This week, I’m covering how misplaced delegation can ruin a company/team. Paul Graham’s post on Twitter stirred the debate on effective leadership. There’s a lot to learn. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Corporate Leadership 101 tells us that delegation is the way to scale yourself.

As you grew in your career, did you ever feel the following:

• I can’t do everything alone. I need to rely on others more

• If I get in the way too much, others will not grow and leave

I certainly have. But the question becomes, how often is the delivery not up to your expectations?

To scale up, creating a hierarchy was an obvious choice. But, the best leaders I’ve worked for were all stressed about their jobs. I couldn’t understand why.

Earlier this week, Paul Graham’s note on “Founder mode” blew up Twitter (Now X). He talked about how founders have been getting bad advice about delegation for generations. Almost killing their startups on some occasions. 

After reading this, answers to my earlier question started to become obvious. “Why all great leaders stressed most of the time?”

Today, we will talk about increasing the effectiveness of your leadership by learning from founder mode.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• Understand the difference between delegation and trusting without verification

• 3 mistakes I have made as a leader and how to avoid them

📣 Get the most viral content in 9-seconds (Collaboration)

Volv is a Snapchat-backed social news app that consolidates the most important, viral, and interesting content from around the web into 9-second stories that you can just scroll through like social media.

Users call it “TikTok for smart people” since they use Volv instead of TikTok and Instagram to discover quality content that they would’ve never read otherwise. So far, users have read 60 million stories on Volv.

Here’s a code you can use to get Volv Premium free for a month: VOLVLL

Get free 1 month Volv Premium

Before discussing the topic further today, let’s understand what Paul refers to as these two modes.

🚀 Founder mode

Founder mode represents a flat organizational structure. Even as a company gets large and requires some structure, top leaders (founders) are still involved with most delivery. There will be a delegation, but getting involved is considered more positive than micromanaging.

🗂️ Manager mode

Manager mode represents a modular organizational structure. Each module is responsible for delivering certain pieces. Leaders (founders) hire other leaders to form a hierarchy. There’s a deeper reliance on ownership and responsibility.

As Paul noted, most founders get the advice of shifting to manager mode as they scale. But the majority of them saw a downtrend in performance. The question was, “Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing?”

🛑 Why delegation doesn’t work?

Don’t get me wrong; delegation remains crucial for success. It’s just that we need to clearly understand when delegation becomes an assignment. And nobody likes assignments.

As you might know, I started my journey on my second startup stint few weeks back. My leadership journey found its way through Google, Apple and now here at the startup. I always get advice to stay out and let people do their work.

It made sense, but I was never satisfied. Sometimes, I felt that people around me didn’t share the same passion for the work. Other times, I blamed myself for not being a leader who can motivate well.

Let’s understand how or when to delegate. We will transform the “founder vs. manager mode” discussions into how they affect leadership in general.

1) Empowerment comes from within

“I will empower my team to make decisions.” It doesn’t work. I can’t empower you to do anything. A leader can only inspire and motivate their team. A motivated team feels empowered.

I have made the mistake of delegating to individuals, thinking I’m empowering them. The result was not good. I was forcing my empowerment to others. Instead, you should:

• Focus on building motivation and inspiring your team

• Align goals with what each individual cares about

• Monitor progress and get involved

Founder mode: 1 | Manager mode: 0

2) Trusting only credentials is a mistake

I have worked at some of the largest companies. I led teams at Google Apple. But that doesn’t mean anything. I might come into your organization as a leader and ruin it.

Hiring “good” people and giving them space to do their work isn’t straightforward. Most founders experienced “hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.”

My ability to lead an organization depends on how much I share the vision. This is why hiring is so difficult. Here’s what I’d recommend:

• Look at objective achievements that translate to your company

• Measure motivation continuously. Fakers will make mistakes sooner than you think

• Communicate what their credentials mean to you and what you expect

Founder mode: 2 | Manager mode: 0

3) A leader must lead

I admire leaders who did not leave me alone to do my thing. They were regularly involved in helping me get better.

Our default assumption is when a leader gets involved, it’s micromanagement. That’s bad. But, if someone isn’t delivering on their promises, is it still wrong?

Here’s what I’d say: micromanage with consent. There’s a huge difference when you say,

• ✅ “Why this wasn’t done? I want you to finish this by EOD.”

• ❌ “As we discussed, this should have been completed. What’s going on? How can I help?”

The former one comes from your typical boss, most of the time from a non-technical manager. They don’t care about the problem but try to hold you accountable.

The second example highlights involvement and a leader’s ability to solve problems independently.

Who would you respect more?

A leader is someone you want to become.

Founder mode: 3 | Manager mode: 0

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Paul’s post highlights a great point that sparked a debate in the industry. But, to me, it adds clarity to the discussion of what a good leader is. It’s neither “founder” nor “manager” mode. It’s the “leader” mode.

A good leader doesn’t get out of your way after giving you work. Trust me, I was led by such leader, and it was not fun!

A good leader,

• Help you figure out your place in the organization (by hand-holding occasionally)

• Share their wisdom and experience to save you from making the same mistakes (and allow you to make your own)

• Are not afraid of getting their hand dirty and show you the path

I have worked for great leaders, some of whom are C-suite executives at the largest companies in the world. It was not easy. I was always on my toes, but I enjoyed every bit of it.

What leadership attributes do you appreciate in your leaders?

What do you think of Paul’s distinction?

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

Still curious? Read the original post: https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Tech promotion algorithm from by

• Start influencing from day 1 from by

• Always pin your dependencies from

• How AWS lambda works from

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I’m excited to feature , Staff Engineer at Hubspot and author of Curious Soul’s Corner, a newsletter propelling your software career to the next level. He previously worked at tech giants like Amazon.

Today, he will share five tips for improving your interviewing skills. These tips will help you take control of your interview preparation journey. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Are you tired of getting endless rejections from automated systems? I started counting my rejections in the beginning, but I lost count after 1000.

Rejections are not a reflection of our ability, but it still hurts.

I’m excited to host Gourav, who will share tricks that will help you not only get more interviews but also nail them!

⭐ Main Takeaways

• 5 ways you can land more interviews and do better

• Key areas to focus on during your preparation from an interviewer’s point of view

  Not subscribed yet? Do that now, and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

Over to you, Gourav.

Hi everyone, Gourav here 👋

How I landed my first job out of college still surprises me.

More than a decade ago, on a sweltering summer day in a small town in southern Punjab, India, I attended a job placement drive at a local college.

There were 67 candidates and only five software engineering positions. The competition was fierce; we needed to be in the top 7% to make the cut.

Rumors spread that the interviewer is tired of taking interviews and probably already made his picks. 

I desperately needed the job, and being 55th in line exaggerated my nerves. Growing impatient waiting for my turn, I did something crazy. 

I sent a quick note to the interviewer, and within minutes, I was called for an interview – out of turn, at number 10.

What was in the note? 

It read:

“Sir, I’m the fifty-fifth candidate, but I have something you’ll appreciate— ‘Reliability’. If you hire me, you can count on me during the job. Please don’t decide until you’ve heard from me.”

Sometimes, you must take bold chances when the odds are against you. It’s just a negotiation. In essence, make the most of what you have at the moment.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll discuss how you can apply this mindset to your interview process and stand out from the crowd.

👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

1. Build Your Network Before You Need It

Cold messaging rarely works. The biggest mistake people make is sending desperate messages to get hired. 

Take a step back—why would someone vouch for you when they don’t know you?

Build a network that can vouch for you before you need it. This has helped me in the past. I didn’t rely on cold messages - I leaned on relationships I had built over time. The result? Four job offers in just 20 days.

