SWLW #418: The future of work is written, Cultivating gratitude, and more.

I hope that you and your family are doing well, and you are able to find a new rhythm in this hard situation.

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week -
 

This Week's Favorite

​​The Future of Work Is Written
11 minutes read.

Juan Pablo Buriticá with a wonderful post that is more relevant than ever now with covid-19: "As engineers, I offer you this: We’ve learned how to measure the effectiveness of the communication networks we’ve built. We know and manage latency, throughput, packet loss, and retransmission of our communication infrastructure. So, what’s the latency of status updates? How can we improve it without people being constantly on their email or on Slack? Are we losing packets as we pass around meeting notes? Is there a better way to compress transcripts without losing the quality of the message?"

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Product [sponsored]

Get rid of spreadsheets for desk reservation   
Joan Desk Booking is a smart and easy to use app for mobile phones and desktops, designed for frictionless alternation between work from home and the office. It enables efficient desks reservations, teams scheduling and contact tracing.

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Culture

When You Inherit a Project Another Team Built in a “lockdown” and Look Under the Hood
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

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An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
10 minutes read.

Gergely Orosz wrote a blog post that all of your tech leaders should read and discuss - both the blog post and expectations google doc. Project management skills are crucial if you want to increase your impact. Writing high-quality code is not enough to lead bigger projects, with more people, in a way that builds trust within the organization.

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How to Measure and Improve Success in Your Engineering Team
12 minutes read.

Eric Rabinovich with great insights and guidelines you can use to improve your team's effectiveness. The goals you pick, how you explain it, the incentives you set, how you celebrate - all are important to form a strong and sustainable team. Overcommunicate, again and again: "The first thing you need to do as a leader is to connect your team to the KPI and the goal once they’ve been set. Explain to your team members once, then twice (and even more if needed) why the KPI you selected is important for the company and the team, and why reaching the goal you set will actually be significant."

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From Sales-Led to Product-Led and How It Changed Everything
8 minutes read.

Ashton Rankin covers an organizational change that happens when serving a new market (Enterprise customers -> SMBs). This is never an easy transition, and it will impact the type of talent you can (and should) hire and retain. It will change how you measure usage and set KPIs. It's almost like starting a new company. I enjoyed reading Ashton's thoughts on this transition.

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Jobs [sponsored]

Staff Engineer, Infrastructure @ Forter
Join me, the geek behind SWLW and the VP Eng at Forter, to prevent fraud and abuse in e-commerce as we're building the biggest network of trust online. Read about our dev team and join us!
 

 Looking to hire for your team? Promote your open positions on SWLW! 

Peopleware

A New Micro Essay on Cultivating Gratitude
3 minutes read.

Short and powerful observation when examining your life. This is so beautifully written: "The quality of your life is the average of what frame you use to think about desire. Do you let desire rise and dissipate, choosing instead to appreciate what you have, or do you let it linger to dwell on what you lack?"

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Relax for the Same Result
3 minutes read.

"When I notice that I’m all stressed out about something or driving myself to exhaustion, I remember that bike ride and try dialing back my effort by 50 percent. It’s been amazing how often everything gets done just as well and just as fast, with what feels like half the effort." -- Listen to Derek Sivers.

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More Than 8 Years After My Last Public Talk on Product Management, I Spoke About PM Career Management at Products That Count. What Follows Is a Long Tweetstorm With the Key Content. It Isn't for the Faint of Heart. (Thread)
5 minutes read.

Shreyas Doshi is one of my favorite leaders to follow. If you want to be a good Product Manager, or increase your leadership capacity, this thread has many gems to offer.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@paulg: In practice, good intentions rarely work as well as good incentives.

@rakyll: You can spend your entire life on finding right solutions to the wrong problems. The devil is in finding the right problems to work on.



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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 and my work by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.