SWLW #617: High-trust systems at scale, DORA metrics at work, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week.  

 

This Week's Favorite

Talking About High-Trust Systems at Scale (Video)
3 minutes read.

A must-watch video of Tobi Lutke, Shopify's CEO, and Tyler Cowen on the power of framing, the tools we use (and need), and how processes affect our velocity.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

First Date Talking Points, SV Style
1 minute read.

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

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Unlocking Performance Management for Start-Ups and Scale-Ups
5 minutes read.

Helpful framework by Matan Kubovsky to provide continuous feedback to your teammates. The upside of this approach is to write down expectations, align around them, and be able to see trends and provide high-quality and concrete feedback.

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First-Time Founders, CEOs, and Even Employees Should Understand the Playbook of the Incompetent Leader (Thread)
4 minutes read.

Shreyas Doshi shares wisdom many of us saw during our careers. At the end of the day, it's your impact and what you achieved, not the circumstances around you. This is why I love the question "Do you feel you're lucky?" as it forces a healthy balance of knowing not everything is about you yet dealing with difficult situations with clear thinking and a healthy bias for action.

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Stop Building the Wrong Tools: How Developer Surveys Transformed Our Focus
5 minutes read.

It's so easy to improve things that feel nice and important, yet don't move the needle for the business or the people you serve. James Russo shares a practical approach of using surveys to tease out areas of influence to prioritize for the highest leverage.

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Peopleware

I Just Shut Down My Second Startup — Here’s My Retro
5 minutes read.

I like the honesty and transparency of Wayne Zhou sharing his learnings from a painful experience. We should never read those as axioms, but they provide good indicators for red flags to notice or questions we should ask ourselves to verify market-founder-fit and our role in the company.

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DORA Metrics at Work
8 minutes read.

DORA (like SPACE) can be helpful in finding high-level metrics that show good indications for overall delivery health. I'd still balance that with business health, as great DORA metrics can only help with delivery sustainability, not business sustainability. It's essential to provide context and ask platform engineers to seek ways to influence many aspects of the business, as often they're some of the most versatile engineers you'll have.

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Ben Horowitz's Guide on Hiring Executives for Roles You're Not Good At
5 minutes read.

Two pages from Ben Horowitz's book (The Hard Thing About Hard Things) that are spot on for hiring executives for your company. It's fascinating to read it also if you want to become an executive at some point and understand what a CEO might look for when interviewing you.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@JenniferHli: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. The #1, #2, #3 deciding factor of a startup’s success is the shipping velocity. Companies have no long term moat, the only moat is a fast shipping culture.

@asmartbear: What isn’t being said? Why does it feel awkward or scary or unsafe to say it? Fix both of those problems.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.