SWLW #499: Adapting to Endure, The Weekly CEO E-Mail, and more

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join SWLW community in Slack - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Sharing Interesting Stuff: A Simple Yet Powerful Management Tool
5 minutes read.

Florian Fesseler shares a powerful practice I am definitely planning to try myself. I can see how it creates much deeper conversations and learning opportunities for both sides.

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Culture

Problem Solving at a Startup
1 minute read.

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

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Head Of? Director? VP? How to Live With Title Inflation.
4 minutes read.

Our job when building a healthy company is not to judge people for their decisions but rather to understand the incentives and desires that motivated them to do so: "Sometimes that’s title-driven, sometimes it’s money-driven, but a lot of times it’s around scope of impact, whom they get to work with, skills they develop and the journey along the way."

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Adapting to Endure
10 minutes read.

"From May 16–June 3, 2022 we hosted a series of sessions for our founders to help them navigate the current market conditions and emerge as strong, enduring companies. We are now sharing these presentations as a digital toolkit for the broader startup community." -- I highly recommend skimming between the decks shared by Sequoia, and diving deeper where you want to gain more context and insights.

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The Fallacy of Splitting Time
5 minutes read.

Finish what you've started. Cutting down on WIP (work in progress) tasks or projects is vital to creating momentum. Trying to coordinate time can be very costly when things don't work smoothly or require a few people to push together. Not only for the project delivery date but also for how people perceive their progress.

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Peopleware

The Weekly CEO E-Mail
6 minutes read.

"Though I’ve used the word CEO so far, this practice doesn’t just apply to them. It’s a good practice for any leader of an organization that is either distributed or larger in size than a few dozen people. If your org is 100+ people, you should absolutely be sending these emails. " -- Gokul Rajaram with an intriguing method to keep people aligned.

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Does Infrastructure Need Product Managers? (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Karen Clark started an interesting discussion. I strongly agree that while infra teams can compensate for lack of PM by their technical or people leaders, it will break at a certain size. PMs can offer prioritization frameworks for how to decide, have more capacity to interview users, and create buy-in for a long-term vision. Often, the technical leaders will set the vision, and the PM can work out the prioritization for resolving immediate pains versus making sure the team is moving quickly enough to execute the long-term horizon. What do you think? Worth sharing with your teammates and have a discussion.

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Overthinking
5 minutes read.

Sylvain Kerkour shares a good reminder: Measure twice, cut once. This ratio of thinking versus doing is helpful. When it changes to over-thinking (e.g 5:1) or over-doing (1:10) you might derail the business. It gets worse - you'll often attract (and retain) talent with a similar mindset, or set an incentive for your teammates to continue this pattern.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@jenistyping: Reminder to all Hiring Mangers: Recruiters do not exist to “assist” you. They do not report to you. They have an entirely different job/skill set/career. If you can't understand this and see Recruiters as below you, you only hurt yourself/the potential for a true partnership.

@ShaneAParrish: The probability of being able to outperform increases with patience.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.