Articles on Effectiveness

How to Build an Engineering Culture that Focuses on Impact

Many years ago, during my time at Quora, the entire product and engineering team experimented with reviewing together how each project affected the business’s top-line growth metric. Which projects contributed the highest returns on investment toward growth? Which projects had we expected to drive growth, but had fallen short? That monthly practice conveyed a crystal-clear message: what mattered most for any project was its impact on business growth. Individual teams... (more)

Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want

In 1967, American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that our perception of control greatly shapes our choices and behavior. In an oft-cited study, he subjected two groups of dogs to electrical shocks. In the first group, the dogs could press a lever to end the shock. In the second, the lever did nothing; the shocks appeared to continue for random durations, and the dogs in this group could do nothing to... (more)

How to Transition from Average Engineer to 10x Engineer

Can an average engineer develop technical skills that surpass 10x the abilities of his or her peers? Unlikely. Can an engineer of average technical ability develop into an individual contributor who produces 10x the impact of his or her peers? With the right mindset and skill development, absolutely. The key to making that transformation is understanding the distinction between those two questions. (more)

The Highest-Leverage Activities Aren’t Always Deep Work

Michael designed solid software systems and wrote clean code. He enjoyed working on both technically interesting problems as well as hygienic refactors of the codebase. And over the years, Michael had climbed the engineering ladder at a top Silicon Valley tech company to become a senior engineer. But one aspect of his work ethic made him difficult to work with and actually held back his career growth. He eschewed any... (more)

The Single, Most Valuable Lesson I’ve Learned in My Professional Life

I worked long hours at Ooyala, the first startup that I joined after leaving Google. There were weeks where my team and I would work 70-80 hours and hardly any weeks where we worked fewer than 60. Like many teammates, I’d work in the office during the day and then continue to work from home after dinner. Even over holidays or vacations, I’d still be chugging away on my laptop... (more)

“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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“A comprehensive tour of our industry's collective wisdom written with clarity.”

— Jack Heart, Engineering Manager at Asana

“Edmond managed to distill his decade of engineering experience into crystal-clear best practices.”

— Daniel Peng, Senior Staff Engineer at Google

“I wish I had this manual to give my engineers when I was a VP of Engineering at Twitter. This summarizes and presents everything I used to tell my team.”

— Raffi Krikorian, Engineering Director at Uber

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Grow Your Skills Beyond the Book

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Consistently deliver business value — become the key person your team trusts to ship business-critical initiatives.
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