Software Lead Weekly

The Gentle Singularity
5 minutes read.

My take, and I know it might be overly simplistic and for sure optimistic, is the beauty of evolution versus technology is that humans will care about other humans for long enough (and in the grand scheme of things) to assimilate technology for the greater good of other humans: "People have a long-term important and curious advantage over AI: we are hard-wired to care about other people and what they think and do, and we don’t care very much about machines."

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Nutritional Label but for All Text Shared Online
1 minutes read.

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

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My Marketing Team Is 40 AI Agents (Video)
51 minutes read.

Jacob Bank is a terrific product thinker to follow. There is so much buzz around Agents lately that it's hard to distill any insight that you can believe (versus a lot of BS that sounds good). Obviously, Jacob has an interest in this session (he's selling the outcome), and yet his insights are profound, inspiring me to consider how to apply them to my world.

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This Is a Story About How We Rebooted a 15 Year Old Decelerating Business to Be on Course to Be the Fastest Growing Large Software Company in the World in Four Quarters From Today
4 minutes read.

This is one hell of a comeback, both for the cofounder (Eoghan McCabe) and for the company (Intercom). Leading with innovation and writing about it publically creates a foundation for trust in your expertise. Then, if you perform well (e.g., POC head-to-head with your competitors), it builds the brand as the best in the market.

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What Happens When a Leader Moves Up, but the Wreckage of Their Bad Decisions Remains?
7 minutes read.

Great examples of how many small decisions and lack of proper incentives (now versus future) can eventually create weak organizations. I love how Matt Martin: "Accountability shouldn’t expire when a title changes. It should follow the decisions, the impact, and the legacy left behind. If we want to build organizations where leadership actually means something, beyond optics and upward mobility, then we need systems that remember. This isn’t to punish the past, but to protect the future. Because the cost of indifference isn’t just broken teams. It’s broken trust. Broken people. And eventually, a broken organization."

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Being “In Control” vs “In Command”
5 minutes read.

"Being “in command” doesn’t mean you’re constantly telling people what to do. It means you’re acting as an editor, not a writer, unless being a writer is necessary to make progress. And if that is happening constantly, that you make a change on the team so that it’s not happening constantly. That might mean changing someone else, or changing yourself." -- brilliant take from Jason Cohen on the need to be in command (versus in control). It is a masterpiece for every leader in the organization and a must-read for any CEO.

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Managers Need Help, Stats Inside
4 minutes read.

"According to an in-depth survey of my 1M+ newsletter subscribers (possibly the largest-ever sentiment survey of tech workers), fewer than 1 in 3 tech workers (26.6%) rate their managers as highly effective, while more than 4 in 10 (42.3%) rate their managers as ineffective." -- Remarkable statistics to share within your company to open up a discussion if managers are the quality your team needs. Where can you invest more in training? Where should you raise the bar and change your leaders?

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Writing in the Age of LLMs
4 minutes read.

Shreya Shankar shares pitfalls to consider when writing with the help of LLM. Like many things in life, we often average out to low standards, and LLM may best represent that when it comes to writing. Treat your users' time with the respect they need. Don't use empty-calories LLM-generated text to sound smart yet say nothing of substance.

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@garrytan: If you ever do find the thing you truly love to do that is also making something people want, all you have to do is nose to the grindstone on that thing, and compounding takes care of the rest! There are few bigger blessings in life than discovering what that is.

@tobi: I really like the term “context engineering” over prompt engineering. It describes the core skill better: the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.