Here’s how you can build and leverage your network:

• Consistently provide value. Build strong relationships with leaders by providing value in their projects and offering coding assistance or advice.

  • After Coinbase, when I searched for opportunities outside, Directors and Principal Engineers from the company connected me with startup founders, and an interview loop was set up almost instantly.

• Make small deposits of trust. Use your work as the foundation of trust. Help others genuinely in their needs and unblock them.

  • At Amazon, I helped a Senior Manager resolve a critical issue. By consistently offering value - whether advice or coding assistance - I built trust. 

  • When that same manager moved to a different company, he reached out to me with a job offer.

2. Learn from Your Interviews

Is Interview Prep holding you back? 

Smart engineers aren’t just smart at work; they’re smart about interviews, too. Instead of over-preparing or obsessing over every possible question, they dive into interviews and treat each one as a learning opportunity and break the endless loop of preparation.

Since you’re not over-prepared, failures shouldn’t discourage you. This doesn’t mean avoiding preparation altogether, but not waiting until you feel “fully prepared” - because you never will be.

Here’s how you can adopt this approach:

• Set up multiple loops to have a fallback: don’t put all your eggs in the same basket.

  • One time, I lined up five interviews within two weeks - with Google, Amazon, a mid-sized company, and two startups.

• Put companies you want at last first in the loop: This will help you practice more.

  • I set up interviews with startups first, followed by mid-tier and then Big-Tech.

• Apply feedback loop to failures: After each interview, note the questions that tripped you up. Then, practice and reapply learnings. 

  • During my SAP interview, I struggled with a question about distributed file systems. I did a deep dive into storage techniques and system design, where I struggled. Two weeks later, in another interview, I was asked to design a large-scale video streaming system. This time, I confidently handled a question.

• Negotiate for another shot. Have you felt your performance was great except for one interview? But have you tried negotiating your cool-down period? I have. 

  • After failing my first Adobe interview, I explained to the recruiter that I had learned from my mistakes. Two months later, I got another interview and landed the offer.

3. Prepare Adaptable Stories for Behavioral Interviews

Behavioral interviews are incredibly important - more than I can emphasize. As a veteran interviewer, I’ve seen candidates get selected because they stood out in behavioral interviews, even if they had technical gaps. This becomes more important at higher levels.

However, they can be tricky because every company has a different culture and methodology. Here’s how you should approach behavioral interviews:

• Tap into your network. Before interviewing with companies, connect with their employees. Use that insight to shape your answers around examples of how you collaborate across teams under pressure, making sure to highlight transparency.

• Prepare adaptable stories. Always keep 3-4 stories ready, but make them flexible. For example, in a healthcare startup interview, when asked about leading a tough project, I didn’t have a perfect match, so I adapted a story about managing an unexpected client request.

• Adapt to others’ stories. When you do not have direct experience, borrow a colleague’s story. No, it’s not dishonest - you are simply becoming adaptable and a critical thinker - skills that you would need on the job anyway.

4. Be Smart with Leetcode

It’s unfortunate that Leetcode has become a staple of coding interviews. But until this changes, if you’re aiming for Big Tech, Leetcode is unavoidable. Here’s how I approach Leetcode smarter using the EOF (Eliminate, Offset, Frame) framework:

• Eliminate: Negotiate with companies to skip Leetcode rounds altogether. Before interviewing with Apple, I negotiated to replace leetcode rounds with coding questions based on real-life examples.

• Offset: If leetcode rounds are unavoidable, negotiate a greater focus on system design. At a mid-sized company, I successfully replaced one leetcode round with a single in-depth design discussion.

• Frame: Master a small set of key patterns. The ability to recognize problems matching with the problem you have already solved is a game changer. In my Google interview, I immediately recognized a binary tree problem pattern and explained my approach using a well-practiced solution.

5. Use System Design Interviews to tell a Story

System design interviews can often feel like a black box. I’ve found that you navigate them through storytelling. Your interviewers are looking beyond your technical skills to see if you can connect and have seen relatable situations before. 

Are you the person they want to work with? That’s why focus on sharing real experiences, just be humane.

Here’s how you can handle system design interviews when unsure:

1. Steer the conversation. Guide the interviewer toward an area you’re comfortable with. Most of the time, this works. Interviewers are exploring related topics that showcase your strengths.

2. Be honest and resourceful. When you don’t know something, just say, “I don’t know, but here’s how I’d approach solving it.” This honesty builds trust and shows that you’re resourceful. Interviewers appreciate transparency and a problem-solving mindset.

3. Leverage real-world examples. Instead of focusing on a theoretical answer, pivot to a real-world problem around the topic. 

   1. For example, during my interview with Coupang, when asked to design a large-scale package delivery system, I didn’t dive straight into technical jargon. 

   2. Instead, I shared a story about how my team handled unexpected traffic spikes on a previous project. This humanized the conversation and resonated well with the interviewer.

Use storytelling to make system design interviews relatable. When you don’t know something, it’s okay to say, “I haven’t worked in that area”.

👋 Akash again!

Thanks for sharing such awesome and practical tips, Gourav! I’ve done my fair share of interviewing, and I can vouch for these tips.

If you’d like to see more from Gourav, check out his newsletter, The Curious Soul's Corner.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Interviews can be tiring. Getting a call to speak to a human interviewer is hard these days.

Once you get that call, you don’t want to mess up.

I have made mistakes, from obsessing over failure and trying to be 100% ready. These don’t work.

Do you have any interviewing secrets that helped you land a job?

Share in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Tips to create killer presentations from by

• The value of mentors from by

• Secrets of best managers from by

• Scale beyond 100M on GCP from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I’m sharing how you can become indispensable at work by making only a few changes. Tips here will help you stand out and build long-lasting connections at work. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

In this tech industry, we’re told that everyone is disposable. But when you decide to leave, you want to hear, “What can I do to make you stay?” Doesn’t that sound nice? To me, it sounds like I did something right.

When I announced that I would leave Google, I didn’t expect senior leaders to ask me to stay. Then again, when I was leaving Apple last week, the same thing happened.

I didn’t change my decision on either occasion, but felt valued. I’m connected to all of those leaders to this day. I will share a few practical tips that will help you build real connections that last beyond your job.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• How to build relations that last longer than your tenure

• 3 ways you earn the most respect of your leaders

  Not subscribed yet? Do that now, and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

  ---

🎤 Announcement: Future after leaving FAANG twice!

Last week, I shared that I had left Apple. This was my second FAANG job, and I quit. Transformers started the revolution a few years ago. Agents are on the rise. But how do we trust agents to make decisions for us? To secure AI for everyone, I’ve joined another talented founder to start our own journey.

If your organization is hesitating to connect enterprise data with AI, reach out; we can certainly help.

AI without Losing Sleep

Back to the topic, how can you separate yourself from the most?

Take it across the finish line

Skip manager: “Our director is concerned about whether we can deliver feature A on time. It was planned for delivery last quarter.”

Me: “Sorry about the delay. We have finished 90% of the work; before officially supporting it, we will perform stress testing.”

We often make the mistake of focusing too narrowly. It’s easy to lose track of all the moving pieces and leave things unfinished.

One thing we overlook is how it affects the entire organization. Have you ever delayed finishing a project for other “interesting” work? But it’s not just you who’s accountable. Your leaders are also responsible for delivering the same project to their boss.

You’d be surprised how often things are dropped on the floor at the last mile. The best way to earn your place is by delivering complete results.

If leaders don’t have to worry about delivery when you own the piece, they’ll not let you go easy.

