Software Lead Weekly

Infrastructure Gravity & Domain Engineering
14 minutes read.

The section on "How the middle atrophies" provides a powerful explanation for the imbalance between product<>domain<>infra by offering Infrastructure Gravity and Feature Lift as terms to explain the organizational forces applied. The thinking presented under "A Financial Model of Domain Engineering" can be used to plan and reason about budget investments.

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The Decisionmaker
1 minutes read.

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

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The Explore/Exploit Framework for Startups
6 minutes read.

"Not exploring enough usually stems from avoiding discomfort. People like easy choices, and so picking the option that seems good enough or the one that you’re most comfortable with is tempting. If your decision is important, ask yourself if you’re choosing the best option or if you’re taking the easy way out." -- This is something I've seen (and unfortunately did) so many times. Use it to run a sanity check for your decisions, and have someone you trust to push you on it.

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Management Wasn’t Invented to Make Work Faster. It Was Invented to Make Trust Scale.
3 minutes read.

Wonderful take by Hiten Shah on trust as a foundation to build relationships and community, and only then seeking efficiency: "how do you get strangers to work together when personal loyalty is not enough? The answer was simple. Records. Roles. Rituals. Accountability. Every management system began there. Only once trust was stable could efficiency even enter the conversation. [...] The future of management will not belong to those who optimize first. It will belong to those who earn trust first and then make it scale."

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Underdo the Competition
3 minutes read.

"Instead of being last place in the fancy electric car market, they're now the first place in the simple, fun electric truck market." -- Shaan Puri's take on Slate's positioning and product thinking (e.g. knobs over digital buttons) can help shape how you think about the things you create.

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Why I Don't Believe in 1:1s
3 minutes read.

Zeb Hermann's take on 1:1s might open your thinking on how best to leverage it for you and your teammates. I'm unsure if his suggestions take less time or are more effective overall, but they made him track and analyze his investments and impact. That's a worthy exercise to do.

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The SBI Feedback Framework: Your Go-to Guide for End-of-Year Reviews
5 minutes read.

The SBI(N) framework is simple enough to see if it's effective for you. Having enough trust between you and your teammates to allow vulnerable discussions is what you should aim for when you start.

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Pick Better Life Goals
11 minutes read.

Julian Shapiro puts it well: "Vanity not only makes you inauthentic to competent people, it’s also an enormous drain on your time. [...] Don't inherit goals without sanity checking them. Don't outsource them to society. By default, society prioritizes vanity metrics because even the lazy can achieve them."

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@jasonfried: Productivity is for machines, not for people. There’s nothing meaningful about packing some number of work units into some amount of time, or squeezing more into less. Think about how effective you’re being, not how productive you’re being.

@fbinegotiator: Remember that people are not against you. They are for themselves. Which is why curiosity, empathy, mirroring, and labeling work like magic. It’s not about you. It never was.