/Management

From Assumption To Next Step

- John Cutler tl;dr: John discusses how to go from risky assumption to next steps using a single phrase. “One of the significant challenges was what to do with all of the discomfort and anxiety-inducing assumptions. Teams understood the theory — why it might benefit them to surface assumptions, designate “operating assumptions”, prioritize risky assumptions, and make plans to reduce uncertainty where it counts.”

featured in #408

APIs Vs SDKs: Why You Should Always Have Both

tl;dr: This post explains what APIs and SDKs are, exploring the different use cases, examples and best practices for each, and explaining why having both are necessary.

featured in #408

Rescuing A Project In Progress

- Jason Fried tl;dr: “This isn't about calling in reinforcements or adding more resources. This is about stopping, slowing down, eliminating the spread of attention, honing in, and driving to completion.” Jason discusses the importance of establishing "completion discipline" in projects.

featured in #408

The Silent Killer Of Your Operating Practice: Fear

- Amanda Schwartz Ramirez tl;dr: Amanda creates example scenarios and ways of mitigating 5 common fears: (1) Fear of failure. (2) Fear of losing control. (3) Fear of conflict. (4) Fear of losing credibility. (5) Fear of missing something.

featured in #407

Measuring Developer Productivity And Happiness At LinkedIn

- Viktoras Truchanovicius tl;dr: We developed a new internal product called the Developer Insights Hub. It visualizes developer experience and happiness metrics describing key developer activities such code building, reviewing, publishing, as well as the sentiment towards the tools being used… this post provides an overview of how we approached metrics selection and design, system architecture and key product features.

featured in #407

Fast-Forwarding Decision Making

- James Stanier tl;dr: “I’ll pitch the takeaway up front, and it’s this: hold yourself accountable for making decisions and progressing discussions as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary. Be restless while a decision hasn’t been made. Dead time is your enemy. Be creative about ways of shaving minutes, hours and days from a decision point.” James gives several examples of how to approach this.

featured in #406

Slack

- Martin Fowler tl;dr: “A common approach with timeboxed iterations is to allocate as many user stories as possible to each iteration in order to maximize the utilization of the staff involved. Slack is the policy of deliberately leaving time that isn't allocated for stories, using that time for unplanned work. Although this seems inefficient, it usually yields a significant improvement for the productivity of a team.”

featured in #406

Why Engineering Teams Struggle To Scale Their Test Coverage

- Kirk Nathanson tl;dr: We talk to a lot of engineering leaders about QA and end-to-end testing. Something we hear all the time is how difficult it’s been to scale their automated test coverage beyond a few key workflows. Here are the three obstacles that are faced by companies of all sizes.

featured in #406

The Best Managers Don’t Fix, They Coach — Four Tools To Add to Your Toolkit

tl;dr: How to coach - and not “fix” - team members through the following situations: (1) Outcome shift: when a team member is spinning on a problem and how to proceed. (2) Options exploration: you understand your team member’s challenge and what they would like to see happen. (3) Acknowledging strengths: a team member has imposter syndrome or lacks confidence. (4) A team member has unconscious assumptions that might be holding them back.

featured in #405

Two Types Of Software Engineers

- Thorsten Ball tl;dr: “Here's something I've been kicking around in my head for a few weeks… there are two types of engineers. Type 1, when presented with a problem, thinks: "easy, people can just do X.” Type 2, when presented with the same problem, thinks: "very hard, because it requires people to do X." Thorsten explains the importance of the subtle difference.

featured in #405