/Management

This Is How Effective CTOs Embrace Change

- Evan Cooke tl;dr: "A truly great leader is someone that can not only figure out the impact of a potential decision, they can fully understand the impact of that decision on all the people who will be touched by it.” Evan Cooke, former Twilio CTO, outlines the two significant issues faced by CTOs of later stage startups - (1) Not knowing fellow leaders well enough, (2) Misunderstanding the needs of the company - and how to navigate them.

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Copy The Questions, Not The Answers

- Jessica Kerr tl;dr: "Repeating the conclusion isn’t useful. The question that reached that conclusion is useful over and over." Yet, Jessica points to the fact that we tend to replicate team structures of successful companies without asking the right questions. Instead of “what do successful teams do?” ask “how did that team that worked well reach its way of working?”

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The Developer's Guide To SCIM

tl;dr: Automatic user provisioning and deprovisioning via SCIM is often one of the second features, after single sign-on, that engineering teams need to build in order to sell to larger customers. Imagine how difficult it'd be for IT admins to manually add/delete access to your app for hundreds of employees when they join or leave the company. We explore how it works, how to add it to your app, and best practices for implementation.

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Five Takeaways From Looking For A New Senior Role In Tech

- Phil Calçado tl;dr: "This article explicitly focuses on senior leadership roles, which were what I was looking for." (1) It will likely take longer than you expect. (2) Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource. (3) Use your project management skills to keep your sanity. (4) Be strategic around your interviews and chats. (5) Do not waste your time, but part as friends with everyone in the process. 

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How To Mentor Software Engineers

- David Golden tl;dr: Mentorship conversations are quite different from coaching conversations. "When someone comes to me, they’re usually asking bigger question not tied to our day-to-day work and these conversations fall into three categories:" (1) Goals - figuring out what they really want. (2) Situations - handling the unfamiliar or difficult. (3) Skills - getting promoted. David discusses how to mentor each.

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What Are The Benefits Of A PCI Automated Platform?

tl;dr: PCI compliance is a critical step in protecting your business from data breaches and security risks, but it is also a painful process. Are there benefits to a PCI automated platform? You betcha… think less process, less painful. Learn how an automated platform can help your business get market ready faster.

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The Decision-Making Pendulum

- Candost Dagdeviren tl;dr: Candost sees decision-making as a spectrum - or pendulum - between authority and consensus: "On one side, we have the authority, and on the other side, we have the consensus. This pendulum requires leaders to go back and forth. Having flexibility in decision-making is crucial and more persuasive than sticking to only one."

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Inspection And The Limits Of Trust

- Will Larson tl;dr: As a leader, you must trust your team. However, trusting your team can, a times, be at odds with helping them succeed. Human error or bad processes can come into play. Will uses "inspected trust:" when someone "brings a problem or a concern to you, trust them that there is a problem, but give yourself space to independently verify their interpretation of the problem." He highlights various ways of doing this.

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Group Dynamics: Norms and Emotion

- Ed Batista tl;dr: For a leader to enable her team to be more effective, 3 conditions must be met: (1) Mutual trust amongst members. (2) A group identity i.e. members belong to a unique and worthwhile group. (3) Sense of group efficacy i.e. the belief that group members are more effective working together. At the heart of these is the ability to create awareness of emotions and regulate them, and Ed presents a framework of 14 questions, and a step-by-step process that allows a group to assess where they are collectively.

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How GitLab Automates Engineering Management

- Seth Berger tl;dr: Seth shares a few scripts written by the engineering manager of the infrastructure team at Gitlab, who is tasked with coordinating large scale infrastructure and code improvements. The scripts parse issues and epics in order to gain better visibility into the work that needs to be done.

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