Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Reflections on Being CEO of a SaaS Business Through Year 4 and 5, 20ドルm+ of Capital Raised, Triple Digit Revenue Growth
10 minutes read.

If you have some time, I recommend not only reading this post by Tawheed Kader but also his previous posts on lessons learned running a business. One advice I'd follow as a manager is "Reboot your schedule every quarter" -- you often want to change the KPIs and plan your schedule in a way that would help you get there, e.g. spend more time with the relevant people, reduce noise, set time for yourself to read specific more about specific topics etc.

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Deployed My Blog on Kubernetes
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. This is how overkill of software looks like.

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Aligning Projects With Business Goals
5 minutes read.

Having a distributed team kind of forcing you to be extremely explicit and clear about running a business as you cannot fix it via small talks in the hallway. I like this format by DNSimple as it can serve you as a good tool to quickly bounce between projects and features while focusing on the important & urgent first. This can be a tool for the management team and product managers to discuss high-level priorities.

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Avoiding the Trap of Low-Knowledge, High-Confidence Theories
5 minutes read.

"It’s better to be a humble explorer than to be confident in ignorance." -- I'm a huge fan of Jason Cohen's writing, this time writing a blog post that every experienced engineer or manager on your team should read. Jason's tip on "Decide how to decide, ahead of time" is something research teams should practice more. It's often easy to dive into the numbers or data without thinking about the questions you'd like to answer first.

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Collaboration Overload Is a Symptom of a Deeper Organizational Problem
7 minutes read.

The way companies collaborate and reach decisions is probably what sets apart good companies from great ones. This is something that founders and later on managers at all level have to enforce. Interesting to think about the "Set a zero-based time budget" idea for meetings as a way to force better usage of this tool. I wonder how much money and feeling of waste it can save organizations.

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How to Reliably Get Your Team to Write Articles for Your Engineering Blog
3 minutes read.

"People rarely have writer's block when it comes to explaining things to coworkers" -- just use this tip by David Trejo to get your engineers to share interesting lessons learned from their projects. I'm using blog posts and lectures to attract talent to my team, and this is the best marketing tactic I found to win engineers' heart.

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What’s Your Learning Stack?
8 minutes read.

I never thought of it that way, but many conversations I have with close friends and colleagues are around our Learning Stack. Setting time to read in my calendar, taking notes, meeting with people that can teach me, organizing my home and reading habits to use my time effectively etc. What is your learning stack? Have a discussion at work about your practices and ask others on theirs. I'm sure you'll all learn a few tips.

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"I Hate Kanban..."
3 minutes read.

We spend too much of our time figuring out the "right" project management tools and processes, instead of setting the expectations on "what would be considered as a good progress? How will we be able to tell? What will disappoint us? Why?". When the outcome is unclear often not agreed on, every move forward will feel slow. What is your "good enough" for project management?

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@jtowle: My current Slack status emoji is a Slack unread badge. Pretty sure my entire team is going to quit tomorrrow but it was worth it.

@jewelia: All of the best execs I know are really incredible writers. They are concise, clear and their message immediately resonates.