Articles
Book Announcement List
I’m writing a book for innovators based on two decades of experience founding and running startups, and my experience at Amazon. I’ll publish in Q4/2024. If you are a (pre-)founder, product/tech leader, executive, researcher, business professor, or you work in [...]
Accessibility Thinking
Accessibility in tech has, for as long as I can remember, been associated with disability inclusion. For most people, the word accessible is associated with blind or hard-of-hearing people. But there’s so much more to it! Accessibility has a broad [...]
Collaboration vs. Coordination: Why aren’t you achieving as much as you could?
The word collaboration gives the warm and fuzzies to people. If you see it in a job description, you are more likely to apply. When you hear an exec talking about it, you go, “Yes! Let’s collaborate more!” Collaboration makes [...]
The 5 stages of CTO & the CTO Career Chasm
Unsurprisingly, there are different types of CTOs for the various stages of a startup. What makes a CTO strong in one stage might turn into a weakness two stages later, and vice versa. I’ve been a CTO for the last [...]
Badass (Presenting) Presentations — 24 ways to avoid messing up while presenting
I had my fair share of bad presentations. I gave terrible presentations. I watched slow-moving train wreck presentations. The vast majority of advice and tips you get about presentations are stylistic. There is nothing wrong with that. However, have you [...]
Badass Email — How to conquer your Inbox forever
Let me guess: You are struggling with your email situation. Did I get this right? Maybe you are on the brink of declaring Inbox bankruptcy. Maybe you feel you are falling behind at work. Maybe you are putting in an [...]
Badass Meetings — 23 tips on how to tackle the “too many meetings” problem
Meetings are an essential artifact of getting work done – the right work done. Worse than having too many meetings is having too few meetings that result in the getting the wrong work done. Likely, you are here because you [...]
Budget your software initiatives, don’t estimate them
For more than a decade, I stopped using estimations for features and projects. I *budget* them. The more I do it this way, the more I realize this is the right way to build agile software. When Estimating Software projects [...]
17 reasons why becoming an engineering manager is not what you thought it will be
I often find myself giving career advice to software engineers who want to become a manager. I also mentor and coach many managers who’ve made the transition, some more successfully than others. These activities happen inside and outside of my [...]
Interviewing: Ask them to show, not tell!
Picture this. You are taking a Calculus test in High School. Instead of a written assessment, it’s a different type of evaluation. It’s an oral test. Huh? And, instead of asking to solve Calculus problems, the test is about how [...]
11 Reasons Why WFH Is Not All Unicorn amp; Rainbows
(Originally published on GeekWire) In the midst of the ongoing pandemic, there is an awakening among CEOs that employees are capable of doing work and being productive from home. This week, Twitter announced that employees can work from home indefinitely, [...]
Not all problems/opportunities are created equal
It’s easy for builders to get down on a tactical level and lose sight of the big picture and, sometimes, lose sight of something’s original purpose. As far as I observed, this is a symptom that affects most employees in [...]
The 10-step skill ladder for you to achieve awesomeness
What does it mean to be the best software engineer possible? What does it mean to be the best designer? Or the best dentist, CEO, carpenter, recruiter, product manager? A decade ago I heard Jeff Atwood, the founder of Stack [...]
What does it take to succeed at a tech startup?
Let’s level set first. This post is not about what it takes for a startup to be successful. There is plenty of (good and bad) advice about it already. It’s also not about what it takes for you to make [...]
The subtle difference between a terrible and amazing software architect is…
The subtle difference between a terrible and amazing software architect is…Clairvoyance! Even a junior software engineer can architect a service or app. Quickly, they learn they’ve made a mess on how they created the boundaries of presentation, logic, and storage. [...]
The unintended consequences of trying to do it all
On my first job as a manager at Microsoft, the software developers on my team were spending too much time documenting code. They were writing architectural documents, design docs (design docs for devs are not about graphic design but code [...]
The most important thing I learned about Startups
Almost 13 years ago I met a VC to pitch my first* startup. It was as unsophisticated as a pitch can be and I was a rookie. He was impressed enough by what I’ve built that I’ve got invited back [...]
The three-thirds executive
Over the last decade, as a startup executive, I’ve made countless mistakes. As a computer scientist, my brain tries to abstract the problem to a class of problems. Fixing the symptoms, although it might be the right thing to do [...]
How fast can you hire?
Five years ago, when Amazon started its hyper-growth employee count, I wonder how fast a company could hire new employees without causing more harm than good. No matter what kind of business you have, hiring too fast can hinder growth. [...]
A journey of four Marathons: Chicago, New York, Paris, and London.
Last Sunday, I finished my fourth Marathon, London. It was my personal record at 4:21. It was also the most beautiful course of all races I’ve done. And, it was by far, the most beautiful finish place just in front [...]
