On Managing Work – Not People

Most leaders I work with have a common frustration they express to me: an inability to achieve significant gains in how quick and predictable they are in delivering work to their customers.

Wabi-Sabi: People are Imperfect. Love Them Anyway.

I came across the idea of Wabi-Sabi recently, about the same time as I was helping a founder of a startup who had just had one of his most reliable reports suddenly go off the rails.

Inclusive Meetings

Pull these tricks out of your hat as the situation warrants. Get everyone in on the action Proactively give less dominant participants the floor by calling on them individually. On remote calls, regularly check if remote participants are able to follow the conversation and contribute.

Technical problems can almost always be solved, but people problems are hard

I’ll never forget the revelation it was when I figured out how to write computer programs. You mean, I thought, I can make this machine do what I want it to? It was a watershed moment in my life.

How to Tell Your Team That Organizational Change Is Coming

From time to time, every leader has to deliver news that is hard for employees to hear.

Performance of Performance Reviews

Michael Lynch wrote a fascinating, albeit somewhat disheartening, post on his personal experience with Google’s performance review and promotion process. There was quite a bit of discussion so I thought I’d update this post from 2013 on the topic.

Intuition vs. Rationality: Where One Stops the Other Starts

Here’s an interesting passage from Anne Lamott, found in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, that requires some consideration. You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you.

The root cause of workplace drama: Lack of clarity

No matter what the business problem, whether it’s turnover, incivility, low patient scores or managers who don’t know how to give direction, all problems have one root in common: The lack of clarity.  

The surprising misery of empowered teams

The CEO doesn’t try to make the decisions, he leaves that to the team. He trusts the team to do the right thing.

Leaders, stop being so nice all the time.

Leaders, stop being so nice all the time. I don’t mean to sound like an asshole. But when it comes to leadership, it’s true: Prioritizing “being nice” keeps us from being good leaders.

Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system

I joined Uber two years ago as a mobile software engineer with some backend experience. I ended up building the payments functionality in the app - and rewriting the app on the way. Afterwards, I ended up moving into engineering management, heading up the team itself.

Engineering decision model: messy opinions, neat ownership

Having founded a startup before and being now a manager of a small engineering team in another fast-growing startup, I’ve been leveraging the opportunity to experiment with a decision-making framework designed to be scalable, in the hope that the learnings we get will help our engineering organiza

The Idea Funnel

The concept of an idea funnel isn’t new. It has its limitations. But I still find it a helpful visualization tool for outlining a high-level innovation process in search of good ideas. It’s also equally applicable to bootstrapping entrepreneurs and corporate innovators alike.

Growing a feature team using lanes

Each of our feature teams at Teads chooses how it operates based on its specific needs and mission. In this article, I will take the example of the SSP team, in charge of automating the selling of ad spaces through real-time bidding to 1.

Peeling Back the History of the Banana

We have known for some time that phytoliths of cultivated bananas appear at Kuk Swamp in Papua New Guinea around 6,800 years ago. But how they spread into the wider world has not been clear and has led to much debate.