Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Scale-Up Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned Over 9 Years as HubSpot’s CEO
12 minutes read.

Wonderful read by Brian Halligan, with many takeaways you can apply in various leadership positions. One of my favorite points is "Enterprise Value> Team Value> Self Value", which I truly believe is critical if you want to align people around a mission, rather than letting them optimize locally for the team or the individual.

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Properly Organized Fox Storage
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Your Engineering Team Is Not an Island: Success Demands a Holistic View of the Business
4 minutes read.

"Engineering leads need to look at the whole product process (together with the responsible stakeholders) and not just at engineering in isolation... The solution to a problem might not be to hire more people (which a lot of startups do), but to organize product development in a better way" -- in order to build robust and scalable teams, you have to understand the entire process (value stream) in your organization, even if it might lead to investing time, money or people in areas you'd never consider or support. This requires to put the company first and constantly build trust between peers, otherwise this can get ugly fast.

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Devolving From Good to Bad
5 minutes read.

Thinking of someone saying "It used to be fun working here" is probably my biggest fear when scaling my team. I believe that companies "break" not when the team reaches a certain size, but rather when the culture is not robust enough to mature and adjust without killing the core values of the team.

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Organizational Structure Is All About Pragmatism
4 minutes read.

Elad Gil with great insights based on his vast experience on how to structure and adjust your organization as it scales. If I'd have to pick one takeaway it would be "Org structure is often about tie-breaking" -- this is a critical observation when it comes to figuring out the org structure. I've seen it breaks when tie-breaking was needed and the organization structure was poorly set to allow it to work.

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Open Sourcing Our Interviewing Preparation Guide
10 minutes read.

This is simply a must read, and more so - you need to bookmark it. The GitHub repository contains a lot of great tips and references to posts you should share with everyone in your organization who's part of the interviews process.

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Codifying Our Theory of and Approach to Code Reviews
5 minutes read.

"Code Reviews backlog represents value being blocked from our customers" -- this is something I often tell my team, reminding everyone that we cannot move to our next feature and leaving added value behind. To do that, we have to understand how pull requests should look like, and be explicit about the way we want the reviewers and submitters to act. One of the best posts I've read regarding how to effectively use Code Reviews by Glen Sanford.

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Peer Feedback
5 minutes read.

One of the signals for a strong team is looking at Senior Engineers helping with the Peer Feedback, rather than relying solely on Engineering Managers, to create trust and better communication among the teammates.

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@markwunsch: We've secretly replaced this data scientist's BIG DATA with a Magic 8 Ball, let's see if they notice!

@nickstenning: Leadership doesn't always guarantee you'll go in the right direction. But lack of leadership usually means you'll be going nowhere.