Software Lead Weekly

A Wake-Up Call for Tech Managers
4 minutes read.

Marcus Blankenship is spot on: "... it appears many programmers are treated like idiot savants; brilliant children capable only of coding. Stop it. Seriously." -- if you're a manager, read this. Share this. Talk about it. As technical managers, we have to share more context about the business and the product, and spend less time telling people what to do or how to do it.

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Hey Devs, I Finally Found It!
1 minutes read.

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

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What Happens When Startups Turn From Their Innovation Stage to Operational Excellence?
14 minutes read.

If you care about how companies grow, regardless of your position in your current company, read this post by Mark Suster. Reading the story of how MakeSpace grew, and the bumps it had to go through, was fascinating. It doesn't get any better than that, if you're seeking for tips on the pitfalls to avoid as you scale the company. This takeaway is spot on: "Great leaders recognize their own individual strengths and recruit people who complement them rather than compliment them."

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Run Less Software
10 minutes read.

You can use this post by Rich Archbold to judge your decision-making on how you picked your current (and future) technological stack: "By choosing standard technology we systematically increase our speed and reduce the cost of our engineering decisions... We want to spend as much of our time working on the hardest and most valuable problems our customers need solving, not on reinventing the technology wheel." -- also, if you're hiring, building a strong engineering brand by publishing such blog posts and investing in the story-telling & graphical part is a great way to go!

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Top 10 Lessons in Building a Distributed Engineering Team
5 minutes read.

Bruno Miranda with useful tips you can use, even if your team is not distributed. This part is my favorite: "What about productivity? How do we know an engineer is going to be productive if we can't see them? This is a simple answer. Hire self-managing people, keep the teams small, and form product-focused teams." -- reminds me of a great reply to "How do you create happy teams? It's simple, hire positive & happy people."

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I Often Get Asked How I Became a PM and Arrived Where I Am Today
4 minutes read.

Sean Rose (PM at Slack) is someone I've been following on Twitter for some time. He's such a smart and humble, down to earth person. His story into Product Management can serve many others who don't know how to start and looking for ideas. One tip I'd always recommend is to spend more time reading: "I started by reading everything Aaron read — Grove, Christensen. Moore, Benioff, etc... and I kept voraciously reading as much as I could — it seemed like the only way to compensate for (a lack of) years of experience." -- if you add to that being helpful on different mediums (e.g. Quora, StackOverflow etc.), with some luck (and patience!) someone will give you a chance.

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Are You Out of Alignment?
4 minutes read.

Camille Fournier will help you to increase your impact on the team and organization you work for: "Many individual contributors (ICs) get stuck at a certain point in their career because they can’t see that they are out of alignment with their company, and they don’t realize that the way alignment is achieved has changed for them." -- if you're unsure what is important or lost track, just ask. Go to your direct manager and ask: "What keeps you awake at night? What should our team do to make the company more successful? How can I help with it?"

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1/ I’ve Collected Tons of Career Advice. Here’s the Best of the Best. (Thread)
3 minutes read.

David Perell with tips from many entrepreneurs and investors on how to boost your career. My personal favorite was: “You get paid linearly for analyzing and solving problems. You get paid non-linearly for spotting and seizing opportunities.”

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@marckohlbrugge: Managing one’s own psychology is one of the most important yet least discussed traits of successful makers.

@garrytan: Your competitors might raise more money. But if your numbers, fundamentals, and team are better, you will prevail. Markets are short term popularity contests and long term weighing machines.