Culture
Engineering Productivity 4 minutes read.
"So while you’re learning how to have good 1–1s, listen to people, create psychologically safe teams, and think about people’s careers, don’t forget that if your team isn’t shipping, you’re not doing your job." -- Camille Fournier is spot on. Are you helping your team to be as effective as they can? Are you creating clear outcomes? Making sure the team is doing the right thing, and no more than that (e.g., remove nice-to-have requirements)? Are you creating alignment with other groups to assist if they’re a dependency? Do you build momentum and maintain a high-level of energy? Ask yourself these questions on a weekly basis by capturing 30 minutes in the calendar (first day of the week?), and act on the above.
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I’ve Been Doing a Lot of Mentoring Sessions With Early Stage Entrepreneurs, and I Tend to Ask the Same Questions Every Time. I’ll Post Them Here, in Case It Helps Others. (Thread) 3 minutes read.
Stephanie Hurlburt's mentoring questions, at least most of them, can help you in your 1:1s, or if you're considering building and promoting an internal tool or launching a side-project. In a way, almost everything you build inside a company can be looked at as a small startup with customers, employees (your teammates) and money to raise (budget request). So applying Stephanie's questions by replacing the word "business" with "product" can cover also internal tools and products. My favorites: "How will you introduce yourself to others? Work on making it an intro that counters bias and is confident. What’s your product pitch? Keep in mind pitching is HARD. Work at it." and "Where are you at right now with your business? What work have you done? What roadblocks are you facing?"
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Redefining Dilution 5 minutes read.
״Dilution is a function of your burn rate relative to your accretion of value. It is often measured in financing events, but it actually plays out every day in the choices the startup makes and the work the startup accomplishes. Simply put, if you are accreting more value than you burn, there is no dilution. If you’re burning more cash than you’re accreting value, then there is dilution. Put another way, you’re not being diluted because a VC decrees it; you’re being diluted because you spent money building features that your customers didn’t want, instead of the ones that they need. You’re being diluted because you kept scaling up an ineffective sales process because you didn’t want growth to slow." -- This is such an important post to read by every employee working for a startup. Ask about users or customers growth, about revenues (if relevant) and strategy going forward. If you own a piece of the pie, it's your responsibility to ask questions so you could help improve the business.
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