Hi 👋,

When I started this newsletter a while back I wasn't sure which direction it's gonna go. But after a few years I've started enjoying sharing articles about building amazing teams and even organisations, effective people management, tech architecture, and other leadership topics relevant to mostly engineering managers, staff engineers, directors, and CTOs.

Tech Lead Digest isn't the most fortunate name for these topics as it implies a particular role in the team. I've been a tech lead in the past and most of them were not my day to day, really.

So last week, I've decided to bite the bullet and bought leadershipintech.com. I'll be, slowly, migrating the content and the email list over there.

Email deliverability is complicated so it'll take at least a few months to get it done. I'll be running both lists at the same time and you shouldn't miss anything if you decide to stay put. But if you'd like to be one of the first subscribers in the new system you can sign up today. And let me know if something's broken. 🙏

Now, let's move to the top picks from the last week. 📚

Get It Done

Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done.

Socratic – Intelligent task management for modern software teams (sponsor)

Real insights, faster delivery. AI-powered project management & planning. A simple, powerful way to work better, easier, faster—from idea to working software. By including productivity intelligence into the task management flow, we show how well software teams are working and why.

How we fixed our on call process to avoid engineer burnout

Ensuring that Intercom has great uptime requires a rapid response when things go wrong. This is how we developed an effective, sustainable on-call engineering process.

The work is never just “the work”

A deep dive on why projects always overrun and a framework to improve future estimation

To Build a Top Performing Team, Ask for 85% Effort

An outdated way of thinking about peak performance is: “maximum effort = maximum results.” But research shows that it doesn’t actually work that way in reality. Here’s what actually works: The 85% rule, which counterintuitively suggests that to reach maximum output, you need to refrain from giving maximum effort.

Amir’s 10 Laws of Tech

Observations collected over 20 years in the tech industry.

10 Ideas From the Best Book on Engineering Management

Learnings from “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” by Will Larson.

Tech debt metaphor maximalism

I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough, or because they don't properly understand financial debt.

11 years of hosting a SaaS

Lots of mistakes, some uptime too.

And we'll wrap up with some interesting news from big tech:

• Google ramps up return-to-office push by using in-person attendance as part of employee performance reviews
• Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Apple’s Vision Pro
• This is what Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor looks like
• Why AI Will Save the World