SWLW #535: A thorough team guide to RFCs, What is the basis for competition for a startup, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​A Thorough Team Guide to RFCs
13 minutes read.

Juan Pablo Buriticá with a post I cannot recommend enough if you want another tool to build an effective and scalable engineering organization: "The outcomes we seek with RFCs are better technical decisions. While programming is primarily an individual act, building software is a social exercise, so facilitating decisions between groups has helped me build more effective engineering organizations."

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Culture

Developers Showing Off All the Stuff They Built While the PM Was on Vacation
1 minute read.

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

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The Difference Between Good and Great Engineers
5 minutes read.

"Positivity is infectious, and brings the best out in people. A team that has belief and is constantly creative in its efforts to succeed has a chance." -- I love the traits and behaviors covered in this post by Darragh Curran that great engineers demonstrate.

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The Tyranny of "The Plan" (Video)
61 minutes read.

"Derive the design from the constraints. Not the constraints from the design." -- Interesting talk by Mary Poppendieck that will make you think about how you plan and execute a large-scale project. I listened to it twice this week, trying to avoid judgment the first time and then applying my thoughts and beliefs the second time. The magic comes by talking with someone else about it. Try it out. What did you take from it? What are you willing to change your mind about? How would you go about it in the next big effort you need to get done?

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Defensibility & Competition: Are Early SaaS or AI Companies Ever Defensible Early? What Is the Basis for Competition for a Startup?
6 minutes read.

Understanding your go-to-market strategy and how to create differentiation is critical at every phase of the company. Do you know what your company is optimizing for now? Which strategy you're aiming to leverage to create (or increase) a moat? Elad Gil provides a practical framework to help you think about it. This is relevant regardless of your position, as it will help you understand which type of decisions or investment areas will get more attention. Once you know that, try to influence these areas to increase your impact.

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Peopleware

I Just Shut Down My First Startup: What I Learned to Start, Stop, and Continue Doing as a Founder.
14 minutes read.

Lillian Cartwright shares an open and honest retrospective of her lessons from this journey: "Under the guise of prioritizing technical acumen, I was seeking a band-aid to cover my insecurities and beat others at my own game. Instead, I should’ve spent that time building a business, working on myself, and hiring talent when I was ready."

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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A 163-Second Masterclass on the Creative Process (Video)
3 minutes read.

"And of course it comes out like I thought of all this at the same time, but I didn't." -- Jerry Seinfeld shares his framework to capture small nuances and observations and connect the dots backward to create an interesting (and funny) story.

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Failure Is the Absolute Worst Way to Learn Something and Sadly So Many People Spend Their Entire Lives Under the Illusion That Failure Is the Best Way to Learn Anything. (Thread)
5 minutes read.

Shreyas Doshi shares better alternatives that will speed up your learning. My relationship with failure is a difficult one. Even if you do things almost perfectly, you will still fail to close a deal, raise money, hire a great talent, etc. So while I'm all for reducing our feedback loops, it's not trivial to say what we can do to create a can-do attitude that gets better due to each failure rather than crumble upon the hit in our self-image.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@schlaf: A well-known founder I respect recently told me: “In retrospect I mistakenly created the wrong life for myself.” If you secretly feel this way, you’re not alone.

@tobi: With researchers cracking the code on Text-to-speech, all I want is a fully licensed chrome plugin that can read all my pre-reads in the voice of Morgan Freeman while on a run



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.