#19 | Sunday reads for EMs
My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.
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Leveling Up Teams Fast and Slow
tl;dr: Building high-performing teams requires both slow, steady improvement and fast, decisive action. Slowly leveling up means consistently identifying and improving your weakest team. Faster progress comes from empowering your most capable people to lead critical initiatives, even if it disrupts hierarchy, because clear ownership and exceptional leadership can transform outcomes almost overnight.
Local Minima
tl;dr: Teams optimize for their own metrics without realizing this can degrade overall company performance. The fix isn’t better local metrics, it’s ensuring someone owns the “global maximum” by creating counterbalancing metrics that prevent one function’s optimization from breaking another.
Measuring Engineering Productivity
tl;dr: You can measure productivity without destroying trust if manager time >> engineer time in the system. This is a playbook for avoiding Goodhart’s Law by using public, automatable metrics that create culture and cadence rather than surveillance, and only dig into numbers when you need to verify intuition about someone falling behind.
How Experienced Engineers Actually Review Code
tl;dr: Experienced engineers don’t try to understand everything, they strategically scope their attention using three mental models (actual code, expected change, ideal implementation) and only dig deep where these diverge. My non-obvious takeaway: code review is a comprehension problem, not a checklist problem, so design your process around how people actually build understanding.
What if Hard Work Felt Easier?
tl;dr: The work that flows easily (where output is high but effort feels low) is more effective and sustainable than grinding. This means that leaders need to help people find work that taps into their intrinsic motivation.
Most popular from last Sunday
Providing technical clarity to non-technical leaders
What did you read recently that you would like to share?