Issue #389, 8th May 2020

This Week's Favorite


How to Build a Breakthrough
8 minutes read.

Mike Maples with a helpful framework to help you come up with products and movements to shape the future. The power of inversion thinking can help you to promote your ideas, managing risks, and above all - build a narrative you want to chase after. It doesn't mean you'll be right, but it will work on a muscle worth developing.

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Culture


Me at Standup
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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How to Grow, Manage, and Work With Remote Teams
12 minutes read.

Zapier shared their guide for building a remote-only team. Many companies are working with multiple offices, or have people working remotely for various roles. I enjoyed skimming the content and looking for ideas to improve the way the company operates in this hybrid model. For example, I took a few tools from "Remote work tools" and "How to work faster in a remote team."

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Risk Assessment and Prioritization for Startups
8 minutes read.

Leo Polovets with excellent slides you should read as a leader in your organization. Can you state the risks the company should address? Is that something you explain clearly to a teammate? If not, it's a worthy topic to discuss in your next 1:1 with your manager. Slide 30 on the "Watch out for the illusion of progress" is incredibly important.

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Peopleware


20 Questions to Ask Instead of “How Are You Doing Right Now?”
5 minutes read.

Having 1:1s during COVID-19 has to be a bit different. Elizabeth Weingarten offers different questions you can use to go deeper and make sure your teammates are feeling okay.

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Setting Goals (Thread)
4 minutes read.

"I think about a goal like a video game. Video games are built to ensure that the next level is just hard enough to motivate you to continue, but not so hard that you give up. You want to win, even if it’s tough, and victory always seems just within reach. But when it feels impossible, you quickly give up. So when setting a goal, just like in a video game, you want your goal to motivate your team." -- Lenny Rachitsky is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter.

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From Engineer to Designer
4 minutes read.

Amit Assaraf will inspire you to play and consider learning new skills. A few more tips I'm using to add to Amit's list: (1) Which companies are doing great work in that space? (2) Who in these companies should I follow (on Twitter) to learn from them and the resources they share?

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Inspiring Tweets


@eriktorenberg: Consider calling your first ~3-7 employees "founding team": (1) You might attract better people who have more buy-in (2) Make sure that they know they're not a co-founder. It's a glorified first employee (3) Challenge is those ppl get undue moral authority in org if they don't scale

@ShaneAParrish: Be impatient with progress but patient with people.

- Oren

P.S. Can you share this email? I'd love for more people to experiment and improve their company's culture.

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