SWLW #534: Stop obsessing over Development Velocity, Knowledge Creation and the Human Race, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead
11 minutes read.

Given that companies' management teams will always feel "we can do more with less," the challenge becomes figuring out where is the real bottleneck of scaling the company and aligning on the outcome we seek to gain. Launching new features or products often fails to create any impact, increases the maintenance cost, and slows the team down. Knowing what will create positive (and significant) outcomes usually takes time. Experimentation with clear targets before we start (define success and failure criteria) can help us figure it out faster.

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Culture

How I Feel as a Solo Founder
1 minute read.

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

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Organizational Boundary Problems: Too Many Cooks or Not Enough Kitchens?
7 minutes read.

"Structure always exists, so making it explicit and intentional is the foundation for effective, inclusive teams. [...] Organizational design is design." -- Elizabeth Ayer shares her experience and helpful resources you can delve deeper into to build the right environment for your team to be successful.

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Designing for Habitability (Video)
27 minutes read.

I love this talk by Sam Newman. "If you make it hard for people to do their jobs, people will likely either bypass your controls or leave." -- Thinking about the Platform as a product is a helpful way to invest in usability & onboarding experience as part of the core offering. It will increase the chance of teams adopting your Platform and leveraging it the way you hoped.

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How We Manage Incident Response at Honeycomb
5 minutes read.

Fred Hebert with excellent tips to conduct effective on-calls in your organization and deal with production incidents. My favorite takeaway: "Learning is most effective when you can associate actions with outcomes, and having incidents without taking the time to think about their implications is throwing away fantastic opportunities served to us on a (often scorching hot and unpleasant) silver platter."

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Peopleware

Founder Intuition vs. Team Expertise vs. Customer Expertise
5 minutes read.

Casey Winters's summary of the 3 phases (Starting, Scaling, Expanding) companies go through is something you should have available as good guidance. Do you think the leaders in your organization (including yourself) are doing the right things giving the company and product(s) maturity level?

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David Deutsch: Knowledge Creation and the Human Race
43 minutes read.

The conversation between Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch is such a great inspiration to look deeper into ourselves: "Actually, humans are capable of creating incredible knowledge. And knowledge can transform things that we didn’t think of as resources into resources. And in that sense, every human is a lottery ticket on a fundamental breakthrough that might completely change how we think of the earth and biosphere and sustainability." You can read or listen to it.

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The Truth About Git Metrics Tools
2 minutes read.

"My experience working on Pull Panda was that pull request metrics provided value in creating awareness around inefficient code review processes. But there were no real benefits beyond that. [...] I’ve personally yet to come across an example of real benefit gained from these metrics other than shining a light on inefficient code review processes, which is a problem that’s easily solveable without dashboards. Moreover, these tools encourage managers to walk down bad paths such as micro-managing or stack-ranking their developers." -- I strongly agree with Abi Noda; these measurements don't provide valuable insights. They're driving noise (with upper management) and chasing the wrong goals.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@jasonlk: A tough reality: Most new managers can't hire someone great to work for them -- at least, not today. Not yet. Not right now. Not on their own. It's a true skill. You gotta help 'em get there, in many cases. Or they will hire a B+

@andybudd: Most people feel there are too many meetings. However most people also hate the idea that they aren’t being included in important conversations and decisions.



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.