Locally Optimal

Locally Optimal

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Latest — May 16, 2024

Nobody will take care of your career like you will

The reality as you get more and more senior is your manager will most likely have more reports, and almost certainly have more problems under their scope. In fact it gets to the point where they are almost guaranteed to have at least one enormous burning fire active at any

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Guard your time jealously, use most of it for high leverage work

As you become more senior in your career, demands on your time will outstrip the hours you’re willing to work, no matter what. Your time, focus, and energy is perhaps the most immovable constraint on your output. There is a very real ceiling on the useful output hours you

Ask your manager for 5 growth areas, so they can pick 1-2 that actually work

I always try to remember two golden rules of managers – they’re often busy juggling many problems unrelated to you, and they cannot read your mind. I have heard (and have also sometimes personally felt!) complaints like “my manager isn’t offering me the opportunities I want” or “my manager

Make sure your foundations can support your high velocity product growth

You own a system. You are obsessed with your users. You are building value as fast as you can for them, your laggard dependencies be damned. Where dependencies can't keep up, you solve problems yourself! You have seen the dire warnings from stagnant, slow bureaucracies. You've

Know your neighbors

Do you know your team's various stakeholders? Do they know you?

Building consensus iteratively with feedback spirals

Build consensus the agile way Wouldn’t it be better if we treated feedback like we do agile engineering projects — getting feedback early and often instead of in a huge big-bang at the final approval step?

Delegating safely and successfully

A normal fear about delegating is whoever you give it to might not know how to do it well. A bad response is just to avoid delegation! A normal fear about delegating is whoever you give it to might not know how to do it well. A bad response is just to avoid delegation! I like to hack around this by

If it isn’t scheduled, it won’t happen

I’ve had a pretty good run of writing something (internally, for Yelp) every week for a while now, averaging ~3 posts per month since…

Publish independently and publish often

I’m going to be syndicating posts off www.locallyoptimal.com, my personal blog, onto Medium In fast succession: Medium locked down distribution, I read Fred Wilson on the value of being self-sufficient, and patio11 helped me find ways to bootstrap a low traffic personal blog.

Ask the Tech Lead: How should I approach simplifying a complex system?

How do I identify what parts of my system are essential vs accidental complexity? Once identified, how do I remove accidental complexity? How do I identify what parts of my system are essential vs accidental complexity? Once identified, how do I remove accidental complexity?

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Locally Optimal

Technical thoughts from a leadership minded IC

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