When You Hear _______, Pay Attention

Note: With dad-hood I’m doing more lists. They’re easier to write while learning to care for this awesome little farting/burping/pooping/smiling human. Apologies if you’re a fan of the longer posts. I’ll get back to them eventually/occasionally.

When You Hear _______, Pay Attention - part 2!

Last week, John Cutler published “When You Hear _______, Pay Attention.” It’s a handy list of hints that could mean your product development initiative is in trouble. Things like, “We might as well do this at the same time” and “Oh, this doesn’t need UX [or QA, Ops, etc.]”.

My Lessons from Interviewing 400+ Engineers Over Three Startups

Marco Rogers loves interviewing engineers. Here’s a quick back-of-the-napkin showing just how much: he’s been an engineering leader and hiring manager for the last seven years. Over that time, he’s hired over 80 engineers.

How To Hold Better Meetings With The Help Of Graphic Facilitation

I first heard about graphic facilitation at a UX conference where the speakers made amazing drawings during their talks. I found it pretty cool but took it for just a great way to make some notes.

Five things I wish tech managers knew

1. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen. If it happened, whatever IT was, don’t go on as though it didn’t. Face it. Talk about it. Get other viewpoints on it. Don’t live in a fantasy world. 2. Simple, direct conversations are magical.

The 4 questions you should stop asking during your one-on-one meetings

Looking at the clock. Staring into the distance. Short, nondescript answers. A CEO recently told me how he’d frequently see this body language from an employee during their one-on-one meetings. Flat. Disinterested. Preoccupied. It felt lousy to witness, but it’d always been this way.

Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance. And that makes them harder to hire.

interviewing.io is an anonymous technical interviewing platform. We started it because resumes suck and because we believe that anyone, regardless of how they look on paper, should have the opportunity to prove their mettle.

Expectations

Every day, you hear lots and lots of opinions, and get a great deal of advice. Most of it leaves your brain as quickly as it has entered it. But some of it, well it kind of sticks with you forever. You remind yourself of it regularly and try to model your life after it, at least a little.

What makes a great leader, explained in eight counterintuitive charts

As a reporter who’d found himself wearing an ill-fitting entrepreneur’s costume, over the years I’d used journalism as an excuse to learn what I needed to do to be a better business builder.

Building confidence as a CTO

I’ve been the CTO of Splice for more than 5 years now, from early prototypes to today’s 100+ employees. When Steve and I started Splice, I never thought we would get this big.

How to fail as a new engineering manager

Congratulations - you’re a new manager! No, really, I’m being sincere. You can hear the sarcasm in my voice? Sorry, I tried, but I know that along with some excitement, there’s plenty of doubt and angst. You have likely followed a path that’s similar to mine and many others.

How to build and launch an enterprise-scale product

Creating products for a startup or for experimental ventures within a corporate is one thing, but developing & launching enterprise-scale products often take the form of a colossal project (even if it’s done in a lean agile mode).

Just One More Sprint!?

In this post I am going to use a common scenario to highlight some key product development prioritization concepts. Specifically, we are going to dig in to the decision to stop one effort, and start another effort. Let’s start with an example.