SWLW #627: Tying engineering metrics to business metrics, Building a strong ownership culture in a team, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week.  

 

This Week's Favorite

Elon Musk Explains the 5-Step Process He Tries to Implement in His Companies to Ensure Efficient Engineering (Video)
4 minutes read.

Challenging requirements may be the biggest lever to pull. Rarely do people take the time to understand if they can be removed or altered, only to realize they are of low value to the customer's needs.

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Culture

"It Works on Staging"
1 minute read.

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

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Building A Strong Ownership Culture in A Team
9 minutes read.

Candost Dagdeviren wrote a great post, including many tips and ideas you can try out with your team: "You need to be resilient, relentless, and focused. Moreover, you have to have the people who want to put the work together with you. If you have a team of missionaries who just implement the code and don’t care about the rest, then you won’t get any results. Also, you have to have the right organization—not every organization is the best candidate to implement the whole system. However, if your organization develops its own product, then you can probably apply a few things from here to your team, if not the whole system."

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Tying Engineering Metrics to Business Metrics
4 minutes read.

"The next time someone asks why code coverage or deployment frequency matters to the business, you’ll have the answer — and a framework to back it up!" Mapping out KPIs to show how engineering can impact the business on multiple dimensions is a great way to explore our understanding. Iccha Sethi helps you to see the correlations.

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7 Uncommon Opinions After 10 Years of Product Management
5 minutes read.

I love each and every opinion by Tal Raviv, but maybe this one above all: "Smart people are good at painting incredible narratives from way too little data — and quickly. This is the fast lane to losing respect of your teammates and stakeholders — or worse, building crap no one wants. Instead of being intelligent, do your homework. Doing your homework is the ultimate influence card. Doing your homework transcends rank and seniority and politics."

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Peopleware

Build Credibility by Writing a Perfect Executive Summary
8 minutes read.

As you progress in your career, both on the IC and management paths, you'll need to align with executives and ensure you drive your agenda while it fits the company's goals and the executives' agendas.

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My Open Letter to the New Startup Founders (Thread)
4 minutes read.

John Rush shares sound "truth bombs" I wish I had when I opened my company 15 years ago.

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Emojis for Engineers
2 minutes read.

This is so funny and, on many levels, not entirely false.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@Chad_Hurley: Few create, most consume.

@bryan_johnson: Remember that you will rise to the level of your systems, not the wants of your goals.



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.