/Management

The Staff Meeting Ritual

- Allen Cheung tl;dr: “I started this ritual about 7–8 years ago when I first started managing managers and wanted a better format for bringing together the more senior, busier, more expensive people on my teams. Across teams and companies, I’ve iterated on the meeting, modifying the format to accommodate my team’s suggestions and what I saw were the gaps in our organization.”

featured in #612

The Staff Meeting Ritual

- Allen Cheung tl;dr: “I started this ritual about 7–8 years ago when I first started managing managers and wanted a better format for bringing together the more senior, busier, more expensive people on my teams. Across teams and companies, I’ve iterated on the meeting, modifying the format to accommodate my team’s suggestions and what I saw were the gaps in our organization.”

featured in #611

How To Get Good At Strategy

- Claire Lew tl;dr: “The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”Strategy is: (1) Identifying the most critical challenge in a situation. (2) Addressing this challenge with some kind of coherent approach. (3) Having coordinating actions focused on overcoming this challenge."

featured in #611

Why B2B SaaS Outgrow Unified APIs

- Bri Cho tl;dr: Unified APIs feel like a cheat code—one API, dozens of integrations. But as your product scales, what was once a shortcut starts slowing you down. Teams hit limits they didn’t expect. Customers ask for things the unified layer can’t support. Eventually, most B2B SaaS companies need a more flexible solution.

featured in #611

What Async Communication Behaviors Lead To Better Outcomes For Software Engineers?

- Lizzie Matusov tl;dr: “Researchers conducted a 10-day field experiment with 260 elite software engineers. Participants were randomly assigned to 52 globally distributed five-person teams on a crowdsourcing platform. Each team collaborated asynchronously to solve a real-world software problem — designing an algorithm to optimize medical kits for spaceflight. The researchers analyzed communication patterns and outcomes to identify which behaviors predicted the most success outcomes.”

featured in #610

Hiring Great People

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: “So if you too believe that curiosity is important in great individuals and leaders, how do you identify that trait? One way, as my coach friend did, is to see what questions someone asks. If during an interview if the person asks no questions, are they really curious? I’m not even interviewing for your role and I’m curious about how you find the culture of your company, what techniques have you found to be successful, what excited you about joining your company? I could go on and on.”

featured in #610

Managing Underperformers

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “There are two fully unrelated causes of underperformance: Refusal to Align and Failure to Execute. Underperformance is when a person or a team is not bearing their share of the organization’s load. Their colleagues are either relying on them and getting let down, or they’ve learned not to rely on them at all.”

featured in #610

Leading From The Front

tl;dr: “Most people will not lead from the front. They won’t learn what’s needed to be useful when they get there. They won’t block the time to be able to show up. Or when they get there they’ll be a distraction. Or after being woken up twice at 3am in a month they’ll say “this really just isn’t for me. But those that do will earn the respect of their team. They’ll motivate their team to be better than the sum of their parts. And they’ll deliver outcomes that are outsized to their resourcing.”

featured in #609

Managing Underperformers

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “There are two fully unrelated causes of underperformance: Refusal to Align and Failure to Execute. Underperformance is when a person or a team is not bearing their share of the organization’s load. Their colleagues are either relying on them and getting let down, or they’ve learned not to rely on them at all.”

featured in #609

Innovations In Evaluating AI Agent Performance

tl;dr: Just like athletes need more than one drill to win a competition, AI agents require consistent training based on real-world performance metrics to excel in their role. At QA Wolf, we’ve developed weighted “gym scenarios” to simulate real-world challenges and track their progress over time. How does our AI use these metrics to improve our accuracy continuously?

featured in #609