We'll explore the contrasting characteristics of good and bad software owners, highlighting the essential behaviors and practices that set them apart

Good Software Owner/Bad Software Owner

Hiring Juniors is a must. But it alone is not enough and could be actually harmful to them and to the company.

Why Hiring Juniors and Training them is not enough for fast-growth companies

High Agency is something that can be learned and it has been the single most important thing for me in my career. Discover what it is and how to develop it.

High Agency: Accepting that we shouldn't wait for perfect conditions

Don't let a poor endgame spoil your hard work when switching jobs. With just a little extra time, you can: 1. Get a better offer 2. De-risk your change 3. Set yourself up for success. These are my tips on how to do that.

Endgame Strategy When Switching Jobs

Helping others has a remarkable effect on our happiness and personal growth. These are 3 tips that significantly impacted my ability to help others.

Finding ways to help the people around us

A good coach needs to understand the game. A good manager needs to be technically competent.

5 Tips to Stay Technical as a Manager

We can't have effective product teams without trust. Learn tactical ways to build it in your team.

3 Ways to Build Trust in A Team

Engineering Management is a tough job. No wonder we find clever ways to avoid doing it. Playing a Senior Engineer and Tech Lead is one of the most common ones. Don't agree? Read on.

The Lure of the Tech Lead Manager and Why You Should Avoid it

I didn't think much about 'Why' I became a leader. In my first year as a manager, that motivation would drive me to make 3 serious mistakes, at least 1 with direct connection to employees later leaving the company–and the worst part is I didn't see what I was doing wrong then. This article is about them, but also about 'why'

Start with Why: 3 Huge Failures I Had as a Leader and Why They Happened

Teams who try to focus on too many new goals at the same time usually wind up doing a mediocre job on all of them. You can ignore this constraint, but it won't ignore you.

Find Piece of Mind Taking One Thing at a Time

The importance of learning from failure is part of conventional wisdom now. As a result, we encourage people and Organizations to fail fast, to fail cheaply. We encourage managers to display Radical Candor and give harsh feedback, showing people their shortcomings but doing so with love. But there's something fundamentally keeping people from learning from that feedback and their failures.

The Feedback You Receive Is Horrible. We're Going to Fix it.

Being "open to feedback" doesn't cut it. Instead, we need to build dissent and safety into the culture actively. These are the tips the worked best for me.

Training our teams' Dissent Muscle

We view people who agree with us as being more intelligent. We like them more. We want them around. It's harder to feel that way about people who challenge our ideas, who challenge our views of the world. And that's the main reason a lot of leaders fail.

You might be making your team complacent by killing Dissent

Making time for what matters

3 Behaviors we can have when leading from vulnerability, humility and curiosity that will give people in our teams more ownership and meaning

3 Openhearted Behaviors That Will Make Your Team show Extreme Ownership

Shift from passivity, resentment, and resignation to an unwavering determination to make your team awesome

An Unspoken Rule of Highly Effective Product Teams

Managing is hard. We often fail and don't notice it. These 3 signs help us fix issues before they're too big

3 Early Signs of a Failing Manager

Informational meetings are incredible time-wasters. They exist out of habit and mistrust. Avoid meeting fatigue by allowing people to engage and collaborate during meetings. Do pre-work and follow-up. But, most of all, respect people's times.

Stop Informing, Start Collaborating

We all want to build great products but have a different view of what great means. So let's try to create a shared understanding, but first, let's see what's wrong with how each group usually talks about quality.

What's Software Quality, after all?

What's Software Quality, After All?

Why you shouldn't jump to a solution before first understanding and building a shared vision of the problem. And how to do it :)

The Problem with not Understanding the Problem

Biases cause a lack of diversity in companies. They make you miss out on great candidates. Keep reading to learn some of the techniques I employ to reduce them in my interviews.

Reducing Bias in your interviews

We hate being asked why something is taking so long. Having to make good to estimations we weren't sure how to make. But why do we keep doing it?

Everybody hates estimating, so why do we do it?

We tend to think of Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris as bad traits. But honestly, they're great qualities for Engineers. Learn how to nurture them 😉

Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

It doesn't matter how long you've been in the market, the responsibility of figuring out what you want to do, what you want to learn, and what will make you happy rests on your shoulders

Are you managing yourself?

Everyone is responsible for Product Strategy, Engineers need to own it too. Learn how 🙂

What's the role of Engineers in Product Strategy?

MVPs are overused and stretched to do things they're not meant to. Learn what we can do about it and why that's a bad thing :)

Too Much Minimum, Too Little Viable

If we focus only on optimizing what's immediately in front of us, we can get trapped in local maxima. It may leave us for way too long on a single hill and not make us find ways to improve continually. Learn some habits that helped me cross that chasm.

Practice does not make perfect

We've all had a lousy one-on-one. Failed to share or was unable to make the other person share their priorities. It doesn't have to be like that. One-on-Ones can be great tools for managers, and their directs.

Are you having open and meaningful one on ones?

Building Products is often like navigating a sea. Learning fast about the conditions of the sea allows us to move more quickly. In these scenarios, thinking about our plans as Sea Charts is more useful than Road Maps.

It's a Sea Chart, not a Road Map

Curiosity a great tool for leadership. We don't need to know all the answers, but we need to always drive for the best results.

Curiosity and Confidence

The Effective Manager by Mark Horstman is my number one book for new managers. It's pragmatic, focused and comprehensive.

Key takeaways from the Effective Manager | Part One

Blaming others or other things erodes trust and respect. It takes our attention away from dealing with the problem. Start owning and dealing with what happens to you.

Stop pointing fingers, own your shit

The Myth of the Super Leader

What does a great outcome look like for a meeting?

Steering the discussion while giving a voice to everyone and appreciating diverging opinions is hard. But, much like steering a ship, it can be learned.

Enabling Free Discussion and the importance to Disagree and Commit

Meetings are a medium of work, understanding what great outcomes for different types of them will give us and our teams more time and effectiveness

A top 5 takeaways summary of High Output Management

High output management by Andrew S. Grove is one of the best books ever written on management. 

Everything is a Process: A Takeaway from High Output Management

High output management by Andrew S. Grove is one of the best books ever written on management. These are the main ideas I took from it

The first steps you should take to start tackling performance and how to speed them up

The Road to Great Product Performance: The First Steps

Understand how improving and protecting your website performance can affect your results

Performance is a Feature: Avoid Losing Users and Conversions

In the post, we'll learn a few tips and tricks about the React library Memoization tools. How to effectively use things like useMemo, useCallback, useRef and React.memo.

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