• Be dependable: When I was the TL for Chrome’s security, my manager told me, “If our director doesn’t have to get involved, that’s a success.” He meant being responsible enough with our ownership and delivering on our promises.

  • Stay out of the negative headlines.

  • Make your leader’s life easier.

• Communicate timely: Unexpected things happen, so keeping everyone informed is important. People like surprises, but only the good ones. If a project is delayed, communicate that.

  • ❌ “We couldn’t complete OKR1 due to the dependency on team X.”

  • ✅ “Due to an unexpected dependency on team X, we might be unable to complete OKR1.”

• Draw a clear finish line: We often don’t define success criteria. It leads to confusion and unrealistic expectations. During planning and sign-offs, declare success criteria and how to measure them.

  • ❌ “Make our API server faster.”

  • ✅ “Improve the latency of our API server by 50%.”

Form your opinions

How often have you held off your opinions before a senior leader? Be honest.

I have multiple times. As I grew and observed other respected engineers, I noticed one thing. Almost everyone was opinionated. It took me a while, but I realized we are paid for our opinions.

From which library to use to what should be the next priority for an area, engineers are paid for their intellect. (Side note: that’s why ChatGPT is not taking anyone’s job anytime soon)

Don’t be afraid to question decisions even when it’s coming from higher up. Few things to keep in mind,

• Express opinions freely to unblock progress. Views that don’t provide a solution are ineffective.

  • ❌ “Investing in X is not going to help our organization.”

  • ✅ “Instead of focusing on X, we should focus on A because …”

• Form your opinions based on ground truth.

  • Views are not to support a side or ego.

• Be open to changing your opinion for the right rationale.

  • Resolve opposing opinions by listening to others.

Have others’ back

Teams and organizations are exactly like society. It works better with collaboration.

If you’re responsible for cooking food at home, would you stay hungry if you’re sick? No, your partner will accommodate.

Similarly, if a peer is having difficulty delivering, you shouldn’t use it as an excuse for missing the deadline. This also applies beyond a team’s boundary.

One of my biggest mistakes in my career was overlooking another team’s struggle. It involved deciding who’d implement a piece between our teams. Logically, it made sense for them to own, but I ignored all other factors.

Going through this experience, I learned that you get support when you’re supportive. Here are some key things to implement,

• Don’t wait to build connections till you need them.

• Foster a supportive environment and go above and beyond.

• Treat others like you want to be treated.

Words travel faster in an organization. These behaviors are more visible than you’d think. And which leader would want to lose a person like that?

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

The tech industry is relatively small. Your reputation travels with you as you move. Your connections and their endorsements make a huge difference.

I’m still in touch with my previous leaders. Some of them made starting a company possible. Leaving a job is okay; don’t leave future opportunities at the door.

Today, we explored three ways you can become indispensable at your organization. I’ve benefitted from them, and I’ve no doubt you’ll too.

To recap, practice the following,

• Take it across the finish line

  • Be dependable

    • Stay out of the negative headlines.

    • Make your leader’s life easier.

  • Communicate timely

    • ❌ “We couldn’t complete OKR1 due to the dependency on team X.”

    • ✅ “Due to an unexpected dependency on team X, we might be unable to complete OKR1.”

  • Draw a clear finish line

    • ❌ “Make our API server faster.”

    • ✅ “Improve the latency of our API server by 50%.”

• Form your opinions

  • Don’t hesitate 

    • ❌ “Investing in X is not going to help our organization.”

    • ✅ “Instead of focusing on X, we should focus on A because …”

  • Base it on ground truth

    • Views are not to support a side or ego.

  • Be open to change

    • Resolve opposing opinions by listening to others.

• Have others’ back

  • Don’t wait to build connections till you need them.

  • Foster a supportive environment and go above and beyond.

  • Treat others like you want to be treated

What is one piece of advice you’d give someone to earn the ultimate farewell gift?

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Communicate with impact from by

• Ask before you code from by

• Design better apps from by

• Start up? from by and

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I’m sharing how I repeatedly gained credibility at different levels working at Google and Apple. You will gain practical tips to apply and accelerate your growth. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

When I joined Google, I used to question why any shiny work wouldn’t happen without getting an opinion from John. The same thing happened when I joined Apple.

In your company, do you know people who get pulled into high-stakes conversations?

Exponential growth happens when you become that person.

By the time I left Google, I was getting called out to do special projects assigned by the SVP.

Today, I will share how you can build your credibility at every level and become that person.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• Strategies to gain the most credibility at each level (L3-L5)

• Practical examples that you can implement in your job today

  Not subscribed yet? Do that now, and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

🎤 Announcement: Life update

Today, I quit. I have decided to leave Apple after a short tenure of 1.2 years. You folks are among the first to know. Recently, I shared my views on when it is the right time to leave, so I want to briefly explain my rationale.

When I left my dream job at Google to join Apple, I planned to get the coveted “10-year” trophy. Life had something else planned for me, and I got an opportunity I couldn’t pass on. More on that later.

Back to today’s topic! How I built credibility once again and left.

🐣 New Grad or L3

There’s no better time to build your credibility in an organization than when you’re new. At this level, expectations are limited. Your performance is judged on your delivery.

I joined a unicorn startup as a new grad. The first six months were brutal. A “senior” engineer scrutinized everything I did. It didn’t feel great, but I understand it better now.

At the time, we had many manual processes that I went on to automate in my spare time. By the end of the next six months, I automated one engineer’s grunt work. It earned my leadership's trust, and I was rewarded with ownership of the automation division.

Here’s my three takeaways for you:

• Stay hungry: L3 engineers are full of energy. Take advantage of that and throw yourself at problems. If you can solve other’s pain points, you’ll get recognized.

  • Listen to team meetings to identify areas.

  • Ask your team leads where you can help.

• Self-nominate: Every team has many small yet impactful work. Express interest and take them up.

  • Review your team’s backlog and identify “nice to have” items.

  • Come forward when someone is looking for assistance.

• Be curious: The best way to earn trust is when you feel comfortable to ask questions.

  • Shadow a senior’s design patterns and coding practices.

  • Clarify tasks given to you and understand the context of the larger goals.

🏃‍♀️ Mid-level or L4

At this level, expectations start to grow. When I joined Google, I noticed that few individuals were involved in most decisions. I wanted to be like them; it gave me a sense of “importance” at the time.

As I was starting from zero, I was given an easy task. Even then, I struggled. Imposter syndrome started getting to me. I felt like I did not deserve the respect my fellow engineers had.

After spending some time and learning from folks across the org, I delivered my project six months early. But I didn’t stop there. I knew to get credibility, I had to do something beyond expectations.

I started collaborating with other teams and expanding my project’s scope, which led to me getting ownership. As I started delivering consistently, I became this area's “go-to” person. The next thing I knew, I was helping my teammates onboard to this project. By the time I got promoted to senior, I was already getting pulled in for different things.

If you’re in this situation, I’d suggest the following:

• Take ownership: Work with your leader to identify an area you can own. Drive the project from start to finish. The most important thing here is never to drop a thing.

  • Look for opportunities for expanding scope, e.g., “How can others benefit from this work?”.

  • Pick up anything dropped on the floor, don’t complain, and take it to the finish line.

• Assist your teammates: I got lucky because my team was expanding. If that’s not the case, expand the project and get buy-ins for more resources.

• Align with the next level: L4 is not a terminal level for most companies. You’re expected to grow into a senior engineer. Align your expectations with L5, mainly when collaborating outside your team, which will help you gain visibility.

  • Find projects to collaborate with key ICs in your organization.

  • Become an expert on a specific area for your team.

🏋️‍♀️ Senior or L5

When you’re a senior engineer, you already have an established reputation. For me, this almost cost me my credibility. It’s easy to confuse trust with power.

