SWLW #427: When costs are nonlinear keep it small, How hard should I push myself, and more.

Heya,

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

​​When Costs Are Nonlinear, Keep It Small.
5 minutes read.

Jessica Kerr with a powerful framing, helping you decide when to strive to batch work together versus doing them immediately one at a time. Share this post with the engineering and product teams, and see how or where this should change your decisions today.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

Product [sponsored]

Effective Feature Management by O'Reilly
Learn how you can use feature flags to reduce risk, iterate faster, and gain more control in your dev cycles with this book written by LaunchDarkly CTO/Co-founder, John Kodamul.

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Culture

Devs Watching QA Test the Product
1 minute read.

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

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


6 Lessons I Learned While Implementing Technical RFCs as a Decision Making Tool
6 minutes read.

Juan Pablo Buriticá with a post I put on my "monthly re-read list" for the next few months. As we scale our team, it's critical to understand which process we can use to understand the value we try to capture and the tradeoffs we have in front of us with various solutions. RFC can be a great format to align the team and get them to participate. The section about "Trust issues become more evident" is a great benefit to building a stronger team.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


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

I think the 4 questions Eric Rabinovich asks should be part of your Design Reviews docs. They should help you frame how you write about new initiatives you believe could assist. They drive the conversation in a way you can discuss value and tradeoffs. Can you answer them for projects you're participating in or leading today?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


10 Technical Strategies to Avoid When Scaling Your Startup (And 5 to Embrace)
7 minutes read.

One of my all-time favorite talks is Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley. Brian Scanlan's post reminds me of that mindset. This post should be a good candidate for your reading material to new teammates.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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 Looking to hire for your team? Promote your open positions on SWLW! 

Peopleware

“How Do I Feel Worthwhile as a Manager When My People Are Doing All the Implementing?”
5 minutes read.

Long feedback loops are really painful. This is true for managers or technical leaders who often see the results of their work in months or years. There is no way around them other than defining goals and measurements for yourself in a different time scale than you're used to. Charity Majors captures it well: "Manager successes and failures play out over a much longer period of time than the successes and failures of writing and debugging code, and you can only indirectly trace your impact. It can be hard to draw a straight line from cause to effect. Some of your greatest successes may resonate and compound for years to come, yet the person might not remember, may never even have known how you contributed to their triumph. (Hell, you might not either.)"

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


How Hard Should I Push Myself?
7 minutes read.

"We anticipate bad things months, years, or even decades out. And when we do this, the very same stress response gets turned on—even though there is no immediate danger, and there is no immediate way to avoid it. [...] What that means is, just knowing you have the option to reduce stress is enough to make something less stressful—even if you’re not actually controlling the stressors at all." -- Dan Shipper helps to set a support system around you to help you sustainably push yourself into new growth areas.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.


How to Start a New Tech Exec Job
5 minutes read.

Nir Rubinstein covers well the areas you should pay attention to and the pitfalls to avoid. My favorite topics are "Have opinions, not ideals!" and "Don’t rush to provide value!" as you have first to build trust and gain context.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
Share it via Twitter or email.

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@gregisenberg: You can't build great products without being "at one" with the niche you're building it for. It's almost impossible. Deeply understand your niche or expect disappointments

@JanusFaustus: don’t confuse *doing what you want* with *doing what is comfortable*



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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.