Fostering an inclusive organization is intimidating work. Not only is it intimidating, for the longest time I struggled to find a framework to even think about it effectively. Over time, I’ve found a framework for thinking about inclusion efforts that is simple but that I’ve found very useful. An inclusive organization is one where folks have access to membership and opportunity. Membership is participating as version of themselves they feel comfortable with. Opportunity is having access ...| lethain.com
Along with slow technical migrations, I believe reorganizations are the second largest activity which cause quickly growing companies to slow down. Here is a framework for running an engineering reorg effectively.| lethain.com
Most companies believe they are constrained by funding, product market fit or hiring. Books have been written about each of those, and this will be a foray into hiring. In particular, it’ll be a look at how to use the fundamental hiring diagnostic tool: the hiring funnel.| lethain.com
I’ve come to believe that most organizational design questions can be answered by recursively applying a framework for sizing teams. Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to team sizing into a bit of a framework, and even changed my mind on several aspects, especially the viability of small teams. This post describes how I now size teams| lethain.com
There is a moment in every company’s growth when top-level planning shifts from discussing specific projects to talking about goals. This can be a very empowering moment because goals decouple the “what” from the “how”, but it can also be a confusing transition for everyone involved: writing clear goals takes a bit of practice. This post takes a look at how to write effective goals and how to use them during planning.| lethain.com
Several years ago, my friend Bobby showed me an article about a CEO who used systems thinking to understand their company’s bottlenecks, which eventually lead to him buying out his cofounder, who had been leading their sales team. As is the case for most stories about ourselves that we decide to publish widely, this decision turned out to be the right one, and their business flourished.| lethain.com
Many effective leaders I’ve worked with have the uncanny knack for working on leverage problems. In some problem domains, the product management skillset is extraordinarily effective for identifying useful problems, but systems thinking is the most universally useful toolkit I’ve found.| lethain.com