Software Lead Weekly

Minimum Viable Personality
5 minutes read.

"Personality is API for loyalty" - while a bit old, this post is still more relevant than ever, with the rise of so many startups. Wonderfully written, made me laugh while nodding my head the all time. Build a brand, stand out. Do it for your product, your team and even for your engineers. Share it at the office, it's golden.

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Here's a Poem About the Problems Caused When a Mathematical Concept Takes Over a Poem
1 minutes read.

As always, something to start the weekend with a huge smile on your face. Math is fun.

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How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management
14 minutes read.

These days my mind is occupied with my own thoughts on the required traits, expectations and practices to help my company's engineering team to grow while keeping hierarchy to minimum. “Engineers hate being micromanaged on the technical side but love being closely managed on the career side” - great insights in this article, on how Google approach measuring management value by using the same data-driven approach they're using for measuring product value.

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Shit Rolls Downhill
2 minutes read.

"Culture is simple — get your act together... People emulate leadership. Great leaders are great examples. They’re prepared, they (really) listen, and they consistently collaborate with their teams to transform the best ideas into action." Short and inspiring.

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10 Things That Changed How I Thought About Building Things That Matter
6 minutes read.

Not only this post is packed with wonderful insights, it's also a super helpful reference to other important posts on the topic. Free some time and give it a look, dive deeper and read the posts mentioned here. It doesn't get any better than that.

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Still Totally Obsessed With How to Do This Manager Job
5 minutes read.

What is your management philosophy? These two are spot on: "My job is to help my people have the career they want. Whether it ends up being on my team or not" and "I have awkward conversations so you don’t have to. And so they actually happen"

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To-Do Lists Are Evil. Schedule Everything.
2 minutes read.

I like this concept of scheduling my to-do list to make sure I'm allocating enough time for the things I care about most. Interesting time-management hack to try next week.

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Feedback
18 minutes read.

Peter Seibel (Twitter) hates Performance Reviews - "it strikes me that if you could chart my probability of leaving Twitter over time, it would probably spike every six months sometime during feedback". I think that it all beings with setting expectations poorly when someone is promoted to a managerial position. Managers need to understand that it's their job to make the time to write and share feedback constantly, to help their teammates with their careers, to ask for feedback and improve the way they lead. When this is at the bottom of every manager's todo list, no wonder the organization "feels" the urge to enforce the process.

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@StartupLJackson: The problem with fixating on aggregate data and "industry trends" is that it's irrelevant to your startup. You are a beautiful snowflake.

@dzello: Perfect is not the enemy of good. Bad is the enemy of good. Perfect is the enemy of time.