Richard Crowley Aug 1 · 8 min read

In early 2017, Shelly Schneider accepted a new job at a large insurance company. With a desk surrounded by hundreds of coworkers, she expected to have a robust social experience at work.

With nineteen traction channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s why we’ve created a simple framework called Bullseye that will help you find the channel that will get you traction. As billionaire PayPal …

Marianne Bellotti Aug 5 · 13 min read

Illustration by @margaridamouta

Nov 25, 2017 · 11 min read

From QCon NYC, 2019

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

The first 90 days of any career transition—be it a promotion, a new job or a lateral transfer—are critical and can determine if you succeed or fail in the new role. In this book, Michael Watkins presents critical success strategies for new …

If you’ve been struggling to adopt useful metrics in your user experience team – you might want to consider the HEART framework designed by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu, from Google’s research team.

June 21 2019

Droplets

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A peculiar challenge of management is trying to invest in someone’s career development when they themselves are uncertain about their goals. As a manager, you may have more experience and more access to opportunities within the company, but …

This is about my journey, from a newly-minted yet confused CEO caught like a rabbit staring helpless into the oncoming headlights of change – to being voted one of the most influential people in IT within the UK. It took me a decade to …

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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 …

We have lost control over our content. To change this, we need to reconsider the way we create and consume content online. We need to create a new set of tools that enable an independent, open web for everyone.

Cassie McDaniel in The Startup Jul 1 · 12 min read

Resilience Assessment Grid (RAG)

In Silicon Valley, ambition matters more than financial success.

July 10, 2019

Illustration by Yin Weihung

‘Resilience’ is a term that has been used for a long time and in several different ways. It was first used in to describe a property of timber, and to explain why some types of wood were able to accommodate sudden and severe loads without …

Karl Wiegers in The Startup Jun 14 · 11 min read

*(Download the cards & instructions as PDF or PPTX )

I have worked in three venture capital firms over the last thirty-three years and am intimately familiar with the performance of the fifteen (ish) venture funds raised and invested by these three firms. Much of what I have written about …

Paul Taylor/Getty Images

Why is it that some people seem to make constant progress in their professional and personal lives, while others appear to be doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over?

Photo by Oleg Sidorenko

I have been coaching several experienced software engineers to further grow professionally, since transitioning to being an engineering manager. I have noticed a few skills that people often underestimate the importance of developing. …

Dave Bailey Apr 9

/prōˌseləˈrāSH(ə)n/ noun 1. The acceleration of acceleration

Our goal with product management at Gatsby is to create an ongoing and iterative product discovery and development process that allows us to ship customer value quickly and with confidence in our product–market fit. There are a lot of ways …

Jun 27, 2019

There are a lot of work “rituals” that suck so badly you want to hunt down and interrogate who ever invented them. The dreaded weekly status email is one of them. The weekly 1:1 between a boss and a direct report can be another. What should …

Gatsby’s core philosophy can be divided into three parts.

Secure your site by learning how to explicitly mark your cross-site cookies.

I know some managers say “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions,” but personally I don’t subscribe to it.

Arthur Holland Michel | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,946 words)

By Geoffrey A. Fowler | The Washington Post Columnist

This is Part 5, the conclusion of a series. Part 1 is The Journey to a Content Mesh*; Part 2 is* Unbundling of the CMS*; Part 3 is* The Rise of Modern Web Development; Part 4 is Why Mobile Performance is Crucial.

This is Part 4 of a series. Part 1 is The Journey to a Content Mesh*; Part 2 is* Unbundling of the CMS*; Part 3 is* The Rise of Modern Web Development.

Photo by Todd Diemer

Next year, I’ll be entering my 10th year of being formally employed to write code.

“Rugged” describes software development organizations that have a culture of rapidly evolving their ability to create available, survivable, defensible, secure, and resilient software. Rugged organizations use competition, cooperation, and …

January 29, 2019

Our VP of Engineering, Rukmini Reddy, shares the pivotal events that helped shape her path and underpin her leadership philosophy.

What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies, hate speech, harassment, and …

Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture.

