SWLW #447: The Thinking Ladder, My Leadership Document , and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​My Leadership Document — 2021 Edition
11 minutes read.

So many gems in this post by Subbu Allamaraju, I found myself marking and taking notes on almost every paragraph. I'd add Subbu's post to the recommended reading list for managers and technical leads. Interesting idea to try out: Pair managers and tech leads together and ask them to discuss their observations on "Watching for excuses" and "Using your leverage."

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

Product [sponsored]

Guide to Effective Feature Management [O'Reilly]
Testing in production sounds scary, right? What if you could safely ship features faster? Adopt feature management practices to accelerate release cycles and deploy every 6 hours, instead of every 6 weeks. Check out the new book from O'Reilly and LaunchDarkly CTO & Cofounder John Kodumal.

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Culture

"I'm Inheriting Too Much Tech Debt"
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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Encourage Teams to Take Risks
4 minutes read.

"In our work we may not always be the best guardrails for a team member. But, with a little work we can identify what those guardrails should be. I love using RFCs(Request For Comments) for large features and new services because they provide opportunity for team members to grow with minimal long term risk. The checkpoints and conversations help them learn architecture by doing it, and allow the team at large to help them grow." -- Letting people make mistakes is hard. But you were in that place before. You want to cap the risk while also ensuring that a failure won't discourage them too much.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Incident Writeup as Sociological Storytelling
3 minutes read.

This is such an excellent take on how to write an incident report: "good incident writeup is a sociological story about our system. Yes, there are individual engineers who were involved in the incident, but their role in the writeup is to serve as a narrative vehicle for telling that larger story. We care about those engineers (they are our colleagues!), but it’s the system that the story is about."

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


It’s Time to Fight for a Dual Product Management Career Path
9 minutes read.

As a parallel career ladder become more common on the engineering side, Ken Norton suggests we adopt it for the Product Management route. People should not be forced upon management of people to increase their impact, and this should be true for more and more professions as our industry matures.

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

Engineering Director @ Tessian (Remote / London)
We're building the world’s first Human Layer Security platform and we’re looking for an experienced technical Engineering Director to join our team.
 

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

Peopleware

The Power of Product Thinking
5 minutes read.

Learning to improve your inquiry and observation skills is critical to increasing your impact on the organization. It will impact how you build tools and products (internal and external): "The simplest way to define product thinking is that it is the skill of knowing what makes a product useful — and loved — by people. As with all skills, it can be nurtured and developed; it’s not just an instinct one does or doesn’t have (and even instincts are trained, after all)."

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Someone Asked, So I’m Curious to Hear What Others Recommend: What Are the Best Resources for Learning to Be a Better Presenter and Storyteller? (Thread)
3 minutes read.

I've picked up many resources to read and watch, and I believe you'll find it helpful as well. I can recommend Made to Stick as an inspirational book to drive ideas from. If you look for structure, Molly Mielke's response is spot on.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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The Thinking Ladder
22 minutes read.

You'll find yourself being inspired while also getting some serious laughs. It's a long one, and wonderfully written by Tim Urban. So grab a coffee or tea, and enjoy.

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

And finally, inspiring tweets...

@BrianNorgard: Product is philosophy.

@david_perell: The Law of Work: Communicating an idea requires a finite amount of work. The more work the writer does to clarify their ideas, the less the reader has to work to understand them.



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




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.