Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly

The Mindset That Kills Product Thinking
12 minutes read.

"Product thinking moves your focus to outcomes and business impact." -- Jeff Patton wrote a post you should share with everyone in your team. Understanding this post will help you increase your impact on the organization.

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Painting: "The Arrival of the AWS Bill." Oil on Canvas.
1 minutes read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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John Lewis IT Software Engineering Principles
5 minutes read.

The principles themselves and the self-assessment your teammates can do is a great approach to scale your organization. You can make it for every part of your organization and ask your teammates to use it (e.g. during Design Reviews) when leading significant efforts.

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Organisational Scaling Question: an Org Does Ad-Hoc Knowledge Management With a Disorganised Internal Wiki. They Make a Habit of Asking Questions in Slack. As They Grow More, Newcomers Are Too Daunted to Ask Questions. The Wiki Gets Messier. What ACTUALLY Works to Fix This? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Yoz Grahame starts a discussion we can all relate to - how to manage your organizational knowledge as the company matures. Discuss with your teammates which ideas are worth considering, such as hiring someone (librarian) to own it.

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Product-Driven Versus Customer-Driven
17 minutes read.

Venkatesh Rao wrote an eye-opening essay. Customer-driven assumes customers exhibit stable behaviors, with problems they can communicate clearly. It's hard to build a sustainable business that will last decades taking that as an axiom.

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How Do the Most Experienced Engineers in an Organization Get "Stuck"?
4 minutes read.

Use Gergely Orosz's list when building an onboarding plan for senior engineers joining your team. I know it would have helped me before considering and planning their first 90 days with it.

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What Is Developer Experience? A Roundup of Links and Goodness
6 minutes read.

James Governor covers why Developer Experience is becoming critical when scaling your organization ("Day 2") and how engineers expect to see it being promoted by upper management.

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Almanac CEO Readme
7 minutes read.

It's fascinating to see how a CEO sets expectations with their team, what's important for them, and how they manage their time. You don't have to agree with the content or even with the README format (I know it's a heated topic), yet it might increase the chances of working better with them.

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@shreyas: Writing cultures have this neat side effect of overcoming some drawbacks of hierarchy and org boundaries. Anyone in the company can write an insightful proposal for how something should be improved, and it will get noticed if it’s compelling. Meetings can never scale like that.

@SahilBloom: Life Rule: Spend more time doing things you never regret. A few things I never regret: • Creative sprints • Talking to smart friends • Journaling for 5 min • Calling my parents • Going for a walk • Exercising • Sleeping 8 hours Make your list—then spend more time on it!