/Management

The Guide To Becoming Enterprise Ready For SaaS Businesses

tl;dr: "Crossing the Enterprise Chasm" is an inevitable transition every B2B SaaS company has to make when they start selling to enterprises. Although it's a necessary step, moving upmarket is fraught with challenges — building enterprise features takes a ton of capital, it requires aggressive prioritizations, and engineers generally don't like building enterprise features. Here's a guide for product and engineering leaders on making their SaaS apps Enterprise Ready.

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Antifragile

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: “Failures happen. In engineering we often face a choice between trying to eliminate failures or making our systems handle them more gracefully. Both approaches are important but in my experience fault tolerance is the more valuable. The reason is simple: we can only eliminate failures we can imagine while fault tolerance adds some resilience to failures we could not imagine. I have found the same to be true for groups of people.” Andrew discusses how to implement this in management.

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Some Principles Of Human-Centered Computing

- John Allspaw tl;dr: (1) The Aretha Franklin Principle: Emphasizes valuing both humans and machines in a system, aiming for synergy rather than competition. (2) The Sacagawea Principle: Stresses the importance of computational tools supporting active information management and decision-making processes. (3) The Lewis and Clark Principle: Highlights the need to present guidance to users in a way that aligns with their goals and facilitates comprehension of key decisions.

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The Ruthless Edit

- Jim Nelson tl;dr: So often in design, engineering, or product, you’re faced with this decision: how do we pare down what we have to something that feels like a cohesive whole? “Rick Rubin gives this advice about working in the studio with artists when making an album: Let’s say We’ve recorded twenty-five songs. We think the album is going to have ten. Instead of picking our favorite ten, we limit it to: “What are the five or six we can’t live without?” Then you say: “Ok here are the five or six we can't live without, now what would we add to that which makes it better and not worse?” It puts you in a different frame when you start with building and not removing.” 

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Goodhart's Law In Software Engineering

- Hillel Wayne tl;dr: “Goodhart's law is a warning for pointy-haired bosses who up with terrible metrics: lines added, feature points done, etc. I'm more interested in how it affects the metrics we set for ourselves that our bosses might never know about.”

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Why You Should “Design It Twice"?

- Eliran Turgeman tl;dr: “The core message is that you shouldn’t just go with the first design that comes to mind. Instead, come up with at least two different designs even if you have to force yourself. No matter how confident you are, you’ll make better decisions when you compare options side by side.”

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Be Plainspoken

- Andrew Bosworth tl;dr: Andrew discusses the superpower of being plainspoken. “Our desire to maintain harmony can cause us to be indirect about uncomfortable truths. Our desire to influence can cause us to pre-emptively address every arcane objection. Our desire to impress can cause us to use more language than necessary. And the expectations we have internalized about corporate communication often cause us to write in a way we never would to our friends.”

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Scope Management 101

- Kent Beck tl;dr: (1) Plan incrementally. The team, every week, must be prepared to decide what to do that week. Some planning processes are so painful, or require the sign-off of such overworked people, that contemplating planning weekly causes sweat to bead on foreheads. Learn how to plan lightly as to tactics & resolutely as to goals. (2) Deliver incrementally. The team must be prepared to support production while developing. This in turn requires rock solid reliable tidying & prioritizing the fixing & preventing of defects.

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Multi-Tenant vs. Single-Tenant IDaaS Solutions

- Daniel DeGroff tl;dr: “The choice depends on your business model and requirements. Regulatory compliance, security, data management, and upgrade control are important considerations that will ultimately define the most effective solution for your company. Which trade-offs are you willing and able to make? Read some of the most important considerations below and decide which approach fits your business.”

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How To Add An Onboarding Flow For Your Application

- Roy Anger tl;dr: Streamline your app's onboarding with Clerk’s customizable session tokens, publicMetadata, and Next.js Middleware. Implement a seamless experience with minimal code.

featured in #549