SWLW #488: How to do less, The maybe great idea, and more!

Heya,

My heart is with everyone in a difficult situation these days. I pray we will have better days coming. Below you can read my best findings for the week. If you want to support my work or join SWLW community in Slack - scroll down to the bottom of the email to see how.
 

This Week's Favorite

​​How to Do Less
6 minutes read.

Alex Turek will make you stop and think about your team's execution discipline and stress levels. Controlling WIP (work in progress) is indeed the right direction. I disagree with picking WIP=1 as the correct number. The Engineering Manager should iterate and learn how many t-shirt size WIPs the team can own to maximize business impact and personal growth plans. EMs should optimize for at least two people working on the same project, which will help reduce the team's WIP projects.

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Culture

Engineering Candidate Sends You a Pic of This WFH Setup. Do You Hire Them?
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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The Maybe Great Idea
14 minutes read.

Read Tanya Reilly's deck to improve the probability of your ideas hitting production and making a significant impact. It's worth looking for Tanya's post "Iterating on our RFC Process" if you prefer reading about their journey at Squarespace in a more accessible reading format.

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Another Common Question I’m Answering Working With Scaling Tech Companies Is: Q. What’s the Worst Leadership Advice You’ve Heard? A. By Far the Worst Is “Hire Great People and Get Out of Their Way”. Let Me Explain… (Thread)
7 minutes read.

"I prioritized autonomy over alignment. It's a million times easier to measure and feel high autonomy than it is to measure high alignment. [...] The biggest alignment problem is the gap between how much people think they have to align versus what they should align on. There are many strategic decisions in the how. eg, what technologies to use, new system vs integration, build in core or in an app." -- This thread is packed with so many gems. Jean-Michel Lemieux with one of the most important insights I've seen on leadership. Read it, share it, practice it, and re-read it again.

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Don't Go for the Incremental, Pursue the Transformative
4 minutes read.

"attack the inherent complexity of the problem, not the incidental complexities, which time and improvement in technology will take care of." and "The point of prototypes is to fail fast, learn, and move on to the next attack. If you have a plan of attack for a worthy problem, sketch it, model it, pursue it to see if it holds water. As the first/easiest step, write down your idea to explain it." -- Murat Demirbas with powerful reminders worth reading. Will it inspire you to try (or keep going)?

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Peopleware

When to Delegate, When to Say No
6 minutes read.

Lara Hogan shares a simple and effective mechanism to review your efforts and decide what to promote now, delegate, delay, or decline. Use it when you feel overwhelmed to create some focus on things you should decline or delay to reduce immediate noise.

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15 Visuals That Will Motivate You to Read More Books
4 minutes read.

I love all of the visuals Alex shares. Use one of them as a background for your phone. A daily reminder can be useful to boost your reading habits.

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How to Be a More Effective Internal Product Manager
9 minutes read.

Share Rui Zhang's post with internal product managers or "pure makers" (those who strive to do things end to end, from ideation to production). I love the HEART framework to gauge products, internal or external.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@omervk: The question I found most impactful to ask when I get a document to review is What kind of feedback would you like me to give?

@NavalismHQ: Free education is abundant, all over the internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.



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.