SWLW #478: How to write a Strategy Statement , 73 hours downtime postmortem from Roblox, and more

Heya and happy Friday,

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

​​To the Moon (Video)
52 minutes read.

What an incredible storytelling and delivery by Russ Olsen. Emotional, passionate, insightful. Sometimes, humans can be wonderful, with big dreams and a relentlessly resourceful mindset.

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

Product [sponsored]

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Culture

Developers Arguing on Twitter vs IRL
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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Roblox Return to Service - A 73 Hours Downtime Postmortem
18 minutes read.

Great read by the team at Roblox, sharing their learnings from a 73 hours downtime. Production operations at such a huge scale and complexity is incredibly challenging. I’m sure it was tough to figure out what was going on and stay calm at restoring the service after so many hours, so kudos for being transparent about it and sharing things as they are. What would you take from that into how we build our systems?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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As Segment Grew From Open Source Afterthought to the Leading Customer Data Platform, We "Refound" Product Market Fit Several Times. Surprising to Me as a Product Person, Our Biggest Learnings in PMF Were From Wildly Uncomfortable Questions From Our Sales Team Eyes a Thread (Thread)
3 minutes read.

I love this thread by Peter Reinhardt as it covers how to think about sales and product development and be open-minded to learn from others: "It wasn't really even selling. We just explained how Segment the product fit into their problem and their approach. It was all backwards from how I noobishly expected sales to work. And it was phenomenally more effective, not just for sales. "

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Share it via Twitter or email.


How to Design a House to Last 1000 Years (Part I)
6 minutes read.

I know what you're thinking. How does this post relate to building software companies? Reading Brian Potter's post made me think about building companies that can sustainably provide value for 1000 years. Is that possible? Can a software company be designed to handle discrete destructive events or decay processes? What would be the fundamental design of such companies if this was the year 3022?

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Jobs [sponsored]

Director of Engineering @ ButterCMS (Remote)
Working closely with our founder and CEO, you’ll own all technology, deliver on our roadmap, and most importantly, ensure that our customers are successful.

Engineering Manager @ Swimm (Tel Aviv)
Swimm helps engineering teams sync with code by integrating Continuous Documentation into the development workflow, so that docs are always up to date.

 

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Peopleware

How to Write a Strategy Statement Your Team Will Actually Remember
4 minutes read.

Using the "Even Over" approach when defining your strategy is powerful. It clearly puts tradeoffs, making it easier for the team to make decisions: "I'm willing to lose this to optimize that."

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Share it via Twitter or email.


Don’t Worry, Be Happy
4 minutes read.

Noam Wakrat will get you to stop and think how much you're optimizing for happiness and joy at work. I had a long heated debate on the Twitter-sphere if we should optimize for happiness or is that only a side-product. To build a sustainable business for creative people, with a lot of optionality on the employees' side, we need to make it a place people choose to work for every day.

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


Working With Product Managers: Advice From PMs
6 minutes read.

Gergely Orosz covers extremely helpful insights and actions you can apply to improve the way engineering and product should work together as partners. Share it internally in your company with both PMs and Eng.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@rakyll: As a senior engineer, you should learn how to be less reactionary and more strategic. Reactionary behavior creates tactical solutions. Tactical solutions create more problems. Learning to think big and fix foundational issues sometimes makes hard problems disappear.

@heyblake: Your writing is the clearest indicator of how you think. That's why it's the highest leverage skill you can master.



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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 by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.