The Engineering Manager
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-- Empowering ourselves to empower others.
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Stratechery by Ben Thompson
stratechery.com
On the business, strategy, and impact of technology.
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Code Yellow, Code Red
Towards the end of 2025, it seemed that we couldn’t get through a week at Provet without some kind of infrastructure degradation. Outages were piling up, they were hard to...
The right kind of AI sceptic
Read about AI opinion online and you get two camps: those who believe it will fundamentally reshape how software gets built, and those who see it as useful tooling but...
Earn your scepticism
Read about AI opinion online and you get two camps: those who believe it will fundamentally reshape how software gets built, and those who see it as useful tooling but...
Distilling leadership wisdom
This month, we’re going to explore a practical technique for learning from leaders you’ll never have access to: distilling their thinking into an AI role you can query on demand....
Who will be the senior engineers of 2035?
This month, we’re going to explore a question that is a pertinent topic right now: where are the senior engineers of the future going to come from? After years of...
Slow down to speed up
This month, we’re going to explore what might be the most counterintuitive practice in the age of AI: knowing when to slow down. Hang on, slow down? Yes, bear with...
One list to rule them all
This month, we’re going to explore one of the most powerful forcing functions available to leaders: the single prioritized list. It’s probably the most simple idea you could think of:...
One bottleneck at a time
This month, we’re going to think about our teams, departments, and organisations as systems. Specifically, we’re going to consider how we can increase throughput and output by identifying and removing...
Use it or lose it
This month, we’re going to continue exploring the mental models that Charlie Munger covered in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a compendium of 11 talks given throughout his life. The book culminates...
Invert, always invert
I recently finished Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a collection of eleven talks by Charlie Munger. When Stripe Press published a brand new edition of it with their usual beautiful type setting...
Councils of agents: group thinking with LLMs
Introduction It’s been two months since I finished a sequence of LLM-based posts which were intended to think of unique ways that you could improve your leadership skills by leaning...
The beauty of constraints
This week we are going to take a deep dive into constraints: one of the most powerful tools that you have as a leader to help your team deliver more...
Going direct
After a series of posts on LLMs, we’re returning to management fundamentals. This month, we’re building upon the cultural shift that management has experienced recently: smaller, leaner and tighter orgs....
Leadership co-processing with LLMs
Over the last few months, I’ve been writing about a number of factors that AI — specifically LLMs — are changing the way the role of management works. If you...
New advice for aspiring managers
I had a conversation with a colleague the other week who is interested in moving into management. It was during this conversation that I realized just how different my advice...
A bag of worries: tackling overwhelm with LLMs
If you’ve had periods in your leadership journey where you feel like you’re generating more to-do items than you can handle, then you’re not alone. Every day, you might add...
A weekly mind meld
Leaders can often find it hard to build deep trust and alignment with their teams, especially if those teams are quite big, or if the leader in question is quite...
LLMs: An Operator’s View
Many of you that read my articles are operators of some kind. You may run one or many teams, or even a whole company. And, even if you are not...
Should managers still code?
This month we have a mailbag question from a reader who asks: Hi James, Your newsletter “being in the details” resonated with me. I would like to ask your opinion...
Gather, decide, execute: reflecting on my daily system
Since my November article on being in the details, I’ve had a few people ask me about the system that I use in order to do so. In my first...