SWLW #614: Technical Coherence, How to effectively manage low performers, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week.  

 

This Week's Favorite

Technical Coherence
4 minutes read.

Mapping out the business and using UX Domains, Shared Domains, and Infrastructure can be a helpful way to analyze your needs and consider investment ratios that work for you.

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Culture

Post-Vacation Work Inbox, Explained
1 minute read.

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

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If You Want People to Remember, Tell a Story
4 minutes read.

"In the madhouse pressure cooker environment of running a startup, too few CEOs, founders, and executives recognize the power of a story to set expectations. They pop a value like “ownership” up on a slide in an all-hands and expect people to get what it means. Some might. Many won’t. Instead, take ten minutes. Tell the story of García. Let it be known that any and all who can carry a message to García on your team will be rewarded, because that is what ownership and reliability look like." -- People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Stories can drive such emotion.

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Pick One and Own It
7 minutes read.

Understanding your product's unique advantage over the market and how to pitch it to deal with objections can serve all of us in how we build products.

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Leveraging AI for Efficient Incident Response
7 minutes read.

Fascinating to read how Meta is using AI to reduce their time to resolve production incidents. It's unclear how much it would help smaller startups, and how generic the solution can get given the impact of finetunning. Using LLM to correlate incidents to mitigations (action items taken) and changes in code (and configuration) is a promising direction. I took some inspiration from that to see if the method can be used elsewhere, e.g., to explain tickets opened related to recent changes.

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Peopleware

How to Effectively Manage Low Performers: The CARES Framework
5 minutes read.

Ro Fernandez provides two practical frameworks - CARES framework and Situational Leadership Framework - to help you deal with low performers and help them find a path to align expectations and improve (or part ways). Make sure you protect yourself as well in this process. I have often seen managers trying hard to turn things around, only to drain their energy completely, while the other side didn't invest as much in it.

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Action Is a Skill. How to Become High-Action
3 minutes read.

Shaan Puri is a brilliant communicator. I love reading his blog and listening to him on his podcast with Sam Parr. He has great energy and a way with words to drive you to aim bigger, look for creative ways to chase your goals, and constantly look for opportunities.

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Lean Architecture: A Better Way to Apply and Teach Software Design
12 minutes read.

What a great writing on what we should aim for when building software: "A cost effective solution is a solution that is easy to maintain. We are talking about code that is easy to understand, easy to test, it enables cooperation and in general it is easy to change and evolve. Evolution is really important. Stakeholders evolve, their problems evolve and thus your solution should be able to evolve along. Being able to evolve along shouldn’t be a huge cost. That is why I would like to see Lean Architecture more as a methodology / mindset rather than an end state. It should be a process of intermediate states only. The process only stops when change stops. It’s a constant search for a code solution that solves the current problems and at the same time keeps the amount of design patterns, principles and what not to the bare minimum. We keep the following question in mind: How much design do we need to implement right now to keep the codebase maintainable?"

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@rakyll: Burnout happens when there is no progress. Burnout also happens when you have no visibility into how dots will connect in the future. Burnout is about not being able to close the loop after putting a ton of effort and not seeing enough results.

@Tim_Denning: "The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation." (1) You create a habit to automate the process. (2) If you perform a habit enough times then you don’t have to decide. (3) Deciding causes decision fatigue which sucks away your precious daily energy.



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.