in the Washington Post calling for federal regulation of technology, he included something that caught some observers by surprise:

by Greg Satell

Kent Beck Nov 26 · 4 min read

Bread, meat, fruit, veggies, dairy. Those are the essential building blocks of a nutritious diet, the ones mom taught you about when you were five. We’ve been working with the same formula since the dawn of time, and it hasn’t failed us …

Charity Majors is the CTO and founder of Honeycomb, a platform offering full stack observability for event driven debugging. Below is her story about how Honeycomb built a fully distributed team of over 30.

After years of quality hard work, you, the star employee, have been promoted to be a manager of a team, a first-time accomplishment for you. Congrats! You should take time to feel proud of this achievement. But you also don’t have time to …

The first person to conceptualize and complete the Calendar Year Triple Crown was Brian Robinson. He completed his trek in 2001. By the end of 2018, 8 additional people had completed it. The Calendar Year Triple Crown entails completing the …

This article is an excerpt from Atomic Habits, my New York Times bestselling book.

*“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that

I just read this piece, which is basically a very long subtweet about my Friday deploy threads. Go on and read it: I’ll wait.

Everything is broken, and it’s actually starting to sort of scare me that we’re not willing to acknowledge how bad things have become. It’s starting to scare me that the industry tends to have discussions about morals and ethics in bars, …

On this page, we’re detailing how informal communication occurs at GitLab, and why it matters in an all-remote culture.

There were search engines before

Productivity should adopt an idea from military and business strategy: the distinction between peacetime and wartime.

My co-founder David and I both grew up in poverty and can call ourselves “battle-tested” when it comes to both life and startups, so when the talk in the Valley turned to income inequality, our ears perked up. For a moment, our two worlds …

The microkernel architecture pattern (sometimes referred to as the plug-in architecture pattern) is a natural pattern for implementing product-based applications. A product-based application is one that is packaged and made available for …

How To Write A Standard Operating Procedure

A group of technology experts chartered by Congress to guide American efforts in artificial intelligence have released their initial report on how to ensure AI development stays on track inside the United States. And, overall, there’s a lot …

Paul Virilio (French: [viʁiljo]; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018)[3] was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and …

Photo: Pixabay

I recently picked up Building Evolutionary Architectures by Ford, Parsons and Kua. It occupies a similar spot in my head as Accelerate and A Philosophy of Software Design, in the category of seasoned software practitioners sharing their …

Perfectly made toast isn’t just an obsession in Japan. It’s a business opportunity.

As technical leaders and managers, our job is to make the right decision most of the time. Hiring, firing, technology choices, software architecture, and project prioritization are examples of high impact decisions that we need to make …

I hear more voices saying there is little point in doing time-based estimations on how long building software will take, and thus we should just stop doing it. “Let’s just use story points and estimate complexity, but not the time” and …

If your job involves direct leadership of engineering teams, managing how and what they deliver, you’ve surely come across situations where the pressure to deliver features won out and led to poor service reliability. You’ve probably had …

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything …

Here is some data: the last incident your company experienced lasted 54 minutes. What insight does this data reveal besides a) an incident happened, and b) it lasted 54 minutes (at least according to someone interpreting an event as an …

The most popular software applications on the planet have a few things in common. They solve a real problem, they’re (usually) easy to use, and they offer a best-in-class customer experience. Sounds simple, right? Even if you’re just …

Back in 2015, I wrote a blog post called Dropbox: the First Dead Decacorn. At the time, it was the most widely shared take I’d ever written. I learned several things from writing this piece, and none of them had to do with Dropbox: I …

Kristin Wilson Oct 9 · 6 min read

Matt Cooper Sep 19 · 11 min read

It was raining on the day of the shoot. That morning, Sept. 5, 2015, Olivia Jackson mucked around on the lonely stretch of road outside Pretoria, South Africa, where Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was filming. None of the other …

The Silicon Valley narrative centers on entrepreneurial protagonists who are poised one predestined step away from changing the world. A decade ago they were heroes, and more recently they’ve become villains, but either way they are …

Scott Follow

Imagine a world where you bring together the top leaders in your organization to solve the company’s most pressing challenges, and, instead of coming together as a core group to solve that problem, they approach the exercise as a collection …

If you can employ anyone, from anywhere, what should you pay them? What is fair?

