A Manager's Manifesto — The Year of the Looking Glass

A Manager’s Manifesto

10) Always get the full story before making a decision.

9) It’s incredibly easy to ‘flip the switch’ and start writing people off after a few bad experiences. Resist at all costs. You were bumbling once too. You made poor decisions. You learn and grow, and so does everybody else.

8) Sweep up the crumbs. Wipe the tables. Turn off the lights. Plug the holes that need plugging—even if it’s menial, even if nobody will know you did it. Do it in service of the product, the company, and this wondrous, magical thing you are all building together.

7) Recognize you can’t do everything. Close your eyes, fall backwards, and learn to trust.

6) Clearly, there is a more efficient way to do the things you do. How? Ponder that on your daily drive home.

5) Figure out which people rely on you and how you can help them be self-sufficient. You may feel important having a monopoly on salmon provisions, but if the whole village learns how to fish, it’ll free you up to do something else. Like figuring out how to grow wheat. Or how to domesticate those cute wolf-pups.

4) Don’t say anything if it’s not actually contributing to the discussion. Your voice is not so melodious that it absolutely must be heard.

3) Making the best decision is not as important as putting in the right processes to ensure that the best decisions get made.

2) Dole out thanks and encouragement like you dole out opinions.

1) Above all, this: never, ever get in the way. It’s better to twiddle your thumbs and squint up at the clouds than to obstruct progress for the sake of that stupid, childish thing called ego.

Suspended Coffees

Emotional Skill — On Leadership — Medium

Building an Atom — on management — Medium

The importance of selling your vision. — What I Learned Building…

A team aligned behind a vision will move mountains. Sell them on your roadmap and don’t compromise — care about the details, the fit and finish. Only work with those that have (as Larry Page puts it) “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” and push everyone on your team until it’s uncomfortable.

It's not a web app. It's an app you install from the web.

Can never stress this enough

> Spend hours—hours!—mashing on your app with your big, clumsy fingers. Tap things twice. Swipe at things that shouldn’t be swiped. Touch things that shouldn’t be touched. Mush it and squeeze it and scrape it. Do it when you’re lying in bed, in the bathroom, walking down the street. Over, and over, and over again. You’ll find all sorts of little UI glitches that way. Each one needs to be investigated, and its cause rooted out and repaired. Be warned: it’ll be awfully tempting to tell yourself those little glitches don’t matter, that it’s just something weird with your phone, that real users won’t encounter them. But do not give into temptation! The devil is in the details, and we’ve discovered major structural flaws with our code by investigating seemingly innocuous little bugs. This may double the development time of your app, but it’ll be worth it.