SWLW #472: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Scaling to $100 Million, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join SWLW community - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​The Tyranny of Structurelessness
13 minutes read.

"As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Informal structure forms the basis for elites." -- Jo Freeman covers how good intentions can still lead to poor organizational health. This often happens as organizations grow and not enough attention is invested into doing so with grace. Make sure you read the "PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING" and ask yourself how much of it happens in your organization today.

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Culture

Engineering Is 🤯
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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Scaling to $100 Million
12 minutes read.

If your company is in the SaaS space - I highly recommend sharing this post by Mary D'onofrio and Ethan Ding to teach the team which metrics are most important for the business's health and why. Where does your company stand? Which questions you want to ask the management team after reading this benchmark?

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How Stripe Scaled - Notes From Office Hours With Claire Hughes Johnson
15 minutes read.

I enjoyed reading the full interview (you can read Tomasz's TL;DR) and "Working with Claire: an unauthorized guide" to learn about the type of management styles companies like Google and Stripe have. I loved this insight: "... you have to really take your hiring practices incredibly seriously... when you’re growing quickly, you’re starving and everything looks like a giant buffet when they walk into an interview. And you really actually need to do the opposite thing and go on a diet sometimes, especially for the very first hire you make in a new function or a leader."

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Death by Indigestion: More Companies Die of Indigestion Than Starvation.
3 minutes read.

Bryce Roberts with a wonderful take on how to leverage constraints into your strength: "They [startups] are dying from indigestion as they try to consume and deploy resources at the same rate as their large competitors. Instead of embracing the innovation advantages that come with being small and resourceful, most are in a race to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Playing someone else’s game instead of their own."

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Peopleware

Your Calendar = Your Priorities
5 minutes read.

Worth reading how John Cutler defines "valuable" and how you should think about energy & time investment: "... time spent and pragmatism is not enough. High performing teams spend more time (and energy) on valuable things."

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I've Got a Secret to Tell You... Your Boss Is Tired of Being Your Manager. They Want You to Manage Them. Managing Up: How to Get What You Want & Give Your Boss What They Need (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Wes Kao presents a good way of thinking about "managing up". The examples are a bit extreme, but that's excellent as it can help shape the difference between your current way of doing things and what Wes offers to do: "You have more control over your relationship with your boss than you think. And it all starts with embracing that it’s your responsibility to manage your boss."

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Why Story-Driven Learning Can Help You Master Any Subject
4 minutes read.

Polina Pompliano got me thinking about leveraging stories to capture and share knowledge inside the company. The story can help retain facts, relationships, formulas, warnings, upside, or anything relevant to doing the necessary work. What is the narrative behind the change you'd like to make? How can you get people to connect to it emotionally? It's working well on kids at school, but it doesn't end there. Most of us learn best when we can connect to the narrative.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@orangebook_: Too much comfort dulls the mind.

@isamlambert: AWS having issues still isn't a good technical reason to do multi-cloud.


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.