Software Lead Weekly

Scaling a Product Organization (Video)
20 minutes read.

Great video and slides from Akshay Kothari, founder of Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn). Akshay shares why and how they changed their organization structure over time to keep innovation and execution speed to maximum, with over 30M users. Their insight about pushing power to edges and iLike/iWish/iWonder culture hack is useful and inspiring. Highly recommended!

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How We Ship Code at Twitter (Vine)
6 minutes read.

Alright, this video got me. Where do I sign to join Twitter? Seriously though, funny 6 seconds vine video of how Twitter releases code. Great way to start your weekend.

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The Similarities Between Building and Scaling a Product and a Company
2 minutes read.

Fred Wilson with a really important post about scaling your and company. Hiring is critical not only because of what they'll build in the next year, but for what they'll lead and innovate in the next 5 years. While people always repeat the "Hire Slow, Fire Fast" mantra, replacing a great person who contributed tremendously to the company will be painful. This is why I would put extra attention to who do you choose to promote to a management position and what is the motivation behind that for both sides. Promote those who will be able to scale the company in terms of empowering their teammates. It requires a lot of agility and guts to change things as you grow. Unlike code and product changes, you'll pay much more for making a wrong decision.

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But I Already Wrote It
3 minutes read.

What do you do in case you developed a lot more than needed to implement a feature? Do you keep the code or do you trim it? Jef Claes picked the latter. Share this post with your Technical Leads, have a discussion around the real cost of supporting your features - "The cost of implementing a feature is just a tiny portion of what it costs to support that feature through its entire lifetime."

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8 Questions You Should Be Asking at Midyear
5 minutes read.

8 simple yet powerful questions by Kate Matsudaira (of popforms) you can use to help your teammates measure their progress. I've marked it as one of my favorite posts to go back to for my next self-retrospective. Great read!

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Make If-Then Plans to Get More Things Done
7 minutes read.

How do you fight procrastination? Edmond Lau shares a great if-then approach to get things done. What I love most in his post, is his advice on "Develop routines to reduce transaction costs". It's something I've been doing for the last couple of years now. Breaking my prioritization time (early morning at home) from my getting things done time, helped me to reduce context switch and reduced my fear of working on the wrong things.

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@noahkagan: To be in the 1% you have to do what the 99% won't

@levie: Companies fail when they stop asking what they would do if they were started today, and instead just iterate on what they've already done.