SWLW #525: Good conversations have lots of doorknobs, You have too many metrics, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs
6 minutes read.

Adam Mastroianni wrote one of my favorite blog posts this year. This is such a powerful takeaway: "Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”)."

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Culture

Me When I Deploy Straight to Production Without Testing
1 minute read.

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

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You Have Too Many Metrics
5 minutes read.

The graph of "cost of tracking metrics" vs. "demand for metrics" summarizes today's world well. We're in a world of abundance, where our skill to prioritize work based on a narrative is more important than ever.

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This Is What Winning in SaaS Looks Like in 2023
5 minutes read.

Rory O'driscoll shares the mindset companies need to adopt now in 2023, taking his lessons learned as a board member at Box as they made a difficult transition: "The ability of the founding team at Box, led by Aaron and Dylan, to adapt and play a different game is what made the difference. It is very hard to go from a growth at all costs mindset to pinching the pennies. It sucks to be unwinding investments you made only a year ago but they did it. At the same time, they held fast to what matters and continued to invest for the upside. [...] Growth is going to slow across the board and every company will have to dust out the “get profitable while preserving the upside” playbook."

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Companies Are More Successful When They Define How They Work. Instead of Trying to Appeal to Everybody, They Attract True Believers With a Spiky Point of View. Here's How We Work at Write of Passage (Thread)
4 minutes read.

How you decide to build your company (explicit optimization factors, tradeoffs, and constraints) is one of the fascinating parts for me when looking at a company from the outside. Companies, like humans, are special and unique. They provide color and meaning. They need to be quirky and fun. They should be interesting. They should be useful to others.

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Peopleware

How to Improve Your Creative Thinking
6 minutes read.

"Even with the best tools available to turn our creative ideas into something more tangible, though, we still need to provide the initial seed of an idea and be able to judge whether we’re heading in the right direction. We’re still the creative directors of our own minds." -- Alice Albrecht with so many gems I've learned from. For example: "To widen our divergent thinking funnel, we could try and seek out new ideas that are maximally different from our own, but this typically won’t work. It’s actually better to make incremental steps outside your own filter bubble because new information must overlap somewhat with what you already know to be effectively associated and assimilated. Read voraciously and engage deeply with a wide variety of content to build a richer memory bank for you to tap."

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The Need to Read
3 minutes read.

"A good writer doesn't just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery. Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you'll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. [...] People who just want information may find other ways to get it. But people who want to have ideas can't afford to." -- I often like thinking of "Read What You Love Until You Love to Read" as a way to build a healthy habit.

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Selfish Writing
4 minutes read.

Writing and reading are skills worth practicing as we enter a new year. Which goals around them would you put for yourself? "Grinding through this [writing] process reveals bits of context that are hopefully new discoveries to the reader. More importantly, they were likely new discoveries to the writer before they set out writing. [...] Many of the good writers you enjoy probably aren’t much smarter than you. They’ve just forced themselves through the process of transferring vague feelings into words and the clarity that generates. The takeaway for voracious readers is that you can discover new perspectives and new context by writing yourself."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@jackbutcher: Winning is finding your game

@fchollet: You can't do great design if you don't understand in depth the experience of the person you're designing for.



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.