When I first became a tech lead, I made many mistakes. These included picking fights without trying to understand, micromanaging deliverables for my team, and more. It wasn’t long before I realized something needed to change.

My transition from a “code machine” to a “senior engineer” was painful. The two most powerful lessons were:

• Delegate: Instead of sitting on all parts of the projects, I started dividing and distributing ownership.

  • Create space for others to grow.

  • Scale yourself by delegating work and grow your impact.

    • Starting at the senior level, your output alone does not dictate your performance.

• Clear Communication: The quality of your communication determines how others perceive you.

  • Invest in mastering concise communication.

    • ❌ “The functionality of the module should be enhanced to provide increased flexibility and adaptability for the end user, with a focus on streamlining the overall workflow process and enhancing the overall user experience.”

    • ✅ “We need to improve the module so it's easier to use and can handle a wider variety of tasks, making the user's workflow smoother.”

  • Be intentional with everything you say.

    • ❌ “I think if we decide to make this change, our downstream systems might suffer.”

    • ✅ “This change increases latency by 20%, breaking service X.”

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Credibility is a currency in the industry that will take you places. No matter where you’re in your career, invest heavily in this.

When I built an image as a reliable and trustworthy individual, I was called on to run projects with the highest visibility (Sunder Pichai, in one instance).

To recap, here’s what we talked about,

• New Grad or L3

  • Stay hungry

    • Listen to team meetings to identify areas.

    • Ask your team leads where you can help.

  • Self-nominate

    • Review your team’s backlog and identify “nice to have” items.

    • Come forward when someone is looking for assistance.

  • Be curious

    • Shadow a senior’s coding practices.

    • Clarify tasks given to you and understand the context of the larger goals.

• Mid-level or L4

  • Take ownership

    • “How can others benefit from this work?”.

    • Pick up anything dropped on the floor, don’t complain, and take it to the finish line.

  • Assist your teammates

  • Align with the next level

    • Find projects to collaborate with key ICs in your organization.

    • Become an expert on a specific area for your team.

• Senior or L5

  • Delegate

    • Create space for others to grow.

    • Scale yourself by delegating work and grow your impact.

  • Clear Communication

    • Invest in mastering concise communication.

      • ❌ “The functionality of the module should be enhanced to provide increased flexibility and adaptability for the end user, with a focus on streamlining the overall workflow process and enhancing the overall user experience.”

      • ✅ “We need to improve the module so it's easier to use and can handle a wider variety of tasks, making the user's workflow smoother.”

    • Be intentional with everything you say.

      • ❌ “I think if we decide to make this change, our downstream systems might suffer.”

      • ✅ “This change increases latency by 20%, breaking service X.”

What has worked for you in building credibility in your current role?

Share them in the comments!

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Balance your team from by

• Recommendation systems with LLM from by

• Struggle of an engineering manager from by

• Jump on the latest trends from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I am sharing why the Staff level is considered a different job. Tips I share here will help you prepare for your next promotion. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

How often have you heard others say, “Staff engineer is a completely different job”?

What does that even mean? Isn’t staff the next growth level after senior?

The first time I had my “to-staff” career conversation with my manager, he said, “Staff engineering is not about being an expert senior engineer; it’s a new role”.

I left the conversation confused, asking myself, “Do I even want this role?”

If you’re in a similar situation, don’t worry. Most people looking for staff promotion go through the same thought process.

Today, we will discuss it with examples from my experience. The examples will help you plan your strategy to break the senior engineer ceiling.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• What are the differences between a Senior and a Staff Engineer?

• 3 practices that will push you for your Staff promotion.

  Not subscribed yet? Do that now, and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

🎤 Announcement: New podcast episode

I highly recommend checking out this podcast episode. I share tips and tricks to break into FAANG. We also discuss taking control of your growth by investing outside your day job.

Expectations from a Senior vs a Staff Engineer

Have you heard of the term “L5/6 scope work”? Most companies today expect their people to perform at the next level before handing out promotions. Finding appropriate projects for career growth becomes crucial.

What makes you perform at the Staff level

1) Transition from problem-solver to organizational thinker

A senior engineer is an efficient problem solver. My biggest struggle in staff transition was I wasn’t sure what was expected of me.

As a senior engineer, do you sometimes feel “What is an L6 scoped work?”.

After much trial and error, I learned the following about staff engineers:

• They aren’t told what to do

• Their focus shifts from team to organization

• They define priorities for the organization using their credibility

You can do many things to align your performance along these dimensions. Here’s what I recommend,

• Spend time speaking with leaders across the organization to establish a solid business context.

  • To the director: “What are the top three business objectives to solve over the next two years?”

  • To peer leaders: “What parts of X make your life difficult?”

• Draft a detailed plan and establish collaborative partnerships

  • Set the priorities for your organization and influence other team’s workstreams.

  • Collaborate with leaders from your surrounding teams to align on vision

  • Define a clear project plan and get buy-ins from all stakeholders

• Dedicate 20% of your time to fixing organizational problems

  • Cultural: Lead information sessions/book clubs to foster collaboration

  • Technical: Lend your expertise in solving problems beyond your immediate team.

One thing was common in most of the quick growth of staff engineers. They took advantage of the credibility they built, getting to senior levels, and influenced the organization’s future shape in multiple dimensions.

2) Master the corporate politics and get comfortable saying “no”

Engineers are wired to solve problems. Growing to a senior role requires solving as many problems as possible. Because of this, I struggled to say no to anyone.

It quickly turned into dropping things left to right. At times, I stretched my work hours to support the extra load. One of my mentors at the time said, “You need to say no more often and better”. I had no clue how.

That day, I walked away with three most valuable lessons as an engineer,

• Don’t just say no.

  • ❌ “We already have a large backlog with prioritized projects. Unfortunately, we can’t take on more at the moment.”

    • This is prone to escalation, at which point it becomes a “something” measuring contest.

  • ✅ “Our organizational priority is A (link to your Director+ OKR). This contributes more towards B. Were there any other reasons we are looking at this now?”

    • It gives them context and time to rethink their ask. Highlighting the consequences of taking this extra load can also help make a solid case for “no”.

• Understand the influence of key individuals.

  • “I briefly discussed this with Mark, and we both agree that project C can wait till we finish up A & B.”

    • Adding someone everyone respects to your rationale helps unblock the most challenging roads.

• Help out when it’s not too much.

  • The corporate world works similarly to society. Leverage plays a vital role as you move up.

    • “Doing M isn’t exactly aligned to our overarching goals, but let’s make an exception.”

Depressing? I know! Who said the world was perfect?

Staff+ engineers increasingly get involved in such conversations. Develop the skills to handle issues on your own. Leaders like those who solve conflicts without escalating every single time.

3) Grow people around you

The most underrated characteristic of staff engineers is helping others. A staff engineer is responsible for growing the business and the people, too.

If you’re a senior looking to grow to staff,

• Mentor L4s/L5s in your organization.

  • You don't get kicked out when you help others grow to replace you. You go up!

• Share your knowledge wider.

  • I’ve seen people host 30-minute knowledge sessions for new members. Recording them and building an archive can improve your organization’s onboarding.

• Lend your deep technical expertise.

  • Most influential senior engineers are called to review architecture, designs, etc. There’s no immediate benefit, but you build relationships that establish you as “rising” staff.

🗒️ Note

I apologize for missing the Friday schedule this week. Although the article was ready, I was not satisfied with the material. Going to a conference the whole week didn’t help much either. Thank you for your continued support and understanding.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Leveling in engineering is like a pyramid. The higher you go up, the less opportunity. There’s always a “luck” factor: right time, right place. 

