#236 – April 06, 2025
Time-management challenges managers face
Advice for time management as a manager
8 minutes by Ben Kuhn
In this post Ben addresses the time-management challenges managers face, particularly for former individual contributors. He outlines five key strategies: having realistic productivity expectations, prioritizing ruthlessly based on deadlines and bandwidth-increasing work, delegating effectively by calibrating to team members' capabilities, following a five-step overwhelm checklist to triage tasks, and deliberately carving out focused time by batching meetings and distractions.
Review only the real changes in a Pull Request
sponsored by GitClear
Commits are more than just added and removed lines. This tool recognizes updated, moved, and copy-pasted code inside a pull request to produce 30% slimmer PRs.
Crafting a Standout Leadership CV
6 minutes by Lena Reinhard
Your CV should tell a compelling story about your leadership journey and the impact you've had throughout your career. By following Lena's guidelines, you'll create a document that effectively showcases your capabilities and helps you stand out in a competitive field.
Steps to build an engineering strategy
10 minutes by Will Larson
Will outlines a structured five-step approach to creating effective engineering strategy: Exploration, Diagnosis, Refinement, Policy, and Operations. He emphasizes that while following these steps doesn't guarantee success, they help avoid common pitfalls that occur when busy people skip uncomfortable steps, though the structure can be adapted as needed.
Shared Understanding At Scale
15 minutes by John Cutler
In this post John explores information management challenges in organizations through five interconnected themes. He examines how goal hierarchies often become unnecessarily complex with unused middle layers, and how different information-gathering approaches affect leadership decision-making. John argues against the myth of a single perfect dashboard, showing that effective views must be purpose-specific and he also warns against over-nesting workflow loops when different processes operate at varying speeds. He explains how organizational models inevitably compress complexity in ways that reflect power dynamics and can inadvertently prioritize certain work.
The Castle Is Under Siege: Are you the bard?
3 minutes by Michael Küsters
“If you focus on people being busy, you get people being busy.” You’ve probably heard that one in some Agile training or coaching session. It sounds profound. But it’s often used in ways that are… well, wrong. In this article Michael critiques the misuse of Agile principles through a medieval castle metaphor, explaining how focusing on "busyness" misses the point of effective work management. He argues for applying Theory of Constraints principles instead and emphasizes that in organizations, managers often burden key contributors with non-essential tasks rather than helping them overcome constraints that limit overall performance.
Ship software faster with experienced engineers
sponsored by Lemon.io
Rigorously vetted and curated developers from around Europe and Latin America. Lemon.io helps you hire talent fast, on budget, and with month-to-month flexibility.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: