SWLW #550: CEO's Concerns, Making an Impact as a Platform PM, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

Why AI Will Save the World by Marc Andreessen
20 minutes read.

Marc Andreessen is a great thinker I enjoy following and listening to. The way he analyzes a situation and applies critical thinking is a great way to learn from (historical observations, incentives analysis, etc.). It's important to remember that Marc has his incentives as an investor, so read it as it is. All companies should start thinking and experimenting with the latest tools and concepts around LLM. It can change the offering the company is taking to market, and also boost the productivity and happiness of its employees.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

Which One of You Did This!?
1 minute read.

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

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10 Ideas From the Best Book on Engineering Management
6 minutes read.

Syed Mohsin shares his takeaways from Will Larson's great book "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management" and how they influence his management style. One comment on the "Four States of a Team" is that Tech debt is not a good view to judge a team, even though it's one I can understand why engineers pick to focus on and why it's often a good proxy for morale. Teams will always feel they have a lot of Tech Debt (just like we always feel rewrite is the answer for many problems), so a better proxy is to understand Tech Debt Controls & Rituals around it so the team will feel empowered to bring ideas, discuss priorities, understand the investment ratio (e.g. X% of team's time per month), and track progress.

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CEO's Concern #4: The CEO Feels That the Engineering Team Does Not Work Hard Enough (Series)
8 minutes read.

"So, I had a chat with a startup CEO today and he was all frustrated about not having solid metrics to measure their Engineering team's progress, like they do with the sales team. It's a complaint I hear a lot from CEOs, which often puts pressure on the VP of Engineering to come up with hard-to-measure numbers." -- Miri Curiel's 4 posts are the best I've seen in the past 10 years on working with CEOs effectively. In the first comment in this post, you'll find links to the first post (context) and then the CEOs' concerns and how to deal with them with less drama and frustration on both sides.

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How to Get Buy-in for DevEx Initiatives: Strategies From GitHub, Notion, and More
5 minutes read.

This is such an important advice by Thansha Sadacharam to gain attention, share insights and offer a few initiatives to make an impact: "Try to think about how you can get invited to present to leadership. Here's what we've done in the past: after each survey, we'll distribute the results to the entire organization, while also sending a one-pager to leadership that contains the most critical findings. This has been successful in getting the Tech Insights team invited to present an overview of the results to the executive leadership team. In these presentations, the focus has been covering one or two key metrics, for example overall developer satisfaction, along with the top three factors driving that score and the top three solutions the team is exploring. In addition, these presentations have included proposals for specific projects, and recommended focus areas for directors and managers across the company."

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Peopleware

How to Make an Impact as a Platform Product Manager
5 minutes read.

Alex Craciun shares excellent insights into the role of the Product Manager when leading Platform teams. "Communication is usually a core skill for Product Managers. Still, it becomes vital as a Platform Product Manager because you have to context switch from talking to Engineers to talking to VPs and C-suite across multiple teams. So you have to learn how to abstract—a lot." -- While this feels trivial, I rarely in my career saw people doing it well and proactively practicing this skill. People often think that they can wing it by showing up and talking.

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We’re All Biased. Here Are 9 Mental Errors That Could Be Killing Your Marketing Growth (Internal and External) and Costing You Customers (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Katelyn Bourgoin shares helpful tips that can be relevant when building products, both to paying customers and internal customers (they need to choose to use your products). Where can your team level up by being more aware of existing biases?

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Amir’s 10 Laws of Tech
4 minutes read.

Amir Shevat's "laws" are interesting if you try not to judge them but ask yourself if you've seen them before and understand why they happened. I've seen these two many times in my life, and it's never easy to deal with them (like knowing your biases, it doesn't mean you can avoid them): "The most painful, and least useful projects are migration projects, yet companies will replace technologies every 4 years." and "Left alone, a product team will optimize to the closest and easiest goal."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@AlexHormozi: Productivity hack: Make it as easy as possible to work as hard as you can.

@mulegirl: Designing a functional, outcome-oriented work culture is really hard and often no one’s job.


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.