#43 | Sunday reads for EMs

My favourite reads of the week to make your Sunday a little more inspiring.

Stephane Moreau

May 03, 2026

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. Every Sunday I share with you my favourite reads of the week.

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How to hire people who are better than you (Jason Cohen)

tl;dr: You have to hire people who know more than you in domains you can’t evaluate, so stop trying to assess their expertise and instead watch for specific tells - do you leave the conversation wanting to implement half their ideas, are you already learning from them in the interview itself, and would it scare you if they joined a competitor?

How To Be Direct And Strategic (Yue Zhao)

tl;dr: Reframes “strategic communication” for engineers who confuse directness with bluntness. Three-question prep before any high-stakes conversation: what does this person already believe, what emotion will this trigger, and what needs to be said first.

Measure Less to Learn More (Discord) - Jake Mainwaring

tl;dr: Discord reduced their experiment metrics from ~50 to ~15 and got ~45% better at detecting real, meaningful effects, because tracking too many metrics makes statistical corrections stricter and hides what actually matters. Too many metrics come at a cost - every extra, overlapping metric makes it harder to detect real improvements.

The Critical Shift In What Differentiates Great Leaders (Yue Zhao)

tl;dr: Analysis, synthesis, pattern recognition are getting commoditized by AI, so the leadership differentiators going forward are heart (reading and managing the emotional state of a room) and gut (ethical judgment in novel situations where the data doesn’t decide for you).

Speak in the affirmative: “Do this” versus “Don’t do that” (Wes Kao)

tl;dr: Flip negative phrasings to positive ones because “don’t do X” forces the listener to mentally model X and then invert it, which adds friction, sounds reprimanding, and worst of all gives airtime to exactly the behavior you don’t want.