If you practice the three things we discussed today, it will set you apart. When I was going through this transition, I was told these things, but they lacked examples that I could apply.

This article will help you grow beyond senior. To recap, here’s what we covered,

• Become organizational thinker

  • Spend time speaking with leaders across the organization to establish a solid business context.

  • Draft a detailed plan and establish collaborative partnerships

  • Dedicate 20% of your time to fixing organizational problems

• Master politics and saying no

  • Don’t just say no

  • Understand the influence of key individuals

  • Help out when it’s not too much

• Grow others around you

  • Mentor L4s/L5s in your organization

  • Share your knowledge wider

  • Lend your deep technical expertise

What are some of the blockers of growth you face,

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• How to say no from by and

• What type of SWE you want to be from by

• Benefits of mental models in SWE from by

• How to keep your good manager from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

Staying consistent is important but hard. We judge ourselves too quickly as soon as we miss even once. This week, I’m sharing five key learnings from my journey of writing a book, newsletters and short-form posts. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Who doesn’t know consistency is the key to success?

But do you struggle to stay consistent? I do. At times, I feel burnt out trying to stay consistent.

From career growth to investment growth, consistency remains central.

But life is unpredictable. Staying consistent is impossible. Then how do you succeed?

I recently wrote a book, and today, I will share my top ten learnings that will help you work around inconsistency.

Get it tomorrow

⭐ Main Takeaways

• 5 tips for staying consistent in the long run

• Traps to avoid for trading your mental health for consistency

I’m a hard worker. Consistency means the world to me. But sometimes, I compromise my mental health, trying to stay consistent. I call it “Forced Consistency”.

Does this also happen to you?

In my career, I’ve grown quickly to become a Staff Engineer at FAANG. I attribute this to the amazing people I’m surrounded by and my hard work. I don’t have above-average intelligence.

During this time, I have felt burnt out two times. One of which happened very recently. This sent me through the thought process of “What went wrong?”

The answer I found was repeated “Forced Consistency”.

Now, let’s dive in!

1) It’s okay to be inconsistent sometimes

Writing the book took me a year. Towards the end of that journey, I started writing shorter content online. Between two newsletters and a daily LinkedIn post, I’m only consistent on one.

I've been consistently inconsistent for the remaining 66% of my target. Due to personal reasons, my days are booked. Initially, I’d beat myself up for missing one day to the point writing was turning “not fun”.

Instead, you should,

• Update your plan that respects flexibility

  • I dropped one newsletter and daily LinkedIn posts from my weekly goals.

• Balance priorities to match your current load

  • I reassigned priorities, and writing daily on all three is not my target.

• Decide on a comeback date or adjust expectations

  • I’m going to start posting regularly from Aug 31, 2024.

2) Life is not a sprint

In the face of fast growth, we forget life operates at the scale of years. Judging ourselves on a daily scale doesn’t work.

After starting Leadership Letters, I started a second newsletter on “Cracking the Security Engineering Interviews”. I aim to provide practical tips to aspiring security professionals and help them break into desired roles.

After four articles, I couldn’t post another one. I asked myself the following questions, 

• “Am I still motivated by the goal?”

• “Can this wait for a few months?”

• “Am I ready for the consequences?”

Answers to all of them were “yes”. It’s important to recognize life is long. Taking a pause and pushing goals to the future isn’t always bad.

3) Never give up

When I started posting regularly on LinkedIn, my growth on the platform accelerated. But as soon as I became inconsistent, the growth stalled. At the first sign of inconsistency, you should:

• Understand

  • Metrics will be messed up, and it will take effort to come back.

• Plan

  • Put an end date to your inconsistency, don’t make it “tomorrow”.

• Execute

  • Pick up where you left it or slightly lower.

The idea of consistency is never to give up. Here’s what established writers () are saying on this topic,

Now that we have discussed how to avoid “Forced Consistency,” let’s explore a couple of lessons on how to stay consistent for longer durations.

4) Write in batches

During the book's writing, there were days when I could not write a single sentence. Yes, there was lots of writer’s block. Read more on writing tips to learn how to minimize it.

Later, in ’s LinkedIn Creator boot camp, I received a tip that will go on to formalize this experience.

The idea is simple: you can’t predict the future. So write when you’re in a flow state.

• Prepare for the future in advance

• Schedule prepared material

5) Consistency is a journey

Last thing before closing this post, I have repeatedly mistaken consistency as a goal.

Whenever I missed a day, it felt like I was missing my goal.

Do you have a gym membership? If you missed one day, does that mean you failed?

Going to the gym every day was not the goal. The goal was to stay healthy.

Accepting and developing a “bounce-back” plan is what matters. 

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

We talked about how compromising mental health to stay consistent is not the solution. Writing a book, newsletter, and short posts inconsistently taught me a few things. But this applies beyond writing. In just about everything in life.

• It’s okay to be inconsistent sometimes

  • Update your plan that respects flexibility

  • Balance priorities to match your current load

  • Decide on a comeback date or adjust expectations

• Life is not a sprint

  • Ask these questions to yourself

    • “Am I still motivated by the goal?”

    • “Can this wait for a few months?”

    • “Am I ready for the consequences?”

• Never give up

  • Understand

    • Metrics will be messed up, and it will take effort to come back.

  • Plan

    • Put an end date to your inconsistency, don’t make it “tomorrow”.

  • Execute

    • Pick up where you left it or slightly lower.

• Write in batches

• Consistency is a journey

What are your thoughts about trying too hard to be consistent? 

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Personal finance for engineers from by

• Reasons for people quitting from by

• Perfectionism kills productivity from by and

• Balance your interactions from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

Presenting ideas/results to executives is a great way to build visibility. This week, I’m sharing seven key insights I learned from 100+ executive presentations. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

What do you think when your manager says: “Bob, do you want to present our work to John (Director) next week?” 

As a mid-level software engineer at Google, it was nerve-wracking for me. As I grew in my role, I found myself in these situations more often.

Presenting to executives is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate impact and establish visibility. But, the downsides of a bad presentation are grave.

Imagine you’re going up for a promotion in the next cycle. If you fail to impress, this person has the authority to deny your promotion.

I used to suck at presentations. I’d come up with walls of text in the slides and read through them. Today, we will explore the secret formula to capture an executive’s attention. These tips will help you nail your next big presentation.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• Things executives care about in a presentation

• How to improve your slides with 7 practical steps

Why did an executive agree to listen to me? What is their role in this presentation?

You might find yourself presenting to higher-ups for one of three reasons:

• Sell an idea

  • “We should do X because …”

• Share the results

  • “In the past quarter, we achieved Y despite challenges because …”

• Responding to a crisis

  • “The root cause of O was identified to be …”

An executive is an organization's decision-maker. The quicker you can help them make that decision, the better the presentation.

Let’s explore the top seven things to improve your high-stakes presentations.

Before the presentation

1) Learn what they care about

Earlier in my career, I made the mistake of sharing too much. It took me a while to accept that higher-ups don’t care about the details.

❌ “We are using a smaller instruction-tuned model with the llama dataset to reduce the latency.”

✅ “Our new model cuts latency by 50% while maintaining the accuracy.”

Another common mistake was showcasing the wrong things. I’d say,

❌ “We should invest in securing our CI/CD because it can cost us millions of dollars in potential fines.”

✅ “Our user safety relies on securing all aspects of our software. Recent attacks demonstrated how critical CI/CD is to overall security. This aligns well with our company's overall direction, too.”

