Links

Think of me as a web crawler with taste.

Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned About Management

Julie Zhuo:

Having all the answers is not the goal. Motivating the team to find the answers is the goal.

To evaluate the strength of a manager, look at the strength of their team.

The first time any of the above happens on your watch, it’s always new and hard, no matter how many books you’ve read on the topic. But the fifth or tenth time or 20th time it happens, you’re no longer freaked out. You realize that you’ll be fine.

Lots more interesting points in this and part 2.

Engineering Productivity

Camille Fournier:

So what are the management skills that are needed to achieve [Engineering productivity]? At the first level of management, they look like:

  1. Breaking down the scope of projects to help your team ship frequently. An eye for the MVP, for sequencing work and for predicting likely risks and bottlenecks for project completion are the skills here. This is why I think project management is such an important part of engineering leadership development, and why I hate to hand it off to professional project managers for work that doesn’t cross teams or organizations.

Bingo.

Rick Stein's Obituary

Nephew James Stein of Los Angeles claimed his uncle was an A&R consultant for Bad Boy records and ran a chain of legal recreational marijuana dispensaries in Colorado called Casablunta.

Via Kottke.