Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

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Scaling Knowledge at Airbnb
7 minutes read.

This pain of sharing insights and knowledge (versus raw data) is a pain I'm experiencing myself recently. I like the process Airbnb is following, mostly focusing on streamline the flow, validating the quality and correctness of the result (to avoid false conclusions) and making it visible to the entire organization.

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Culture

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Marc Was Almost Ready to Implement His "Hello World" React App
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Don’t Ship The Org Chart
4 minutes read.

Ken Norton with a great post on how to split up responsibilities between multiple product managers. I love Ken's insight -- "Here’s another test: how many PMs need to be in the room?" and how he presents the need of deciding on high level prioritization to avoid local maxima, as a feature, not bug. Lastly, this is spot on: "Keep track of what’s working well and what isn’t, and be willing to change and adapt based on what you hear from the team. Remember that you’re building a product and a company."

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Agile Is The New Waterfall — a Followup
5 minutes read.

I recommend reading the first post by ayasin (Agile Is The New Waterfall), and then come back to his followup. As someone who've done Scrum (well, parts of it, with plenty of adjustments) for 4 years, and have some nasty reactions when hearing the words Agile or Scrum, I found myself nodding my head while reading every line of this post. It's the people and problem that worth focusing, not the damn process or current solution. My thoughts on constantly adjusting your process: "Scaling engineering org is about tweaking for flow, happiness and fulfillment. If your process is not improving one of the above, kill it."

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A Better Offer Letter
3 minutes read.

I feel that as a community we still have a long way to go in order to make compensation and terms more open, focusing on educating people rather than hiding details from them, hoping they'd not ask questions. Nice move by eShares.

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Peopleware

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Fighting The Ticking Clock in Your Head
4 minutes read.

Wonderful advice if you're always trying to optimize your time around providing value: "When my internal clock starts getting loud, there’s one thing that has consistently helped me: I temporarily shift my perspective on how I’m measuring progress. Instead of focusing on feature completion, I focus on the other value my work is creating."

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A New Method to Reduce The Insane Number of Meetings You Attend
3 minutes read.

Reviewing your last week's meetings in order to understand how effective they were, is a great way to save yourself time, and remove waste. As a leader, it's also a great way to challenge the way meetings are used, and decisions are reached, e.g. maybe people feel they need a meeting to reach an agreement, which might be a slow process to follow. How many meetings you ranked as 0 or 1? What you're going to do about it?

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In Defense of Management
6 minutes read.

"I compare management to code reviews or continuous integration; when done poorly, it is clearly a drag on the organization, and if you feel like you've been getting on fine without them, why take on the overhead? But anyone who has made the transition knows that once in place, you'll wonder how you ever got on without them. The same can be said for good management." -- make sure that this is the kind of leadership you're providing, regardless of the structure you choose to operate within.

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Inspiring Tweets

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@sean_a_rose: “Hire the best” might be the most useless advice I’ve ever heard. It’s not like everyone’s otherwise trying to hire mediocre people.

@jasonfried: Know what you’ll say no to.