Software Lead Weekly

Talk-To-Think, Think-To-Talk, and Leadership
5 minutes read.

Lindsay Holmwood is a brilliant writer, and this post is one of those rare observations that you can learn from and apply immediately to practice your leadership skills. Learn to distinguish between these two communication styles, and when it's best to use each. It can provide a lot of clarity to your teammates.

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When You Get Excited by A/B Test Results Too Early...
1 minutes read.

As always, my humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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How to Scale: Lessons From Stripe CEO
34 minutes read.

Many gems in this wonderful interview with Partick Collison. This one can sound obvious, but it's actually an important observation, when it comes to create a culture people would describe happy: "It seems to be hard problem by itself to create a startup that injects unhappy people and somehow make them happy... We’re just trying to hire people who are intrinsically happy already, and kind of “cheat”" -- great way to spend 30 minutes of your time on your next commute to work.

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The Case for Startups to Make Radical Transparency the Top Priority
14 minutes read.

Matthew Bellows (Yesware's CEO) explains why he made radical transparency a core value in his company, and what you can gain from applying it in yours. Even if you're tight on time, I highly recommend reading the sections about "Rumor Management" and "Educate your team".

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Here’s Why Our Team Now Chooses Their Own Salaries
8 minutes read.

There is a shift towards how companies can and should be built, moving from a very closed, secrecy driven leadership to a transparent leadership, where people have more visibility into the complexity of building and scaling a company. Hanno, very much like companies such as Buffer, have tried to challenge the way they decide on salaries internally, by utilizing their culture of transparency. It reminds me of Stripe's gmail hacks to provide context for new people joining the company, by exposing all of the emails people send to the entire company. Figuring out a model where transparency can help you to attract better talent and increase employees' retention is getting a lot of emphasis these days. It should be interesting to watch how new companies will learn from these brave moves, and how existing companies will adjust to remain competitive for the talent who seek for such transparency.

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The Most Important Piece of Advice for Folks Starting Their Careers
6 minutes read.

This is the post you should send to friends who ask you for career advice. But before you do so, read it and ask yourself if you're doing enough to push your limits in your own career. Probably the best value for time post you'll read this week.

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Great Teams, Great Products
4 minutes read.

What makes a great product? What makes a great team? This one from Cap is great capture of what I've experienced as well: "many people mistake “a group of all senior people” as a recipe for a great team. My experience is that great teams are a mixture of talents and expertise, but the constant is an environment of teaching and learning." -- Finally, read the section about "People and Teams, Not Resources". This is culture.

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“The Best Job Advert for an Engineer Ever Written”
5 minutes read.

These concerns are what you should address when writing a job description on your site. Reading it made me think that I have a lot of work to do to improve the job descriptions I write, when looking for great people to join us. My favorite part: "I want to focus on shipping software than matters to users and my employer. Sadly I often seem to be removed from this process, thereby disempowering me. Let me do this and I will!"

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@MarkAgee: Stages of working from home: (1) Yay I get to work from home (2) It would be nice to talk to people (3) I hope that pigeon sits in the window today

@CodeStars: An optimist sees a glass half full. A pessimist sees it half empty. An engineer sees it twice as large as it needs to be.