/Management

When To Write Strategy, And How Much?

- Will Larson tl;dr: Will covers: (1) When to write strategy, in particular the pain points (like cross-team friction) and opportunities (like senior hires) that are good moments to start writing. (2) How much strategy your org can tolerate, avoiding the traps of writing so much that it’s ignored or so little that there’s not much impact. (3) Using strategy altitude – how permissive a given strategy is and where it’s implemented – to manage the overhead that strategies creates. (4) Mechanisms to debug whether you’re doing too much or too little strategy work. 

featured in #544

Manager Antipatterns

- Ted Neward tl;dr: “There's a whole host of mistakes that companies often fall prey to with respect to those they have leading teams, and I thought it a good idea to collect them into one place, under the umbrella heading of "manager antipatterns”.”

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One On One Meeting Format Ideas

- Marc Gauthier tl;dr: “As a manager, doing one on one meetings with your direct reports is your most important tool. I’ve talked a bit before about opening lines, but I figured it could be interesting to dig into how I handle this every week with my teams. I think it’s important to have a clear format shared to direct reports. This frames the conversation and helps the manager fullfil the objective, while giving some insights to the direct report regarding what this is all about.”

featured in #544

Unlocking CI/CD Efficiency

- Sean Chapman tl;dr: Understanding the impact of each of your deployments is crucial, especially as they become increasingly frequent. Chances are, your team is either aiming to increase shipping velocity or has already started deploying “continuously”. And while CD comes with a host of well-established benefits, it also introduces a heightened risk of introducing new errors and issues. Today, Raygun takes a look at the state of continuous deployment according to survey data, so you can see how you stack up compared to other teams. 

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Enthusiasm: Managing Our Most Precious Resource

- Kent Beck tl;dr: “The enthusiasm-enhancing way to allocate people to tasks is to let the people allocate themselves. They have context, in the form of accountability and purpose and approximate proportions, but to preserve enthusiasm they must make their own decision. And a fired up engineer is five times (for some value of five) as valuable as that same engineer just putting in hours.”

featured in #543

Learn What Role Based Access Control Is And How To Use It To Simplify Permission Management Within Organizations

- Brian Morrison tl;dr: Managing permissions in large SaaS applications can be a nightmare. Providing team owners a way to grant functionality to users in a simplified way can be the difference between companies purchasing your software or going with a competitor. Clerk provides you with a way to build this functionality with minimal effort.

featured in #543

The 3 Motivational Forces Of Developers

- Ben Northrop tl;dr: “After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation. It undergirds all of his decisions and interactions. It predicts what kind of code he'll write, what technologies he'll prefer, and even how he'll succeed on a given assignment. And it's often quite easy to peg for any given developer after just a few days of working with him or her.” 

featured in #543

How to Write Great Tech Specs

- Nicola Ballotta tl;dr: Nicola covers: (1) What a tech specs document is, why it's important, and why it can sometimes be challenging to create one. (2) How to create outstanding tech specs. (3) A Notion system for creating tech specs. (4) Tips from both his own experience as well as the communities.

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Build Vs Buy Part I: Complexities Of Building SSO And SCIM In-House

- Min Kim Amit Bhojraj tl;dr: One of the pitfalls of building SSO and SCIM from scratch is the ongoing engineering investment required to scale your solution — supporting more IdPs, dealing with expiring SAML certificates, and standardizing onboarding fragmentation. And this is after spending 3-6 months to develop the initial solution for a handful of providers. When factoring in feature expansion (domain verification, JIT provisioning, custom-mapped attributes, IdP role assignment), which is different from work related to maintenance and scalability, the total cost of ownership multiplies significantly.

featured in #542

The 3 Motivational Forces Of Developers

- Ben Northrop tl;dr: “After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation. It undergirds all of his decisions and interactions. It predicts what kind of code he'll write, what technologies he'll prefer, and even how he'll succeed on a given assignment. And it's often quite easy to peg for any given developer after just a few days of working with him or her.” 

featured in #542