David Lush Mar 26

Before you pull a user story into development, it’s crucial to have a conversation to clarify and confirm the acceptance criteria.

February 2002

Dear map people,

“Time management” is not a solution — it’s actually part of the problem.

Martin Fowler

(Ric Carrasquillo/for The Washington Post)

Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as spies in disguise in “The Americans.” (Eric Liebowitz/FX)

One of the most common and cardinal mistakes startups often make when building a product is not conducting adequate market research.

Natalie Sandman May 20

We look to leaders to make consistent decisions, keep a steady course, and align an organization’s culture. But leaders typically face multiple demands that conflict with one another, and it’s a mistake to assume there are cut-and-dried …

Ben Dalziel May 10

Several people are typing.

Adam Hawkins Apr 29, 2018

One of the paradoxes of today’s internet platforms is they are vastly automated, and have no human control or interaction over what any given person sees, and yet they are also totally dependent on human behavior, because what they’re …

Note: Since this was published in 2015, some of our ideas have evolved, our revenue and burn rate have both increased, and our orientation has changed. But, as you’ll read later in the post, we still hope that people stay at Carta for a …

“The question is not how fast tech companies will become car companies, but how fast we will become a tech company.” This is how the board member of a global car company recently articulated the central issue facing most incumbents today: …

I never met Bill Campbell. To be honest, I had never even heard about him until I heard Eric Schmidt speak his praises on the the Tim Ferris Podcast.

Some leaders are fantastic at “team branding”—communicating about their group in ways that give the rest of the organization a good understanding of what the team is all about. Others are squarely focused on “team public relations”—telling …

Things started to click into place for Jamie Davila after she discovered she was on the autism spectrum five years ago this summer.

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

Defining the role of CTO can be tricky. Each company has a different

​With research suggesting that companies can save money, boost morale and attract top candidates by offering work-at-home options, why are some employers calling their telecommuters back into the main office?

Violent crime in the US is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn’t know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime.

“To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end. That is also what, say, a good algebra teacher does.”

Stripe has engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We are establishing a fifth hub that is less traditional but no less important: Remote. We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, …

This an introductory guide to readings in resilience engineering, aimed at software engineers. Key

I live in Montreal. 4 years ago, I decided to take a job working remotely for a company based in San

Recently I wrote about sizing engineering organizations, and how you can think about it as an exercise in managing concurrency. In understanding org size I talk about the mental exercise of thinking about how the number of concurrent work …

“Vertical Change”, Bjorn Copeland.

Recently, I had the opportunity to present to a group of early-stage

Mission command, also referred to as mission-type tactics, is a style of military command, derived from the Prussian-pioneered mission-type tactics doctrine, which combines centralized intent with decentralized execution subsidiarity and …

If there’s one thing you can’t avoid on the Internet, it’s Likes. They’re in nearly every software platform where people post photos or write text messages.

Making better decisions is one of the best skills we can develop. Good decisions save time, money, and stress. Here, we break down what makes a good decision and what we can do to improve our decision-making processes.

This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military.

Back in 2008, I co-founded KISSmetrics, an analytics company.

Huawei’s been a fixture in the news cycle for a while now. Here’s why.

Yesterday, a colleague looked at me and deadpanned, “aren’t you supposed to have a long beard?” When you remote-work for an extended period (it’s been six months since my last visit to the mother ship), you can expect to hear your share of …

For almost one year, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly circled the planet on the International Space Station, completing three spacewalks, conducting experiments on plants and playing ping-pong with a ball of water. His earthbound twin, Mark, …

Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.

At the end of February, 2019 I left my employer and began working independently. One of my first initiatives was a research project.

Working remotely can be really tough. To get some insight into how to do it better, Google conducted a two-year study involving data from 5,600 employees across the US, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Approximately 30% of the …

Julia Haigh Jan 30

Five years ago, Lenz (one of our co-founders) wrote :

Rahul Gulati Nov 5, 2016

You’ve discovered something new.

Startup strategy is like Kung Fu. There are many styles that work. But in a bar fight, you’re going to get punched in the face regardless.

When most new employees join a company, they’re left to fend for themselves. Which means they spend their first few months tentatively stumbling around with their first few projects.