Art credit @Madison Harney
Spark of the Week
People Management
Building (and leveraging) the right team is a systems problem and for the good or the bad you are a big part of the system. As we reflect on org design and operating models we must also consider the criticality of management - something that many are hoping becomes irrelevant thanks to an #AI context engine.
Amy Wilson and I have been consistent in our point of view that the need for great managers is even more material in this Ambiguity age and this article does a great job of breaking down why.
Yes, you need great hires. Get better at hiring please, but you also need to up your leadership game by building the right operating system for the team to thrive. The good news is that this is a very high #ROI exercise not only for your results but also for your personal growth.
Step one is to consider that maybe what got you here won't get you there.
cc: Alexis Fink and John Sumser (who sparked my thinking on this topic )
Reading and Pondering
h/t Adam Grant - The internet doesn’t bring out the worst in people it makes the worst people more visible. Meg POV: This could be a great thing if we all just learn to have better “shitty people (or bots)” filters.
AI Budgeting a good framework outlining boards POV on AI and spend (show me the results, not show me the token spend) and how this is shaping up for 2027 budget cycle. Important implications for SaaS vendors and vertical AI-hopefuls
Listening to customers - Dave Kellogg writes a great post about how vulnerable we are in taking our own biases into customer feedback. I have been pondering the other side of that a bit with my journey into reading the classic Innovators Dilemma where in times of disruption customer feedback can be very dangerous. I think both are true, and the advice Dave gives about being more curious and aware of what you want to hear matters. I have a post to write about how the confusion goes far beyond product innovation and even more to business model innovation and how that is going to continue to trip up many of us in the next few years, as everything gets so topsy turvy in the market landscape.
Cognitive offloading and the reduction of critical thinking - A great read that reminds us that we need to be more intentional about what we offload and what we build in our daily habits and systems to protect our critical thinking skills. Some good suggestions on how to think about this and what to do and a reminder that this problem pre-dates AI. h/t Shae O
Wage share decline - when we ponder worker sentiment it’s useful to have broader context.
Work and Jobs
You just hired a million bad employees - Humans are now cheaper than software (on average) but tokens are cheaper at scale, AI scales dysfunction instantly and management is the key to convert tokens to productivity. – this is such a useful read. I highly recommend you hit the link and read it all the way though. The broader point suggests what we have been saying for a while. Adding AI without an understanding of your destination and your constraints will just create chaos.H
On the complexity of hiring FDE - Finding people who are both technical and customer-facing has always been a challenge. Today people are discovering this while trying to hire forward deploy engineers.
Quitting benchmark - h/t Kieran - we get asked a lot about when/how/why to quit on the podcast. Some of these become Leadership Corners and some are just backchannel conversations, but all would benefit to know what the “norm” is on this topic. I found most of this data surprising.
I could not love a nerdy post more - John Sumser breaks down what is actually in the labor statistics and why understanding demographics matters. If you want to dig deeper into these types of things I highly recommend this book.
Is jobs a four letter word - Benn wins again, putting his finger on the thing under the thing. Status and social pressure are massive forces. We saw this when officer compensation became public and we see it again in the spans and layers narrative. What is getting lost in this narrative IMO is the reality that leadership by ego while unavoidable is very very fraught.
A great context on the fallacy of work without humans. This is my new favorite quote (bold) “Your people bring a million micro-assumptions to their work that inform not only how they perceive the work underway but also how they spot issues and come up with creative solutions to resolve them. They also bring guilt and fear and shame and cultural nuance in how they respond to failure. Particularly collective failure. It’s extremely unlikely, outside of deeply homogenous environments, that all their baggage will be a matched set. And from that place, you should anticipate wildly different and sometimes relatively heated discussions about what happens next.”
A great pulse check on tech workers but my focus was drawn to number 9 and unsurprisingly managers are important for worker wellbeing. Lenny delivers again.
Career mindsets and a take on the changing career ladder. - My favorite bit is this Stop Delayering for Cost. Start Delayering for Capability.
SWE jobs are growing - I love the decide/execute/deliver sandwich frame. I think this gets a bit to the prior discussions on the importance and durability of “taste”, I also think the “agentic engineering” definition is on the right track for the future. Lots to learn here as we evolve, but generally the evidence suggests we are all making up stories to try to support our own sensemaking and we should recognize that, while we might be in the right direction in our thinking, we are really far from certain – even (especially) those of us who appear the most confident in our read.
Speaking of stories - some good insights into CTO/VPE burnout/tapout.
Obesity penalty in hiring (for women of course)
Lifehacks - AI and Others
Huge shout to Nate for bringing a solution to Claude-y language and shout to Google for the data. FWIW I found ChatGPT did a much better job in taking the point and building the skill with little prompting edit. Claude was much more obtuse about the intent but we got there in the end with the typical brute force required to manage that smart, eager and clueless intern.
Looping Back to You
Thanks to everyone for the support and guidance for our Newsletter and our Podcast. We appreciate the feedback and love learning from each other.
Please keep sending us your leadership corner questions [[email protected]] and like/subscribe on all the platforms.
** Typos and poor grammar either because I'm too lazy to edit properly, or to make you feel confident this was written by a flawed human and not AI generated.
Looping Back to You
Thanks for reading, listening, sharing, and helping us think better. We love hearing where you agree, where you disagree, and what you're seeing from your seat.
If someone forwarded this to you, join the Insight Loop to get the next issue directly in your inbox.
And if you're already in the Loop, help us grow: forward this to someone who would enjoy it, and follow/subscribe to The Meg & Amy Show wherever you listen or watch.
Have a question you'd like us to tackle in a Leadership Corner? Send it to: [email protected]
Watch & Listen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, etc.
More from Meg: Visit Meg's Website
** Typos and poor grammar either because I'm too lazy to edit properly, or to make you feel confident this was written by a flawed human and not AI generated.
