SWLW #618: Conducting a time audit, Learning to call BS, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week.  

 

This Week's Favorite

Conducting a Time Audit
5 minutes read.

Reviewing how you spend your time (how much you invest in each area) and energy (when you do it) could discover areas to improve your leverage and impact. Andy Sparks shares a practical framework for you to try out.

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Culture

New Passcode
1 minute read.

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

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What to Think About When Making Your First Hire (And Every Hire After That)
4 minutes read.

I learned to ask myself, "am I excited for this person to join us?" and if so, "what are they natrually strong at that the team deseparately needs now?" but both have to come after this great observation by Alex Ghiculescu: "It’s very hard to hire someone to do something you don’t know how to do yourself, so if you are doing that, you should be hiring someone who you trust to set the standard."

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Certainty Is the Disease of Our Time (Video)
2 minutes read.

An excellent way to tease out insightful observations from others is to ask them, "What did you change your mind about in the past 5 years? What made you change your mind?"

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AI Companies Are Pivoting From Creating Gods to Building Products. Good.
6 minutes read.

A must-read in today's era of LLM-powered apps looking for problems to solve. Understanding the pitfalls will help you come up with ideas to help effectively take products to market.

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Peopleware

Play in Decades
2 minutes read.

Any advice is useful when we understand the tradeoffs it offers. Many small iterations of improvements compound exceptionally well. Understanding where your "Zone of Genius" is and playing the game for decades will create numerous opportunities for you to benefit from.

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Learning to Call BS
3 minutes read.

"What does it mean to call BS? It is the art of challenging constraints. And it can happen at any stage in the product development process." -- Learning to effectively, with empathy and curiosity, challenge requirements and constraints can open up a more straightforward short-term(to develop) and long-term(to support) solution.

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“My Team Has a Prioritization Problem. Help!“ (Thread)
7 minutes read.

Shreyas Doshi lays out how to use simple and useful narratives and benchmarks to tie between long-term strategy and immediate needs. Extremely powerful thread worth bookmarking to come back to every quarter.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@dsiroker: First-time founder: seeks ego validation. Second-time founder: only cares about market validation

@norootcause: Every system is a distributed system. As a consequence, every problem is a coordination problem.



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.