Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

Why Your Startup Doesn't Invest Sufficiently in Its Differentiators
3 minutes read.

"MMRs (minimum market requirements), neutralizers, and differentiators" -- Tomasz Tunguz is one of my favorite thinkers. Reading this post made me think a lot about our roadmap, both from a product (offering) perspective but also in terms of our core technology (as a moat).

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Current Status: Email Sisyphus
1 minutes read.

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

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Lessons Learned From Scaling a Team (At Intercom)
14 minutes read.

Des Traynor shares the tips he learned while scaling Intercom to a 400+ company in the past 7 years. This one was my favorite takeaway: "Not everyone will love this transition [of scaling the company]. Some of your early hires will fight to artificially preserve a culture that is no longer fit for purpose. Don’t do this. Your company is an organism that evolves, not a relic that needs preservation."

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Principles of Technology Leadership (Video)
51 minutes read.

I laughed so hard while Bryan Cantrill was making fun of Amazon's Leadership Principles regarding "Are Right, A Lot" (minute 28:22). Take some coffee and watch it, Bryan will make you think while being highly entertaining at the same time.

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Applying "systems Thinking" to Turbocharge Your Leadership Effectiveness
5 minutes read.

Nickolas Means's thoughts on "Rewarding collaboration" is a must read as by default most people optimize for the individual, thus creating non-scalable organizational behaviors. Raise the team's awareness and make sure you incentivize the right behaviors, focusing on how the team interacts and work as together.

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My Number One Advice for Startups or VCs: Conviction> Consensus
4 minutes read.

"Conviction> consensus. Respect> Love." -- Mark Suster with important framing on how leaders should act in the organization, where you have to make decisions with partial data. Make sure there is a clear alignment across the org regarding who's the decision maker at any point, and then let them collect the data they need and build the story that would drive the highest likelihood of success given the context available.

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Running an Effective Staff Meeting (Video)
27 minutes read.

"Humans need to form relationships with one another, or they will behave in their worst self" -- Claire Hughes Johnson (Stripe's COO) with tips you should take if you're part of a leadership team, working together in a group setting to address strategical dilemmas or decisions.

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How to Read
4 minutes read.

Robert Heaton with a helpful framework if you're trying to retain more knowledge from books you've read. Following these tactics can provide you a strategical advantage as most people retain very little after reading books (if reading at all). Being able to consume high-quality content and converting it into better framing or action items would take you far.

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@DocOnDev: Good employees in a poor system are commonly mistaken for poor employees.

@auxesis: Career highlight: being told today by designers at work that the quality of my slides at a recent presentation was "intimidating"