This isn’t a new revelation, but it’s helpful to see research to back up how important good managers are:

Managers play a crucial role in shaping an employee’s experience. For example, research shows that nearly 70% of the variability in employee engagement can be predicted by their managers’ behavior, decisions, and personality traits. In other words, whether people are happy, energized, or miserable at work depends mostly on their boss—and whether or not they’re an incompetent manager.

The article goes on to talk about the well-known Peter Principle, which states that “employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent”:

One of the core mechanisms behind the Peter Principle is the gap between the skills needed in junior technical roles and those newly and additionally required in senior and managerial positions. To improve the promotion system, especially for significant promotions for team leader or line manager roles, it’s essential to consider a person’s past performance or technical expertise and leadership potential, such as collaboration experience or services to the team. Organizations can counteract the Peter Principle through comprehensive training programs that equip employees with necessary competencies, such as people management skills, strategic thinking, and emotional intelligence before promoting them to managerial roles.

It’s mind-boggling how often organizations promote individual contributors into manager roles without any training at all. This is a major contributing factor to the Director problem so many orgs are battling with right now:

Your organization will succeed or fail on the basis of your director layer. And in most organizations, that layer is a mess right now.

I like this idea from James Stanier on how to make sure that product strategy doesn’t die the moment it’s created:

One way to do this is to create a regular heartbeat for your strategy. The duration of this heartbeat is up to you, but aligning with one of the larger cycles of the year is a good bet: for example, perhaps you could do it quarterly or biannually. The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been implemented in the time since the last heartbeat. It’s a chance to show how the strategy is living and relevant, and that it’s not just a document that was written once and then placed on the shelf.

I love everything Mandy Brown writes, but Coming home hit extra hard. I have been becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media to a point where I wish I could just leave it all behind, but I had this idea in my head that because of the work I do, that’s not an option. Mandy managed to articulate my feelings about it so well:

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.

I’ve been particularly disappointed with how Mastodon just isn’t the replacement I hoped it would be, and on that point I feel validated as well:

As much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I can’t tell if we’re stuck with this design because it’s familiar, or if it’s familiar because we’re stuck. Very likely it’s me that’s stuck, fixed in place while everything rushes around me, hoping for a gap, a break, a warm rock to rest awhile on. Longing for a mode of communication that lifts me up instead of wiping me out.

Her conclusion about writing on your own site has always been important to me as well, but her point that it’s about more than just “owning your content” is excellent:

While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.

15 years into writing this site, what Mandy says here feels good to me. I think I will continue to post here until I have nothing left to say—and the words will remain here long after that day has passed. I’ll dip into social media when I must, but this will always be home.

This is a really interesting overview and perspective by one of the co-founders of GitHub:

So, to sum up, we won because we started at the right time and we had taste. We were there when a new paradigm was being born and we approached the problem of helping people embrace that new paradigm with a developer experience centric approach that nobody else had the capacity for or interest in.

The whole post is worth reading for the history and all ways things just went right for GitHub.

This is excellent advice from Will Larson:

Many high-agency managers try to prevent executives from doing silly things, but it’s almost always more effective to translate their energy for a silly thing into energy for a useful thing. It also leaves the executive feeling supported by your work rather than viewing you as an obstacle to their progress.

He shares some practical examples in the post to illustrate the principle. Also relevant—Casey Winters’s story about executives sometimes wanting their rounded corners on images:

You are going to run into founders, CEOs, execs that want their “corners”, or seemingly irrational markets, product, features, etc. And it’s going to be your job to make those things happen. As a former product leader, I think every CEO or founder should be trusted when they ask for a corner. Now, if they’re doing it all the time, it might just be a bad leader, and you should get a new job. But I have learned to respect there is a thought process I can’t always see, an important reason they can’t always share with me that may make this the right call. So, now I just label certain ideas as corners in the strategy to teams. I can’t exactly lay out all the reasons this makes sense to do now or agree with the ones I’ve heard, but we’re going to do it anyway, and hope it’s the right thing.

I love this sentiment from Austin Kleon:

I am big on being a "curious elder”—and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.

I’ll go ahead and keep sharing the things I like, and I hope everyone else does too.

I like Erik’s thoughts about AI and coding in Replacing my Right Hand with AI:

I do think that AI will lower the bar for anyone to be able to create software, just like anyone can use Excel to do their own personal accounting. This is a good thing!

And:

Human engineers won’t go away. We’ll still be needed to drive high-level prioritization, understand the overall architecture and scope of the problem, and review the AI’s work, especially as systems get bigger. But we’ll spend much more of our time thinking about what to build, and much less on the repetitive “how” of building it.

On the Product side of this argument, there is Paweł Huryn’s Will We Lose Our Jobs to AI? Cutting Through the Hype. Short answer: no! But he makes some points about how we should adapt that I agree with, especially these two:

• Educate yourself in AI: You should understand concepts like fine-tuning and AI agents, but there’s no need to obsess over them. YouTube videos are perfectly fine unless you want to tie your career more closely to AI.
• Get interested in the business side of the product: How do your organization’s Sales, Success, and Support teams work? How exactly does your company make money? How do you acquire customers? What are the key acquisition, retention, and revenue metrics? How do these metrics differ depending on the customer segment? How have they changed over time? Who are your competitors? What’s unique about your strategy?

In short, use AI for the things that it is good at, and get better at the things that it’s not good at.