SWLW #481: Momentum is magic, How to deal with an Inverse Conway Maneuver, 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

​​Momentum Is Magic
4 minutes read.

Short and insightful post by Evan Meagher. Knowing how to build momentum is a skill worth mastering. Easier to start with smaller projects and fewer people (but not easy, e.g. writing a blog post) and much harder to do when you need to lead multiple people. "A good way to generate early momentum in a project is to prioritize quick wins and explorations that tighten the feedback loop" -- the latter is a great framing when picking the work to start with. What can be done to understand the problem better and reduce the project's risk?

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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Culture

Testing Lambda Functions Locally
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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How to Deal With an Inverse Conway Maneuver?
7 minutes read.

Dealing with Conway's Law is one of the most difficult challenges leaders need to deal with: "This bold move is to use Conway’s Law to indirectly achieve our end goals: to transform your business at a lower cost, modify its communication structures to influence the emergence of optimal architectural designs. The real question to ask is then: what is the right organization to reach a given architectural target?" -- worth learning from "Team Topologies" and seeking more resources to understand your options and the tradeoffs they bring.

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In the Last 5 Years, We’ve Paid $3.9 Million in Profit Sharing to the ConvertKit Team. While Most Companies Hope to Return Money to Shareholders in a Moonshot Acquisition, We’ve Created a Unique Model to Help Our Team Think Like Owners. Here’s How Our Compensation Model Works: (Thread)
5 minutes read.

Nathan Barry always did something different, and running ConvertKit is no different. I hope his approach will inspire many company builders to try out new initiatives. Well done!

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Conducting a Successful Onboarding Plan and Onboarding Process
6 minutes read.

Naomi Kriger covers well how to build an effective onboarding plan in your company. A few questions that are worth having in mind when creating the plan that I appreciate: "What would be the mentee’s needs? What do you expect the process to look like, and how can you measure its success?" and the entire section on "Use High-Level Time Estimations, and Give Buffers" -- I've seen many onboarding plans that could benefit from Naomi's suggestions around it.

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Peopleware

How to Write Something Compelling
5 minutes read.

Writing is still an undervalued skill worth practicing in our industry. You can influence how the company works or what the company works on by becoming a better writer. "In every creative process, there's a moment when you have to grab the subject by the scruff of the neck and lift it up, like an animal carrying its young." -- Justin Mikolay shares a few tips to consider when you're communicating with others (or future self).

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Being Kind and Being Nice Are Two Very Different Things (Thread)
3 minutes read.

Building long-lasting trust requires more than a game of returning a favor. Being remembered for helping others even when nobody looked is a worthy goal for life. It doesn't mean that being nice is wrong; it's the balance between being kind and being nice that we should observe and consider.

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Belonging to Amazon’s Principal Engineering Community
9 minutes read.

Carlos Arguelles covers areas I enjoy reading, probably much less going through myself. It's fascinating to read as it gives you color into how big tech companies increase the impact of technical leaders as they promote them in their career ladder. It affects the role and power dynamics. But what I appreciate more is how they try to build a community for high seniority leaders so that the journey won't feel so lonely.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@shreyas: One secret to being an ultra-influential leader is to take 5 minutes to simulate your meetings every morning. For each meeting, visualize: how you want it to go, what role you will play in it, what could derail the meeting, how you want people to feel during & at the end of it.

@adrukh: At a certain point in your professional growth, you need to actively choose whether to focus on technical challenges in the context of people, or people challenges in the context of technology.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.