How you present your proposal determines its success. After making countless mistakes, my learnings are:

• Start with understanding the leader’s priorities

• Find ways your project helps them achieve those goals

• Prepare bold claims about the cost of not doing what you’re suggesting

2) Tell a story, not data

The most common mistake I make today is obsessing over data. We hear, “Data is binary. It proves things objectively.” But we forget that a lack of context makes data useless.

How many times have you scrambled to collect metrics for a presentation? I have.

The problem is that we build a story around data when we should add relevant data around a story.

After you understand the audience, I’d recommend focusing on a story. Your story must have:

• What problem you’re solving

• Why it’s important to solve the problem

• What will the future look like with this problem solved

The order here is not important. I have found that starting with a future state helps engage an executive’s interest. 

“If we have autonomous agents monitoring our production pipeline reliably, our developers can be 5x productive (<insert data>). But, today's models lack proper access control (<insert data>) to deploy them efficiently.”

To learn more about the effective usage of data to influence, read this excellent post from Jordan.

3) Practice with your team/lead

It’s okay to be nervous. Even after reporting to executives, I get anxious all the time.

The fact that this person decides career progression gives them a sense of authority over us.

Do you feel more confident presenting on a familiar topic than an unknown one?

Confidence builds up as you prepare. I’ve noticed a significant difference in my messaging when I practice more.

Practice at least two times before a big presentation:

• Once only with your manager

• Once with the team or senior folks in your team

Set the expectations for these trial runs,

• Ask them to be critical

• Get feedback on the core message

• Brainstorm potential questions and responses

During the presentation

4) Start by grabbing attention

Executives are busy people. They are sitting in meetings all day.

At first, my presentations sounded like,

“Hi, my name is Akash. I work with X on the Y team. Today, I’m going to talk about…”

It’s a straightforward introduction, but something about this wasn’t right.

As I gained more experience, I understood how important keeping an audience's attention is.

I realized this: “Words, when said and articulated in the right way, can change someone’s mind.”

For that, I need the decision-makers to pay attention.

I’ve found success in spicing up the beginning. Some tactics include:

• Start with the ask

  • “Hi, my name is Akash. I’m going to convince you why we should invest in securing the build pipeline.”

• Present the pending decision

  • “Hi, my name is Akash. Today, I’m hoping to reach an agreement on our strategy for down-trending user engagement.”

• Tell a story they could relate to

  • “Hi, my name is Akash. Today, I will walk you through a proposal to reduce infra failure, which has been the biggest complaint from our partner organizations.”

You can get their attention if they think your proposal aligns with the overall direction. It solves a problem they are hearing about.

My recommendation would be to come up with your set of opening lines. You can use these examples as a template.

5) Don’t hold back your opinions

Do you get afraid of sharing your opinion when someone higher up disagrees?

Even the slightest push made me awkward.

Questions that would immediately pop into my head:

• “Do they not like the idea? Is it flawed?”

• “What if I push back and I come across as cocky?”

• “Am I going to offend them if I oppose them on this forum?”

It took me countless encounters to understand executives value expert opinions.

You’re presenting to higher-ups because your opinion matters. These presentations are the best place to increase your sphere of influence and credibility.

After the presentation

6) Don’t bullshit

One unique thing about executive presentations is there are a lot of questions. And they can come in at any time.

Sometimes, it’s hard to prepare for them. There will be questions that will catch you off-guard.

It’s common when you’re unsure how to answer a question. The mantra is to “never bullshit”. In case you’re not sure how to respond,

• Understand the question to gather information.

  • “You’re concerned about downstream impact because X, did I understand it correctly?”

• Communicate what you think, and you’ll get back to them.

  • “We haven’t yet collaborated with team T. Let me get back to you on that.”

• Take help from other people in the room (my manager has been a savior multiple times).

  • “I know John was having conversations around this. John, do you have anything to add?”

It’s okay to say you don’t know. In fact, there wasn’t a single high-stakes presentation where I had all the answers.

7) Make it easy to decide

More often than not, you’ll be presenting to an executive to get some decision.

All the most liked ones have one thing in common: they make it easy for the leaders to decide.

A few strategies that I’ve found helpful are as follows,

• Present alternatives

  • “We have considered trying x, y, and z. They don’t work because…”

• Include individual deep dives (handouts)

  • “You can refer to the sheet in front of you for in-depth explanations.”

• Send a summary after the meeting with the decision bit

  • “We talked about funding project X because …”

    Not subscribed yet? Do that now and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Presenting to executives can be scary. Leaders have a significant say in your career trajectory. But, if used to your advantage, you expand your influence and build credibility. It’s important to treat this as an opportunity. Always be selling! Today, we talked about 7 steps to nail your next big presentation!

• Learn what they care about

  • Understand the leader’s priorities

  • How your project helps them

  • Explain the cost of not doing it

• Tell a story, not data

  • Don’t build a story around data

  • Add relevant data around your story

• Practice with your team/lead

  • Ask them to be critical

  • Get feedback on the core message

  • Brainstorm potential questions and responses

• Start by grabbing attention

  • Start with the ask

  • Present the pending decision

  • Tell a story they could relate to

• Don’t hold back your opinion

  • Your opinion matters

• Don’t bullshit

  • Understand the question

  • Communicate your thinking

  • Take help from other people

• Make it easy to decide

  • Present alternatives

  • Include individual deep dives (handouts)

  • Send a summary after the meeting with the decision bit

What has been your top learning from a recent high-stakes presentation?

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• How to communicate clearly from by and

• Deploy your AWS SQS Queue from by

• Product or an infra team from by

• Safe deployment practices from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I’m sharing three lessons I learned that can help you boost your team’s performance. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Engineering leaders are always looking to make their workforce efficient.

Whether you’re a project lead, tech lead, or engineering manager, you want the optimal output.

In recent economic turbulence, “getting the most out of people” has become necessary.

But is it the right goal?

When I started on the leadership path, I wanted everyone to feel as energized as I did. My goal was to extract every bit of output from the people around me. It took me a while to realize this was not the right question.

Instead, a leader aims to create an environment where people work at their best.

Despite the misleading title, we will explore three ways you can help your team become more productive.

Let’s begin!

⭐ Main Takeaways

• Practical ways to boost your team’s productivity

• Mindset shift from getting the most out to supporting people to do their best work

Let’s jump right into it!

🎁 Giveaway

“The cybersecurity issues we're going to face with advanced AI are eye-wateringly bad.”

- Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI).

Check out my book on Defense in Depth. If you’re a software engineer/leader interested in building secure products or a security enthusiast, this can be your security companion.

I’m giving away 3 signed copies of my book to interested readers. To enter, share why security is central to modern software development. You can also order it directly on Amazon.

Pre-order on Amazon

🫂 1) Foster psychological safety

Most people depend on jobs for their livelihood. When people fear losing their jobs, work quality inevitably decreases.

The importance of people’s ability to feel safe in their jobs is highly undervalued.

The most common mistake in my experience has been mistaking it for “job safety”. People feel unsafe at work when

• They are judged/schooled in front of others.

  • “You should’ve completed this last quarter. Can you deliver by EOD?”

  • “I’ve explained this system before. You should know this by now.”

• Leadership is unapproachable, unsupportive, or biased.

  • “I will take this other meeting and skip the 1:1 today.”

  • “Project A is important. I will give it to John.”

• Past events or negative experiences make it hard to trust the leaders.

  • “I’m equally shocked by the mass layoffs; I will avoid checking in with the team.”

  • “I will avoid sharing the bad news and let them find out themselves.”

A safe environment allows people to bring their whole selves and productivity skyrockets. Three simple changes that I’ve learned over the years,

• Celebrate publicly and criticize in private.

  • In public: “John, your attention to detail on project X saved us a quarter.”

