The Top 10 Lessons from our Podcast Guests 🥇
A round-up of the best advice we received during the first season of the show.
Hey there! We recently wrapped up the first season of the podcast.
So, this week, for each of the 10 interviews, I picked my personal favorite idea 💡 that I will keep with me forever.
In this article I expanded each idea by adding my own thoughts, more references, and linking it back to the original video.
So here they are:
❤️ Self-care for leaders — by Lena Reinhard, Engineering Coach.
🌎 The World Builder Framework — by Aadil Maan • Lead TPM at Humane
🤖 Fine-tuning AI models is risky — by Disheng Qiu • VP of Eng at Translated
🌊 The Return of Waterfall — by Kent Beck • Creator of Extreme Programming
👯 Pair Programming at Shopify — by Farhan Thawar • VP of Eng at Shopify
💬 Good vs Bad Meetings — by Kathryn Koehler • Director of Eng at Netflix
🧑💻 Remote Teams Challenges — by Maria Gutierrez • Director of Eng at Personio
🙋♂️ Managing up — by Wes Kao • Co-founder of Maven & altMBA
👑 CTO skills are rarely about tech — by Andrew Weaver • CEO of CTO Academy
🔄 Manager feedback loop — by Thiago Ghisi • Director of Eng at Nubank
Let’s dive in!
1) ❤️ Self-care for leaders — by Lena Reinhard (video)
Engineering managers are tasked with creating a supportive and healthy environment for their team.
This means, first and foremost, creating such an environment for themselves. In fact, as the saying goes, you should put your own mask on first, before you help others.
In a time of layoffs, return to office, and ambiguity, managers are often put under great pressure, and should intentionally take care of their own wellbeing.
But how do you recognize your own stress? Here are the three ways I like the most:
1) Look for deviations 🔀
We all have routines we perform periodically. We may work out, follow some diet, play sports / games, and more. When we are stressed, we often drop the ball on some of these routines, to ease the pressure. Look at these deviations as clues to your own mental state.
2) Ask others 📞
Sometimes, for others it is easier to spot changes in our behavior / communication, than it is for ourselves. Talking with colleagues, friends and family about our feelings creates the opportunity to get honest feedback and it also improves our relationships.
3) Practice journaling ✏️
Journaling helps you connect with your feelings.
There are many frameworks for daily journaling — it’s up to you to find your own style, but you should probably write down some variation of these three things:
🙏 Gratitude — write down things you are grateful for in your life. It helps you stay happier and grounded.
💣 Worries — write down things that are worrying you. Counterintuitively, it helps dispel them and makes them less menacing.
💭 Morning / evening thoughts — write down your thoughts every day at the same time (e.g. first thing in the morning, and/or after your work day). It makes you more sensitive and aware of them, and it helps detach you from your own feelings, in a way that is similar to meditation.
2) 🌎 World Builder Framework — by Aadil Maan (video)
Aadil led programs at some of the best tech companies in the world, including Apple, Google, RIM (Blackberry), and now Humane.
Over time he developed his own framework about how companies operate, called the World Builder Framework, to design successful processes.
It is based on three lenses: Environment, People, and Physics.
1) Environment 🌳
Aadil echoes the famous distinction between peacetime and wartime, made popular by Ben Horowitz:
⚔️ Wartime — you are looking for simplification and fast decision making. And you get that through reduction. What can I remove to get people talking more so we make decisions faster?
🕊️ Peacetime — you have flexibility. People are willing to take more time, have thorough discussions about pros and cons, and look at problems through different lenses. The org is more malleable to experiment with process.
In wartime you simplify, while in peacetime you add and explore.
2) People 👥
Aadil buckets people into two main types: hedgehogs and foxes.
🦔 Hedgehogs — are those who believe they know the right solution and go for it relentlessly. They are decisive, have strong bias for action, and don’t want to waste time in endless discussions.
🦊 Foxes — are those who analyze things. Let’s write a doc, do we buy or do we build, let’s collect feedback. They may take more thoughtful decisions, but also get stuck in analysis.
To create process that fits the organization it is crucial to understand what kind of people you work with, and their culture.
3) Physics 🔧
Physics is the combination of systems that are in place in the organization. Aadil refers to three of them:
🔍 System of decisions — how decisions are made. How you converge, and how authority works.
📏 System of measure – how you measure everything, from operations to dev productivity. What are the KPIs and the measurement process. It is a fractal made of systems within systems.
✔️ System of work — how you talk about the work you have to do and how you break it down. E.g. Epics → Stories → Tasks.
3) 🌊 The Return of Waterfall — with Kent Beck (video)
One of the most insightful bits of the chat with Kent was about the evergreen feud between Agile and Waterfall.
Kent acknowledged that Waterfall has made a sneaky comeback in many circles, including not only big tech, but also small and high-growth startups, where—especially—it shouldn’t belong.
In fact, Kent says that Agile vs Waterfall is mostly about power structure, rather than business opportunity:
⬇️ Waterfall — leads to hierarchical decision-making, where what needs to be done is defined and transmitted in top-down fashion.
🔄 Agile — has a bottom-up feedback loop that is a threat to traditional power structures. It empowers engineers, designers, and builders.
So, while Agile obviously leads to better products, it is also uncomfortable for those used to being at the center of decision making and power.
Adopting Agile requires embracing such discomfort, letting go of egos, and truly empowering engineers.