Software Lead Weekly

What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Root Cause’
5 minutes read.

This post is a must-read for anyone dealing with complex systems - humans and machines - thinking that "root cause" is the proper framing to ask more profound questions: "In other words, our experience with incidents can be so disturbing to us that we feel a strong and immediate desire to identify what “caused” an event, so we can then do something (which typically means fixing something) in order to regain a sense of being in control. This is what John Carroll (Carroll, 1995) called root cause seduction. On the face of it, this idea seems understandable, even relatable. But we have to acknowledge that labeling something as a ‘root cause’ reflects a cherry-picked perspective; it highlights one aspect of a complex event and discounts others. The label performs a sort of sleight-of-hand or redirection like a magician might, akin to saying “look right here—don’t concern yourself with other things.” "

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VCs When .Ai Is in the Name
1 minutes read.

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

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Measuring Developer Productivity via Humans
11 minutes read.

Measuring the productivity and happiness of your development team becomes critical once you cross the 50-100 engineers threshold. One of my lessons learned in this area is to constantly show demos, cover the "before & after" with user quotes, and celebrate wins. Figure out where you want to be world-class and why it's critical in your business. These unique investment areas should be something your team is proud to talk about, and it might look strange or have low ROI for other companies.

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We Need More Calm Companies
5 minutes read.

"A calm company's purpose is to provide exceptional service to customers while simultaneously improving the lives of the people who work there. By default, a calm company is profitable. Those profits give a calm company its resilience: there's no last-minute scramble to meet payroll or earn a last-minute sale to keep the business afloat. The company has enough financial margin to weather economic storms." -- Our industry needs variety. Greatness has many shapes and styles.

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Unit Tests Considered Harmful
3 minutes read.

Shai Yallin covers an area I wish I could have read in my early 20s, instead of spending so many years to reach the same powerful conclusion: "Strict coverage for classes prevents regression in these classes but does not assert that the feature actually works. And these tests make it difficult to change the behavior and interface of these classes, that might reflect incidental design or implementation details that have nothing to do with the feature that we actually care about. [...] Finally, remember that our users don't care about our test suite. They care about whether our software actually solves their problems and makes their lives easier. Our engineers also don’t care about our test suite. They want to develop new features, solve bugs, and keep everything tidy with minimal pains and restrictions."

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The Art of Product Management in the Fog of AI
3 minutes read.

Helpful tips by Tomasz Tunguz on how Product Managers and Software Engineers should test their LLM-based applications before launching products. When introducing an unpredictable component to your product, testing, and UX become as tricky as figuring out your distribution channel: "The goal is not to eliminate unpredictability altogether but to design a product that can adapt and learn alongside its users. Just as much as the technology has changed products, our design processes must evolve as well."

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Embrace Silence
3 minutes read.

Pavel Brodsky asks leaders to hold. Let silence be. "As a team leader, being the one to fill every silent moment creates an environment which fosters 'dependency'. The group becomes accustomed to the manager calling all the shots, and gradually relinquishes more and more control to him or her. The team becomes less effective, and struggles to function when the manager is not around."

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The 4 Product Risks: Advanced View
3 minutes read.

An effective way to capture the risks you're dealing with when building products and taking them to market. You can share it with your team and discuss where you should focus.

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@esthercrawford: I came across this lit up stairway today. As it says, you can’t do epic shit with basic people - so keep your standards high. Don’t settle, in work or life, for people who drain you or drag you down. Surrounding yourself with people you want to be like has a compounding effect.

@jspujji: Delete all standing meetings, every quarter. Jeff Lawson, Founder and CEO of Twilio gave me this awesome advice: Why? (1) Immediately Kills ALL unnecessary standing meetings (2) Makes everyone revisit their calendars and think about their weeks (3) Anything that is important will…