SWLW #607: Managing underperformers, Home-cooked software and Barefoot Developers, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
17 minutes read.

Maggie Appleton with an inspiring take on where software might go in the new age of LLM and no-code: "In the current system, this stuff is always considered out of scope. Because it doesn't make any financial sense to support the long tail. Industrial software can only target the biggest problems for the most people, ideally wealthy people with disposable income. This is an economic limitation. Building features that solve every single long tail need requires a lot of engineering labor." This is a wonderful take on the opportunity to build software for "small, special snowflake software" that most companies cannot address: "They could build software solutions that no industrial software company would build—because there’s not enough market value in doing it, and they don’t understand the problem space well enough. This is the long tail of user needs."

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Culture

This Is How I Approve PRs
1 minute read.

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

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Managing Underperformers
5 minutes read.

Jack Danger covers how to handle difficult situations managing underperformers. This is really helpful and practical, written with empathy and kindness for both sides.

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How We Decide What to Build
7 minutes read.

Great take by Ian Vanagas on how to set a process to figure out what your company should build and how to get the entire team (both R&D and Go-To-Market) involved. Starting with "Agree on your product principles" is an excellent piece of advice that is often overlooked. It helps to set the initial decisions early on, helping you create initial momentum.

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No Sleepwalk to Success: Engineering Success in a Technical Startup
6 minutes read.

"For technical founders, extraordinary success is highly correlated with how obsessive a founding team is about developing an extraordinarily efficient GTM machine. This insight is, however, a lot less obvious than it might appear because — especially for technical founders." -- Gil Dibner with an insight that took me about 15 years to understand and appreciate. How you take a product to market influences the product you build, the organization you need to have (puzzle), and the process that will help you learn faster and iterate accordingly.

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Peopleware

How to Hire a CEO
5 minutes read.

Vinod Khosla shares interesting insights that are rare to read about from the outside. It covers the qualities and skills of world-class CEOs. Which questions would you use to tease out the following: "Smart individuals can quickly figure out a thorny issue if they can pare it down into its structural components, prioritize, and make decisions effectively based on the identified fulcrums. Thinking clearly and critically is often more important than experience in new technical areas."

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I Like Dumb Plans
3 minutes read.

"I like plans that sound dumb to our team because they feel obvious, but sound dumb to outsiders because they require a worldview that only our team deeply understands." -- Dumb. Simple. Obvious and clear to the team yet surprising to outsiders. A worthy target.

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Progress Can Be Slow
5 minutes read.

Life is not linear. When you normalize thinking and acting to build habits to serve you for decades, it helps to set a healthier mindset: "One thing that sometimes rubs me the wrong way with personal growth and coaching is that people often market and sell transformation. Transformation sells because people want results fast — they want to stop feeling whatever pain they’re feeling and they want to see a quick path to their impossible seeming dreams. Every marketer knows these tricks, and so many coaching websites and personal growth books follow the same formula to entice you to buy. While there may be some experiences that are truly life-changing, I’ve grown to appreciate a slower, more thoughtful approach in my own personal growth."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@shreyas: High agency has many great upsides, although a significant downside is that it is also highly correlated with high anxiety.

@asmartbear: How do I know that it’s 100x easier to make software than to understand customers, get their attention, and sell to them? Because I know 100 engineers who can build software for every 1 founder who got 100 people to buy something.



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.