/Slava Akhmechet

How To Send Progress Updates tl;dr: 15 tips, including: (1) Understand your role, and with each update add to the body of evidence that you’re a good steward in that role. (2) Add a little randomness to the cadence. (3) Know what your next update will be and work toward it. (4) Always start with a one sentence TL;DR and a 2-4 sentence recap of the overall goals of the project. (5) Within reason, deliberately engineer pleasant surprises so you can include them in your updates. And more.

featured in #505


Headline Driven Development tl;dr: Process involves: (1) Decomposing the project into a stream of headlines. (2) Picking an aggressive ship date for the first headline and working hard to meet it. (3) Having everyone focus only on one headline at a time - the upcoming one. (4) Ignoring everything else that doesn't help ship the current headline. (5) Once a headline ships, switching to the next one and repeating. This process works well as for three reasons - headlines is how humans process change, prioritization is easy and setting deadlines is effective. 

featured in #504


Surviving Disillusionment tl;dr: Engineers are seduced by the romance of technology & its "power to transform the human condition," and repelled by the "drudgery" of corporate politics, bureaucracy, envy and greed." The latter can be overcoming. Slava encourages us to keep a daily tangible, ritual that reminds us of this romance.

featured in #214