7 Challenges With Long-Term Projects And How To Manage Them
- Raviraj Achar tl;dr: Raviraj, a tech lead from Meta, outlines his approach to the following: (1) Prioritizing hard problems. (2) Dealing with hidden work. (3) Managing attrition. (4) Staging the value. (5) Adapting to changing constraints. (6) Maintaining confidence and perception. (7) Having a concrete timeline.featured in #474
Deliver Software Security, Reliability, And Maintainability Through Clean Code Practices
- Gabriel Vivas tl;dr: Every company is a software company, and improving the quality, reliability, and security of your code matters. Sonar has spent the last 15 years building tools like SonarQube and SonarLint to help improve developer velocity, reduce code- level technical debt, and put security in the hands of developers. In this article, we detail how companies can make Clean Code a priority.featured in #474
How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer
- Noah Desai Weiss tl;dr: Noah emphasizes that not all product problems can be solved through data-driven experimentation alone, advocating for intuition and judgment in tackling complex challenges. He advises focusing on individual decision-making rather than being swayed by overall outcomes, a concept known as "resulting." Noah outlines a three-step process for quality decision-making: sharing context, building trust, and factoring in risk. He also introduces the 70:20:10 product roadmap rule for diversifying risk. 70% of efforts should focus on core products, 20% on emerging products, and 10% on experimental ideas. Finally, Noah highlights the importance of well-defined organizational values, like taking bigger, bolder bets and humility, to foster a culture conducive to impactful decision-making.featured in #473
How Much Do Companies Invest in Developer Productivity Teams?
- Abi Noda tl;dr: What percentage of headcount should be allocated toward centralized productivity teams? Abi found that companies under 1,000 engineers allocate 18.9% of their headcount toward centralized productivity teams, with a range of 8%-37%. The average allocation decreased to 17.8% when including companies with more than 1,000 engineers. Abi breaks this down further by company size and categories of productivity teams.featured in #473
Practical Ways To Increase Product Velocity
tl;dr: "This post contains my go-to steps for debugging slow product velocity, particularly in SaaS. While I believe that these tactics are generally applicable, they’re heavily informed by my personal background. I have an engineering background and a reasonable sense for when I’m getting bullshitted about how hard something is. I also have a degree of control over both what teams work on and how they work – without that, some techniques may not apply. So while your mileage may vary, I hope that it’s helpful to lay these tactics out in one place."featured in #472
Updated Pricing: 10,000 MAUs Free, And A New “Pro Plan”
- Braden Sidoti tl;dr: Clerk integrates user management UIs and APIs, purpose-built for React, Next.js, and the Modern Web. and are introducing a new, 'simplified pricing structure' for its user management services, offering '10,000 free monthly active users (MAUs)' for every application. This change includes a 'First Day Free' feature, ensuring no charges for users churning within the first day.featured in #472
The Tragedy Of The Common Leader
- James Stanier tl;dr: "The default outlook for middle management is to look up and down the org chart, but not sideways. Because you are so focused on your own team and your own manager, you often forget that you have a peer group at all! That is, until you need something from them. At this point, the underinvestment in your peer group becomes apparent: you have limited rapport and trust with them, and an ask to transfer some of your engineering capacity to them is met with hot flushes and heavy and furious typing." James prompts us to think about these peers, and how we can approach building relationships with them.featured in #472
First Decide How To Decide: “One Weird Trick” For Easier Decisions
- Jacob Kaplan-Moss tl;dr: "The heart of this process – the move that I think makes it work so well – is that it includes an explicit step to first decide how to decide. That is: when a decision appears that it’ll be controversial or difficult to make, instead of immediately starting to discuss the matter at hand, the stakeholders first come to an agreement about how they’ll eventually decide. In fact, this happens twice: first at the macro scale when the organization agrees to adopt this process overall, and then in the micro scale, for each individual decision." Jacob discusses an example.featured in #471
New Engineering Managers Have A High Failure Rate — This Figma Leader Is On A Mission To Fix It
- Marcel Weekes tl;dr: Marcel discusses the context and solutions to three common problems he sees when engineers transition from IC to management roles: (1) The best-suited folks aren’t the ones elevated to management. (2) New managers fall into a spiral that never pulls them out of IC work. (3) Managing former peers can be just plain awkward.featured in #471
Leading Successful Product Teams
- Ariel Salminen tl;dr: “We’ve been operating in a remote first culture so these rules apply in that context.” The first 5 rules are as follows: (1) Avoid meetings as much as possible. Instead of having them, communicate asynchronous to each other via tools such as Linear, GitHub, Figma, Slack, and similar. (2) Provide at least three days of focus time per week for designers and developers in the team. (3) Trust your team to make decisions, they’re the experts. (4) Default to openness. The team should be sharing what they’re doing whenever they can. (5) Define just the right amount of process. Too much process and it will slow down your team and their performance, while not enough will create inconsistency.featured in #470