/Management

Stop Overcomplicating It: The Simple Guidebook to Upping Your Management Game

tl;dr: Focus on the big 3 elements of leadership: (1) Direction: Ensure that every member of the team understands exactly what's expected and when. (2) Coaching: Coach people towards both short and long-term success, helping them understand what they should continue to do and how to improve. (3) Career: Invest in people’s careers in a way that considers long-term goals and aspirations beyond the company. 

featured in #328


How I Learned To Love Feedback Loops (And Make Better Products)

- Neil Kakkar tl;dr: "One common theme that stood out was how feedback loops between each stage lead to much better decisions. In this post, I want to talk about why these feedback loops are useful, and how to actively seek iterative gains from these loops."

featured in #328


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

tl;dr: Tools to help coach are: (1) Outcome shift - help your report shift from the problem to solution. (2) Options exploration - ask clarifying questions that help make options more concrete. (3) Acknowledging strengths - increase confidence by bringing awareness to their gifts. (4) Uncovering limiting beliefs - make unconscious assumptions conscious and shift to productive beliefs.

featured in #327


Using Systems Thinking To Craft High-Leverage Strategies

- AbdulFattah Popoola tl;dr: "This post proposes a systems-based model for diagnosing, detecting, and fixing the fundamental issues that plague engineering teams. It is a distillation of lessons acquired from identifying and implementing high-leverage strategic remedies across multiple products."

featured in #327


State Of Engineering Time 2022

tl;dr: The Stack Overflow memes are true: 60% of senior engineers commit 10-100 lines/week of copied and pasted code. And there is more: read the report to learn how 600 engineers (ICs and managers) spend time, from wrangling machines to wrangling people.

featured in #327


Keep Your Experiments Separate

- Jessica Kerr tl;dr: "Add features one at a time — not as a series, but on alternate timelines. With version control, we have this superpower." Jessica believes this is a superior process for learning new frameworks, programming style, and more.

featured in #327


Software Engineering - The Soft Parts

- Addy Osmani tl;dr: "Today I'll share some of the software engineering soft skills I've learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering Manager." Addy covers topics such as learning new things, technical complexity, design docs, & more. 

featured in #326


What is a Merge Queue?

- Julien Danjou tl;dr: What do Strava, Shopify, and Uber have in common? Their engineering teams all rely heavily on a Merge Queue. What is it, and why do they need one? This post describes how Merge Queues tackle a significant pain point for these companies. 

featured in #326


Lessons Learned From Becoming CTO Of A Small Startup

- Vadim Kravcenko tl;dr: Vadim shares things that would have made life easier to know when becoming CTO of a small company, including: (1) If you’re moving from the same team to become their manager, you need to make sure they respect you as a developer first. (2) Your friendship with your teammates will suffer once you’re their boss. (3) Stop wanting to do everything yourself. And more. 

featured in #325


Having Career Conversations

- Joe Lynch tl;dr: Most exploratory discussion related to someone’s career development include the person's goals but lack an understanding of the motivations behind those goals. Joe gives us insights into how to make career coaching a foundational part of the engineering manager's role. 

featured in #325