/Leadership

GenAI: Perception vs Reality

tl;dr: In 2024, Jellyfish introduced the Copilot Dashboard to measure the impact of the most widely adopted genAI coding tool. We’ve since gathered data from over 4,200 developers at more than 200 companies, giving us a representative sample of how engineering organizations are using Copilot and what impact it’s having on production.

featured in #579

Bottleneck Dirty Webs

tl;dr: “Delegation, specialization, and federation are critical to scaling companies. But scaling doesn’t mean stepping back from everything. Especially for unsavory, cross-functional, time intensive tasks, leaders should position themselves as bottlenecks - owners that feel pressure when the work grows too much, forcing them to find ways to push back on the growth in time and effort.”

featured in #579

Twenty Tiny Leadership Lessons

- Subbu Allamaraju tl;dr: “Most leadership learning is experiential. We observe, learn, and emulate from others, often subconsciously. Yet, the core of such learning starts shallow, leading to behavioral and decision-making mistakes, learned and uncorrected bad behaviors, and dysfunction. Some get better with experience and scope, but more often than not, we wing it, frequently repeating the same behaviors and mistakes for years.” Recognizing this, Subbu enrolled in the Psychology of Leadership at Penn State University. He shares the top twenty from those studies.

featured in #578

2024: The Year In Review

- James Stanier tl;dr: “Not since the smartphone boom period in 2007 have I seen so much change happening so quickly. We've seen the culture and growth of our companies changing due to the macroeconomic climate, a proliferation of LLM-based tools and technologies, and, fundamentally, as leaders, we've had to change how we think about our roles and our output.”

featured in #578

Principal Engineer Roles Framework

- Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec tl;dr: AWS VP shares a framework for Principal Engineer roles developed at Amazon. The framework defines six key roles: Sponsor (project lead), Guide (technical expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor). This helps organizations optimize senior engineers' impact and develop talent effectively.

featured in #578

The Adaptive Chief Technology Officer

tl;dr: “Being the CTO of a small and mid-size enterprise has been a totally different ride compared to what I’ve seen in the big corporate world. One thing that’s clear to me now? The title might stay the same no matter where you go, but what you’re actually doing as a CTO can vary wildly depending on the industry and the company’s growth stage... The author dives into some of the mental frameworks that have helped me navigate these shifts.”

featured in #577

Principal Engineer Roles Framework

- Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec tl;dr: AWS VP shares a framework for Principal Engineer roles developed at Amazon. The framework defines six key roles: Sponsor (project lead), Guide (technical expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor). This helps organizations optimize senior engineers' impact and develop talent effectively.

featured in #577

OKRs For Evil And Good

- Jessica Kerr tl;dr: “My work does not reduce to measurable outcomes. Much of what I accomplish as an engineer and as a developer advocate amounts to creating conditions that make it more likely for the company to succeed. I resist and resent most metrics, yet I don’t mind OKRs the way Honeycomb does them.”

featured in #577

Problem Driven Development

tl;dr: “An easy playbook for technical roadmap development is Problem Driven Development. In short, it means you develop your technical roadmap based on fixing things that are going wrong. It sounds simple, but it can be very empowering.”

featured in #576

Layers Of Context

- Will Larson tl;dr: “All interesting problems operate across a number of context layers. For a concrete example, let’s think about a problem I’ve run into twice: what are the layers of context for evaluating a team that wants to introduce a new programming language like Erlang or Elixir to your company’s technology stack?" Will shares some layers of context and how to see across them.

featured in #575