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- Issue #695
Issue #695
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
March 3rd February issue is presented by Atono
Planning gets messy when different teams work in different ways. One team runs sprints, another uses Kanban – leadership still needs to know what’s shipping next quarter.
Atono’s Product Methodology Survival Guide shares how they made cross-team planning predictable without forcing everyone into the same process.
Inside the guide:
A decision framework for team autonomy vs. constraints
A cross-team planning checklist that works across methodologies
Real examples from PagerDuty, La Redoute, and Atono
If you’re responsible for delivery across multiple teams, this is a practical approach to keeping planning grounded in reality instead of rituals.
— Anna Shipman
tl;dr: “Earlier this week I was on a panel with some excellent peers discussing AI and engineering productivity. We discussed how to measure engineering productivity; tactics for driving adoption; how this might change how we structure our teams and the impact on junior engineers, among other topics. Here are my notes.”
Leadership Management
— Jason Cohen
tl;dr: “Great strategies include strategic choices having these properties: (1) Real decisions: Chooses A over B even though B is also desirable. (2) Accepts consequences: Chooses A and all of A’s consequences, including the unfortunate ones. (3) Reinforces each other: A set of choices that reinforce each other, rather than choices that are smart in isolation but conflict together.”
Leadership Management
— Troy McAlpin
tl;dr: Code changes that took two hours last year now take two days. It’s not effort. It’s not headcount. As software systems mature, the reasoning behind key decisions gets buried in old tickets, Slack threads, and people who’ve moved on. Every hard question funnels through the same few engineers. AI speeds up individuals, but without shared product context, teams drift. Here’s why velocity erodes in established systems.
Promoted by Atono
Leadership Management
— Dan Federman
tl;dr: “But make no mistake-even if you aren't writing the code, you own the output. I want to see how you approach the problem, how you structure a solution, how you think through constraints, and how you decide what actually matters.”
Management Hiring
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
— Alex Kladov
tl;dr: “My schtick as a software engineer is establishing automated processes — mechanically enforced patterns of behavior. I have collected a Santa Claus bag of specific tricks I’ve learned from different people, and want to share them in turn.”
Productivity CareerAdvice
tl;dr: Vibe coding and agent orchestration are making engineers wildly productive. But throughput without alignment is organized chaos. The faster your team ships, the more critical it is for everyone to know what’s happening, why it matters, and what's coming next. Steady’s Continuous Coordination guide lays out 7 principles any team can adopt to remove coordination bottlenecks.
Promoted by Steady
Guide AI
— Laura Tacho
tl;dr: “What is happening in our organizations, what you can expect to happen and how agents are changing the game.”
Leadership Management Video
— Simon Willison
tl;dr: “I’ve started a new project to collect and document Agentic Engineering Patterns - coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of this new era of coding agent development we find ourselves entering.”
Agents AI
tl;dr: “Suppose you're building a map application. You have millions of restaurants, gas stations, and landmarks, each with a latitude and longitude. A user taps the screen and asks: "What's near me?"
SystemDesign
Most Popular From Last Issue
How I Use Claude Code - Boris Tane
Notable Links
Claude Skills: 66 skills & 9 workflows.
Cmux: Ghostty-based macOS terminal.
Markitdown: Convert files and office documents to Markdown.
Microgpt: LLM visualizer.
Superset: IDE for the AI agents era.
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