SWLW #615: Growing your taste to build better products, Founder Mode done right, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week.  

 

This Week's Favorite

Growing Your Taste to Build Better Products
4 minutes read.

Wonderful take on developing a “taste” for building products. This can be on writing code (how would you define the qualities of beautiful code?) or the experience you want your users to feel when interacting with your product. Can you try out different ideas in your next hackathon? Or maybe as a side project at home to change the experience of existing products (internal or external) you have? What would be an incredible experience (surprising and delightful) people will talk about and share with their teammates?

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Culture

Product Manager Getting Ready to Say “No Updates” at Standup
1 minute read.

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

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Founder Mode
5 minutes read.

The internet is going wild around the latest essay by Paul Graham. This topic is important enough to share this essay and a great take on the next post I shared by Shreyas Doshi. The people you delegate to want to continue and learn and see how they can do it better. Asking them hard questions, showing them examples done by others, trying it for yourself, all can be useful. "Fire and forget" type of management is lazy leadership.

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Founder Mode, Done Right (thread)
5 minutes read.

Shreyas Doshi's take on Founder Mode captures well what you should not take for granted. The entire thread is a must read. Being a manager without being an Operator and Owner is empty calories leadership.

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Operate at All Levels
3 minutes read.

Pedro Franceschi is spot on: "Management is just a tool to coordinate a large number of people to do it cohesively. We want Brex to be the place where people create the best work of their lives, but if a leader has no clue what great work is, they can’t lead someone towards it. It’s like a cavalry captain who can't ride a horse."

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Peopleware

Are You a CT-NO?
4 minutes read.

"Default to Yes" is a healthy mindset for an executive. It doesn't mean you say yes to everything, or say yes to things as they are proposed, but it means staying positive to provide value and serve your team and custsomers.

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Inside RevenueCat’s Engineering Strategy: Scaling Beyond 32,000+ Apps
6 minutes read.

Capturing your team's strategy in a way that helps people make decisions that fit the business's needs becomes critical as you scale. This version is a mix of the "Good Strategy Bad Strategy" format and engineering values. It can help onboard people and reduce friction on day to day dilemmas. What did you take from it? Do you think capturing such context and experimenting with writing a strategy that works for your company will be helpful?

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The Configuration Complexity Clock
5 minutes read.

Software complexity is a topic that, unfortunately, we need to feel the pain and run the entire cycle to understand how things that often start as an attempt to simplify can create complexity elsewhere.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@ShaanVP: A question I keep coming back to: What feels like play for you, but looks like work to others?

@jaltma: There's a strong correlation between people who are great at what they do and people who are deeply curious about and admiring of the best people in their field.



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.