  • In private: “John, there are some concerns about your delivery velocity.”

• Prioritize your team equally

• Don’t shy away from awkward conversations

  • “Layoffs are difficult, and I’m equally shocked as you are. Here’s what I know: x, y, z.”

  • “John, your promotion packet was not approved this time. Here is the feedback we got.”

Your team will feel safe when they see you on their side. That’s when you’ll see a self-driven boost in performance.

🏖️ 2) Don’t always prioritize work

On the first day back after a health crisis, a manager says, 

“Project X is already outside the expected deadline. Can you make sure we complete it this week?”

Did it ever happen to you? It has happened to me.

In the era of high growth, everybody is expected to go above and beyond. I’ve had jobs where I gave it my all. But, when leaders have zero respect for well-being, they get the bare minimum.

When leaders put unnecessary pressure on delivery, they lose the people's confidence.

Teammate: “I’m going to step out for a doctor’s appointment and will be unavailable.”

Manager: “Can you ensure you complete your work before you go?”

It helps no one. Next time, they’d make excuses: “Sorry, I was debugging this complex bug and lost track of time.”. 

Instead, when you:

• Build trust: “Thanks for letting me know. Don’t worry; we will be fine. It’d be great if we don’t push the deadline. Do you think we need to adjust anything?”

• Show care: “I hope it’s nothing serious. Please take care of yourself first.”

• Delegate: “I don’t care when you work, where you work from, as long as you produce consistent output.”

It humanizes the job. Life is unpredictable, and it’s a leader’s responsibility to prioritize people over work.

🛡️ 3)  Be your team’s advocate

One thing your team expects from you is to have their back.

I used to think this was obvious. Coming from a sports background, I knew leaders are supposed to take responsibility when things go south. Until this happened to me:

“Adam (Director) wants to speak with you. We were discussing project X, which got delayed.”

I felt betrayed in many ways. The reason was much more than me being late on my promises.

Unnecessary distractions create stress. It’s not ideal for peak performance. My strategy has been to:

• Provide air cover: Take responsibility and defend your team when things go wrong. This ensures mistakes are learning opportunities, not blame-filled events.

• Push back: Resist unreasonable expectations or decisions from higher-ups that would harm the team's well-being or productivity.

• Champion resources: Whether it's budget for a new tool, training for skill development, or additional team members, actively fight for what the team needs to succeed.

When you’re seen on your team’s side, you create an environment where people are invested. Performance automatically follows.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

How to get the most out of people is the wrong question to ask. Instead, when leaders focus on creating an environment where people can work at their best, performance follows.

Today, we explored three simple strategies to make your team more engaged.

• Foster psychological safety

  • Celebrate publicly and criticize in private.

  • Prioritize your team equally

  • Don’t shy away from awkward conversations

• Don’t always prioritize work

  • Build trust

  • Show care

  • Delegate

• Be your team’s advocate

  • Provide air cover

  • Push back

  • Champion resources

What strategies have you implemented as a leader to create a thriving environment?

Share them in the comments!

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Must read inspiring story from by and

• Design your productive day from by

• Companies and secrets from by

• Meta’s 10-9s consistency from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

Writing is a crucial part of engineering. From design documents to product roadmaps, we spend significant time writing. This week, I’m sharing my strategies for dealing with writer’s block. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Countless times, I have sat at my desk for two hours, struggling to write a single word.

Then, when I’m in my flow state, I write smoothly.

Does it ever happen to you?

An engineer’s relationship with writing is complicated.

I haven’t met a single engineer who loves writing. Be it design documents, user guides, or announcements.

However, every single one of them agrees on its importance.

Depending on your career stage, you will spend 30-60% of your time writing documents. For the last five years, I’ve spent more time writing than coding. With that, reducing moments of struggle became crucial.

Today, we will explore tricks I use to turn the blank page that will make your writing more efficient.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• How to deal with writer’s block

• Proven tips that you can apply today and improve your writing efficiency

Let’s jump right into it!

5 Strategies to get out of “Writer’s Block”

🏁 1) Just start writing

Does your motivation tank as soon as you sit down to write?

You might have had a productive day solving exciting problems. But, when you decide to write a design document, you find yourself distracted. This happens to me all the time. I’d sit still, thinking about all sorts of things, but struggle to write a single word.

Over the years, I’ve found a few reasons,

• Writing is often not the most attractive work for us. I’ve experienced “procrastination” rather than “creative block”. When I start writing, I think about all the other cool stuff I could do.

  • “Should I just finish the cool feature X?”

  • “Is it the best usage of my time right now?”

• I don’t have a clear picture of the content when I write, especially recently with newsletters, but this is equally valid for roadmaps or design documents.

  • “What is the one-line takeaway from this content?”

  • “How are readers benefitting from this?”

Questions like these make writing more problematic than it has to be. Some practices that help me deal with these,

• Break down the task. I started dedicating the first five minutes to creating a structure.

  • Templates are handy

  •  Writing down the headings and main takeaways

• Begin with the background. Sometimes, I struggle with writing the main content because it demands more thinking. Starting with the background section helps me build the flow.

• Set smaller goals. A typical document in your job is 3-10 pages long, which I find discouraging. One section at a time keeps this much attainable.

I made the mistake of focusing on the value proposition at the beginning. This is not only slow but also blocks my thoughts from flowing naturally. I’ve benefitted from simply starting, sometimes with the most obvious sections.

🔄 2) Write a shitty first draft

I want my writing to be perfect - to capture all my thoughts concisely and deliver the right message. The problem is that I expect this from my first draft, which takes forever.

Do you feel the same way?

Recently, I wrote a book (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8KV6N6S). It’s a long-form text, and my fear of writing badly made it more challenging. I forgot that the first draft isn’t meant for the readers. It’s an opportunity to capture ideas. Tricks that helped me deal with this were the following,

• Set realistic expectations. I’m an avid reader. Over the years, I’ve formed opinions on materials I like. Comparing myself with professional writers doesn’t help me get my job done.

• The first draft is a starting point. I started using it to capture raw thoughts, which changed how quickly I could prepare unstructured content.

• Writing is iterative. Once I note down all the ideas, organizing them to tell a story gets easier.

Start using your first draft as a collection of ideas. If you let your mind run free, you’ll have better content.

🔕 3) Manage your distractions

How often have you settled down to write, only to get a notification? Now you’re back to zero.

I get stuck in this endless loop of distractions and calming my mind down. The next thing I know, it’s getting late.

Focus is vital for everything we do. But writing is unique. Encountering a blank state is more common when you write. Your creative mind works best when the rest of it is at rest. My strategy has been,

• Turn off notifications. Before I enter my writing space, switching off as many distractions as possible is provably helpful. Close all those tabs, declutter your desk and activate DND on your phone.

• Try a new spot. Sometimes, when I find myself in those loops, changing my spot helps. Some days, when my office space is noisy, taking a walk in the park and dropping voice notes is an effective way to gather ideas.

• Find the right time. I’m naturally more focused in the morning. I have noticed a significant improvement when I schedule my writing in the morning.

Getting stuck while writing is expected. The urge to take care of one more message will never go away. If you observe, you can find the right environment to unlock smooth writing.

☎️ 4) Talk it out

Have you heard of “Rubber duck debugging”? Giving a problem voice sometimes helps solve the problem.

I’ve found it helpful in writing too. Saying it out loud can clarify your thoughts.

My three-step process:

1. Write freely on a notepad: To avoid those annoying red underlines and suggestions; I like to write on my notepad. I’d set a timer for ten minutes and brain-dump everything on paper. These are not complete sentences.