Lately, I’ve been reading quite a lot of reports on the state and the future of remote work. While I think it’s great to finally see some open resources about what still looks a very underexplored field, I couldn’t find any unique insights …

(Reuters) – A federal appeals court on Monday rejected LinkedIn’s effort to stop a San Francisco company from using information that users of the professional networking website have deemed public.

I was talking to a colleague the other day who told me about a conversation they just had with a customer. The customer had asked “Why can’t I create pie charts in Funnel?” and my colleague’s response, jokingly, was “Our product team really …

Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future. –Robert L. Peters

This article is by Lenny Rachitsky, a former product lead and head of consumer supply growth at Airbnb, and Nels Gilbreth, former Head of Global Revenue Strategy at Eventbrite.

Bryan Walsh Aug 16 · 7 min read

We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups – there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of …

I never planned to do a series of articles, but this write-up almost came as a natural follow-up to the post I wrote last week about Context over Control and the future of remote work. Last week I explored the ground rules of the future of …

TLDR; Read how I cope with working remote.

As I continue to think further about influence and power, Howard Gardner’s Changing Minds offers an extremely helpful conceptual framework, one that I see as a counterpart to Robert Cialdini’s “Weapons of Influence” (discussed at length in …

Alexander Rose Sep 12 · 15 min read

One thing high-performance teams do well is distribute authority — they have a clear system that specifies how decisions are made, and it enables the team to move quickly.

A ballooning spiderMichael Hutchinson

In my time as a manger, I’ve encountered quite a few people who were badly onboarded. As a rule it takes as long a time or longer to fix it as it took to poorly onboard them. Sometimes we’re able to re-onboard people and make them …

Jurgen Appelo is an innovative management thinker whose work I admire, and his 7 Levels of Delegation is a framework that I often recommend to clients to help them determine how to allocate authority and decision-making power between …

When I first started managing, I had no idea what meetings I was supposed to conduct with my staff to help them grow. In part because I was at a smaller organization and we were inventing processes on the fly and also because I did not have …

Posted Nov 26, 2013

His complaint offers lessons on how to make a point.

I’ve playing with a new mental model for early-stage startups: a pendulum. This pendulum oscillates between the limiting factors of the business at different stages. There only two limiting factors in this mental model: product and go to …

Joseph Jacks Jul 5, 2018 · 7 min read

Robert Chang Jul 20 · 14 min read

Andy Johns Sep 10 · 12 min read

Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They’re someone who would …

Joe Goldberg Sep 6 · 4 min read

Above: Remote working: Man on sofa… working.

Ollivier Girard/CIFOR

Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout …

This is a topic I’ve written about a bunch over the years. I feel like it is becoming more urgent every day.

One of the few pieces of advice I feel good about giving to everyone is this: When your job gets harder, the best thing you can do is make a friend.

This post will help engineers get the best results out of their work with managers, and achieve career goals in a predictable way.

Every so often one of my articles seems to strike a chord, and this latest one on the difference between Product Teams and Feature Teams certainly seemed to do that. I am grateful for the very positive response. This morning I woke up to …

This article is certain to upset many people.

It’s easy to put up a facade of success.

Innovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—”invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and …

It’s been almost twenty years since Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of State of Defense, said:

Foursquare check-ins in New York City.

I’ll be shocked if you’re shocked: Building social connection in a remote team is the hardest part of managing a remote team. According to a survey we ran this past fall with 297 remote managers and employees, “fostering a sense of …

Lately there was a lot of talk on twitter about the 10x engineer which started a big debate about what makes a good engineer. Some really stupid things were mentioned such as “10x engineers hate meetings” and “10x engineers come late to the …

Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage …