#241 – May 11, 2025
What “managing up“ really means
A practical guide to working with your manager
8 minutes by Busra Koken
Managing up might sound like corporate language but it’s something most of us do as part of our everyday work. In this blog post, Bursa shares a few examples and practical insights as setting up regular one-on-one, asking managers for input on decisions or documenting your work and challenges in writing. All these might help you build a more supportive and clear relationship with your manager.
Developers don’t need more documentation
sponsored by Unblocked
Docs get written, but answers stay hard to find. The problem isn’t the docs themselves. It’s that the context developers need is scattered, outdated, or missing entirely. Why does this keep happening? And what’s the alternative?
Setting startup policies
8 minutes by Stay SaaSy
As an executive, especially at a startup, setting policies is crucial for organizational stability, but it must be done effectively. This post provides some rules and heuristics along with a simple example how to set up a travel expense policy for a growing startup.
Playbook for effective 1:1s
15 minutes by Joshua Herzig-Marx
Joshua shares a comprehensive guide for conducting productive one-on-one meetings. He recommends weekly 30-minute meetings with a structured flow and emphasizes that managers should listen more than talk, eliminate distractions, ask powerful questions, and adopt a coaching mindset. Regular 1:1 meetings are foundational for building trust, providing feedback, addressing issues proactively, and supporting employee growth.
Embedding a great engineering culture
19 minutes by Mark Grebler
Mark discusses the "embed" step of a four-step framework for building engineering culture and explains how to integrate values into company processes rather than just displaying them. He details how to add cultural values through engineering growth frameworks, hiring practices, ways of working, team structure, and measurement systems.
Lessons from Apple, Palantir and Slack
18 minutes by The Review
In this article Michael Lopp, an engineering leader with experience at Apple, Slack, and other tech giants offers concise advice on scaling software products in today's crowded market, focusing on engineering leadership. He recommends giving engineers "wolf time" for creative exploration, encouraging healthy cross-team debate, building scalable operational systems, and fostering clear communication between product and engineering teams. He also identifies three critical leadership traits: adaptability, storytelling ability, and understanding individual team members' motivations.
Tests are dead. Meticulous AI is here.
sponsored by Meticulous
Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an exhaustive e2e UI test suite that covers every corner of your application – with no developer intervention required whatsoever. Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and hundreds of organisations rely on Meticulous for their frontend testing. It is built from the Chromium level up with a deterministic scheduling engine – making it the only testing tool that eliminates flakes.
And the most popular article from the last issue was: