Software Lead Weekly

This Week's Favorite

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Building A First Team Mindset
5 minutes read.

Jason Wong with a post that I believe every manager, and especially - managers of managers - should read. If your managers don't work well together, it will impact their teammates and how they work with teams around them. Imagine two managers have major conflicts on priorities and urgency, now try to think about what will happen when two engineers in those teams need to work together on something. Conflicts (and gossip) will slow you down, so much so that to "manage" those silos you'll need a lot of extra processes (and people) to compensate.

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Culture

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When #slack is Down And You're A Remote Worker.
1 minute read.

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

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The Engineering Manager Workshop Format
3 minutes read.

I am going to apply Glossier's approach, as described by Aaron Suggs, so managers in my team at Forter could leverage their peers, learn from each other and have it as a support group when needed. Creating more feedback loops is critical, as it's so easy to feel lonely in this path.

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Writing Proposals to Speed up Decisions
3 minutes read.

Max Williams offers a framework you can use to propose and execute on decisions in your organization. It's hard to start with it, as it requires some changes in behaviors (we're used to making decisions "freestyle", with very little structure), but it can have a significant impact on the culture of the organization in the long run. Also, imagine that you have a log of hundreds of decisions done in your organization - there are many insights you could extract from it to improve your velocity as an execution team. Ready to give it a try?

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Migrations: The Sole Scalable Fix to Tech Debt.
5 minutes read.

The process you use to migrate systems (or any kind of tech debt) tells a lot about your culture. Failing just enough times by having a process in place that doesn't build trust inside the organization, will quickly lead to lack of desire or capacity to deal with growth (both business growth and org growth). Take Will Larson's process and share it with your team. On your next migration, hold yourself accountable for these steps, building the trust as you go.

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Peopleware

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Management & False Certainty
5 minutes read.

"Good orgs will judge you more harshly for not betting than for betting wrong." -- Abe Winter covers one of the hardest challenges of managing up (and sideways), where you have a strong disagreement with your managers or peers, and you're unsure how to convey this message effectively. One thing that could help is having some explicit expectations shared between people (thus why I like the concept of Manager Readme). Having that in place, you'll know how to do it without compromising your relationship with them.

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Four Qualities of The Independent Developer
7 minutes read.

"Working a lot on something, deploying it, and then discovering it has little impact after all the hard work, is frustrating, wasting some valuable time, and costing the company a lot of money." -- share this post by Guy Gadon with your software engineers. So many great tips here about how to create better leverage as an IC, validating, planning and executing from A to Z.

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The New Manager Death Spiral (Video)
30 minutes read.

Michael Loop is always fun to watch. It's ridiculous how authentic and real this talk is, even though it covers probably all possible mistakes. I've done many of those over the years.

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Inspiring Tweets

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@ValaAfshar: Happy people solve harder problems.

@pt: Introducing the concept of OKRs to my kids. A big organizational goal this quarter is smoother bedtimes, so we’re aligning to this.