#247 – June 22, 2025
then I watched them kill it in 49 days
I convinced HP's board to buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I watched them kill it in 49 days
14 minutes by Phil McKinney
Phil McKinney, former HP CTO, reveals how he led technical due diligence for HP's $1.2 billion Palm acquisition in 2010, only to watch helplessly as the company destroyed WebOS's potential while he recovered from surgery. After CEO Mark Hurd resigned, replacement Leo Apotheker fundamentally misunderstood WebOS's value, prematurely killing the promising mobile platform to focus on transforming HP into a software company.
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Managing Up: Debugging the most critical relationship in your work life
13 minutes by Lena Reinhard
The article outlines a three-step approach: "Know it" (understand yourself, your boss, and expectations), "Grow it" (deliver quality work while setting boundaries and seeking peer support), and "Show it" (communicate your accomplishments regularly since good work doesn't speak for itself). Lena says that managing up is a learnable skill that involves understanding what your boss cares about, providing regular updates, and validating through feedback.
Boldly going where no one has gone before?
11 minutes by Mark Dalgarno
A helpful technique for kickstarting discovery projects involves using a "known/unknown activity" to generate a prioritized backlog. The process maps team knowledge on a horizontal axis and urgency on a vertical axis. Team members first identify topics related to their project, position them according to collective knowledge, then reposition based on urgency. The resulting visual prioritizes work from top-right (urgent unknowns) to bottom-left (non-urgent knowns), helping teams focus their initial efforts effectively while encouraging knowledge sharing.
Diagnose Before You Delegate
5 minutes by Subbu Allamaraju
Subbu explains how many projects fail because leaders skip the diagnostic step, leading to poor execution, missed deadlines, and eventual abandonment of goals. Through personal examples, he demonstrates how proper diagnosis can uncover technical hurdles, unclear problem decomposition, and unhelpful assumptions that impede progress.
Is All Micromanagement Bad?
25 minutes by First Round
The article discusses the nuanced balance between micromanagement and effective leadership in tech companies. It explains that while "don't micromanage" is common advice, many leaders actually under-manage as a result, missing opportunities to provide necessary guidance. The piece presents perspectives from various tech executives who recommend strategic involvement in details such as modeling desired behavior, investigating data anomalies, creating quality review systems, and establishing regular deep dives.
Why "good enough" cloud backups aren't good enough
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