#261 – September 28, 2025
a collection of helpful documents for engineering teams
Useful engineering management artifacts
6 minutes by Bjorn Roche
Growing organizations benefit from having document templates ready for key processes. Essential templates include career development plans for structured growth conversations, title ladders to ensure fair promotions, and team charters that help teams work better together. Other useful documents are engineering strategies, team roadmaps, satisfaction surveys, and decision briefs for major choices. These templates provide consistency and save time when adapted to your specific needs.
Your senior engineers are tired of being human wikis.
sponsored by Unblocked
Unblocked turns scattered knowledge from GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence into clear answers your team can trust. The result: faster onboarding, fewer interruptions, and autonomous teams that stay focused.
Technocrats vs. strategists
11 minutes by Roger Martin
Roger divides senior executives into two types: technocrats and strategists. Technocrats focus only on managing people and following processes. They create detailed plans and lists but don't get involved in solving problems themselves. Strategic executives spend their time solving the most important organizational problems alongside their teams. They focus on results rather than just following procedures. Roger argues that strategic leaders create possibilities while technocratic leaders impose limitations on their companies.
You're definitely going to be a manager now
5 minutes by Julie Zhuo
Julie argues that AI will reduce pure middle management roles as teams become leaner and information flows more directly. However, management skills will become more important as individual contributors must think like managers. Managing AI resembles managing literal interns who need clear instructions and verification. While AI makes some leadership tasks easier by providing constant coaching support, leadership becomes harder during periods of major change when people feel anxious about job security.
How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do
10 minutes by Ashley Janssen
Ashley uses her air bike workouts to show how motivation works. She dreads the workout but always talks herself through it, from wanting to quit early to finally finishing. This same pattern happens with many unpleasant tasks. Factors like sleep, stress, and physical state affect motivation. She suggests strategies like breaking tasks into smaller pieces, adding accountability, and building consistent routines instead of relying on feeling motivated.
How tech companies measure the impact of AI on software development
33 minutes by Gergely Orosz, Laura Tacho
Measuring AI's impact on software engineering is tricky, but 18 companies are finding practical ways to do it. Most successful teams combine traditional metrics like pull request throughput and change failure rates with new AI-specific measures like user satisfaction and time saved. They break down data by AI usage levels and track metrics over time to spot trends. Companies need solid baseline measurements before AI adoption to make meaningful comparisons.
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.
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