Hey, Luca here! Welcome to a new ✨ Monday 3-2-1 ✨ edition. Every Monday I send you 3 practical ideas about:

• 🎽 Engineering Management

• 🔨 Technical Strategy

• 🎒 Hiring & Careers

You will also be receiving the regular long-form articles on Thursday, like the last one:

• How Far Can You Go Without Engineering Managers? 👑

Let’s start the week on the right foot!

1) 🎽 No agenda, no attenda

Enforcing meeting agendas is a great way to:

1. Make meetings shorter and more productive

2. Make less of them!

Why do you make less meetings if you enforce agendas?

People are lazy and often schedule calls for things they could simply write down and share.

Forcing agendas counters the laziness.

Some agendas will turn into written memos that replace the whole meeting.

Try it for yourself and let me know!

2) 🔨 Good design is invisible

The best designs and tech choices that we make are also the ones we are the most likely to forget.

Because they become invisible — they don’t need maintenance and don’t draw attention.

They just work.

For this reason, often they don’t get enough recognition.

What was a good decision that you made that became invisible? Let’s celebrate it!

Let me know in the comments 👇 or by replying to the email.

3) 🎒 Hire outside the box

As a startup, one of the ways to win at hiring is to look outside the box.

Hire self-taught engineers, folks with uncommon backgrounds or major career shifts. These people are often brilliant and motivated, but not big on credentials.

Large companies overlook them.

They have to setup predictable hiring processes, so this kind of talent falls through the cracks.

I wrote more unusual hiring ideas in a previous article 👇

Refactoring

How to Win at Hiring Against Big Companies ⚔️

As a former founder I often speak with other founders to discuss our respective experiences. One of the most common topics is hiring — especially engineering hiring. A popular complaint is that it's hard for startups to compete against big companies, who have deep pockets and enticing career paths…

Read more

10 months ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Luca Rossi

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