SWLW #558: When to dig a moat, The power of perception, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

When to Dig a Moat
8 minutes read.

A couple of powerful takeaways from the post are: "Companies that have the best products, most talented people, and fastest growth are precisely the ones for which moats are most important. [...] This is why strategy is important for startups, even if it’s uncool. At its simplest, early stage startup strategy is about directing limited resources towards digging moats before you’ve removed enough uncertainty to attract serious competition." and understanding the formula of "Depth of Moat Needed = How Obviously Good Your Idea Is - How Hard it is to Build" (how hard = time + money + expertise) are great takeaways from this post. Everyone who builds a company or is an employee of a relatively small (<250 employees) company should understand the idea of "Complexity Uncertainty" and how it looks in their space.

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Culture

Frontend and Backend Devs Collaborating
1 minute read.

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

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Some Thoughts on Agency
3 minutes read.

Elliot Hershberg shares a good explanation (and an inspirational story) of Agency and its importance in building and running tech companies that seek to reach massive scale by influencing the world and how it works.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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How to Make AI UX Your Moat
8 minutes read.

Given LLM's impact on many companies that will try to build products, differentiate and build moats (eventually), we need to put more emphasis on the user experience (UX) side. Anshul Ramachandran shares helpful framing (e.g. command, context, constraints) that you can use to create better experiences on top of LLM-native products. Many of these products will also become internal products in companies (many are doing Hackathon days around it), and it can influence interactions between teams given how we're used to texting each other (Slack, email, etc.).

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The Most Important Question for Founders Is "Why?"
7 minutes read.

If you work in a big company or thinking of building a company at some point, Ben Yoskovitz's post is a healthy way to look at how (good) founders think long-term in choosing their problems and keeping their motivation high for 1-2 decades (vs. 6-12 months).

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Peopleware

Being ‘Too Busy’ Means Your Personal Strategy Sucks
8 minutes read.

Leveraging Strategic Thinking to build a personal execution plan is a powerful tool I didn't consider using so far: "To have an effective personal strategy, you need to be deliberative about choosing where to deploy your limited available hours in tasks that your particular set of capabilities enable you to generate a win by creating disproportionate value for your organization. And, since this doesn’t happen automatically, you need a personal management system for doing it on an ongoing basis — because on this front, eternal vigilance is the price of effectiveness."

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Stop Trying to Change (Video)
10 minutes read.

"Don't 'should' on yourself, instead, through awareness and appreciation, grow!" is a powerful framing by Kaley Klemp. Also, the idea of naming a ("bad") pattern to observe it and consider the upsides of it is a good practice.

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Covey’s Subway Story and the Power of Perception
4 minutes read.

Erik Van Alstine wrote one of my favorite posts on "perceptual intelligence" – the knowledge of how perception works and how to work it. This is a great question to ask ourselves more often: "Am I trying to change attitudes and behaviors without changing the perceptions that automatically influence attitudes and behaviors? If so, I’m taking an ineffective approach to change."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@Suhail: A small team that knows how to work together should be fiercely protected. Even adding a single semi-misaligned person can drag the team into endless delay and steep deceleration.

@dailystoic: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca



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.