2. Read the mess: The next step is to read it to myself. As I hear myself, my thoughts get clarified. You can use this time to identify missing context or examples.

3. Build a mindmap: At this phase, you can visualize your notes and find connections between pieces. The connections are what make your writing a complete story.

Sometimes, we get lost in the complex web of thoughts. Writing feels like expressing your feelings if you can organize and understand them better.

✏️ 5) Don’t edit as you go

The last tip of the day: please don’t edit when writing.

I fell for this so many times and wasted whole days.

Do you ever feel, “I don’t like this sentence, let me restructure it.” or “I’m making grammatical mistakes, let’s fix those.”.

Editing is an integral part of writing. But it doesn’t have to coexist, as you write. The most essential thing in the beginning is to present your original thoughts.

Don't aim for the perfect first draft. Focus on getting ideas down, then refine them later.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Like it or not, writing will stay at the core of your success. Over the past decade, I have written:

• Research papers,

• Design documents,

• Roadmaps,

• Product announcements,

• Newsletters,

• Short posts,

• And a book.

I couldn’t avoid writer’s block in any of them. Today, I shared tricks I accumulated over the years that will help you write faster. We explored five strategies,

• Just start writing

  • Breaking down the task

  • Beginning with the background

  • Setting smaller goals

• Write a shitty first draft

  • Setting realistic expectations

  • The first draft is a starting point

  • Writing is iterative

• Manage your distractions

  • Turning off notifications

  • Trying a new spot

  • Finding the right time

• Talk it out

  • Writing freely on a notepad

  • Reading the mess

  • Building a mindmap

• Don’t edit as you go

  • Don't aim for the perfect first draft

  • Focus on getting ideas down

  • Refine them later

What has been your most annoying experience with writer’s block? How did you cope with it?

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• 3 essential tips for managing up from by

• 5 dysfunctions to be aware of from by

• Building software with pair programming from by

• How to prioritize effectively from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I’m sharing one common mistake that might block your growth beyond Tech Lead. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

When I first became a TL ~5 years ago, I liked solving problems for others. I thought that was my job.

Do you work with a Tech Lead who’s

• Constantly telling you what to do and how to do it?

• Always jump into technical details when you ask a simple question.

• Giving you instructions to follow and focusing on what they want out of the project?

I used to be that guy. If someone reached out to me for a simple discussion, I’d dig deep and create a recipe for them to follow and solve their problems. I was pleased with my involvement. I was a solution-oriented, hands-on leader. But, I didn’t realize I was blocking growth for individuals working with me.

I was telling people exactly how to do things. When I got feedback, it was surprising but made complete sense. I made three simple changes to improve my leadership.

Today, I will share my mistakes and lessons learned so you can avoid making them yourself.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• Mistakes I made as a solution-oriented Tech Lead

• How you can avoid making these mistakes by following three simple changes

  Not subscribed yet? Do that now and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

🎙️ Announcement

I highly recommend checking out this book. It’s filled with my experience protecting billions of users on the internet and my learnings from working on some of the best security teams, including Google and Apple. If you’re a software engineer interested in building secure products or a security enthusiast, this can be your complete companion. It’s now available for pre-order on Amazon!

Pre-order on Amazon

🗣️ How I Led Before

Imagine you’re my peer, and you come to me with,

“Hey Akash, my package wouldn’t build. Have you seen this error X before?”

My thoughts immediately,

• I don’t want to delay the project

• I know exactly where this is coming from

• Let me teach them how to debug in a coworking session

To avoid delay, I solved the problem for them.

It helped us move past the issue. But my handholding robbed them of the chance to learn.

I continued making this mistake until a peer shared harsh feedback, “If you don’t let people figure out on their own, you’re blocking their growth”.

This feedback hurt a little at the time because it questioned my ability to do my job. But this single piece of nudge brought the most impactful change.

Enough with the context. Let’s explore what I did and how you can avoid this mistake.

👂 3 ways I avoid dictating now

When we start thinking only about solutions, we tend to dictate to others. This happened to me fairly recently; the role was reversed this time. I was on the receiving end.

The experience closed the loop for me. So today, I am sharing three simple changes I made.

💬 1) Asking open-ended questions

Teammate: “The filter we designed is hitting the system memory limit with an OOM error.”

❌ TL: “Let’s do A, B, and C.” or “I will take a look and send a PR.”

✅ TL: “What options have you considered?” or “How would you approach this?”

Going to the second approach took some time, but it has the following benefits,

• Encourages team members to think critically and come up with solutions

• Helps you uncover the root of the problem

• Builds trust and creates a safe space for your team to learn and grow

🤐 2) Resisting the urge to jump in

Our natural instinct is to fix problems quickly, especially in time-sensitive subjects. Let’s try a different example. Imagine you’re sitting in a weekly status meeting, and a teammate is giving an update on their work.

Teammate: “I have deployed the services but am slightly concerned about race conditions. I will focus on load testing this week.”

❌ TL: “The way I architected the system, I’m not about race condition. I want you to work on X instead.”

✅ TL: “Interesting, let me know what you find. We have another important thing that can use your help. Consider time-boxing your efforts on the tests.”

This is based on real events. There are multiple problems with the first response here. We will take a look at why the second one is better,

• Builds confidence for your team members

• Creates space for deeper thinking and innovative solutions

• Develops leadership skills and helps them step up to take ownership

📚 3) Offering guidance, not answers

Even when asked a question, your team is looking for validation. Offer frameworks, resources, or alternative perspectives to help them find their own answers. This time, we will take an example of designing a system. Your team is designing a data-intensive application, and you’re reviewing the choice of database section.

❌ TL: “We should use Google Firestore. It supports high read volume, and indexing is great.”

✅ TL: “Let’s try to come up with our requirements and compare different options. You can benefit from reading this white paper: <link>”

The first response takes the power of collaboration from the team. Quick fixes like these are not scalable. Some benefits of guidance include,

• Builds long-term competence

• Promotes autonomy within the team

• Takes advantage of a team’s diverse thinking

  Not subscribed yet? Do that now and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

  ---

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

The problem of dictating what and how is wider than new TLs. I’ve worked with a seasoned TL (10+ years as a TL) who had this problem. Things got better after giving the feedback I received earlier in my career.

On the other hand, it’s important to understand that speed matters a lot in real life. We often feel that if I can solve this problem in 5 minutes, let’s just do that. But those minutes add up, and it doesn’t scale.

Another side effect of this behavior is losing talented engineers. If a TL is not creating opportunities for others to grow, they will quickly lose team confidence. You can avoid making the mistakes I made by,

• Asking open-ended questions

  • Encourages critical thinking

  • Helps understand the underlying problem

  • Builds trust and creates a safe space

• Resisting the urge to jump in

  • Builds confidence

  • Creates space for innovative solutions

  • Develops leadership skills 

• Offering guidance, not answers

  • Creates a sustainable environment

  • Promotes autonomy

  • Includes everyone in decision-making

What has been your go-to strategy for fighting this instinct as a leader?

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Index information for growth from by

• Euro tech jobs from by

• Why you should avoid heroism in engineering from by

• Machine learning interviews from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I’m sharing how you can decide if it’s the right time to change your job. I have had four jobs, and every time, I switched for a different reason. We will explore how you can plan your career in a way that serves you. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

How many times do you question your decision to quit?

Do you feel:

• Am I changing jobs too soon?

• How will my new manager be?

• What if the new company is much worse?

Broadly, I divide quitting into two categories,

1. Happy quit

2. Rage quit

The first is when you start feeling your growth has stalled and want new challenges. The other is when you can’t stand working in your current team.

I’ve had a job where I felt disconnected the first day. The manager seemed a completely different person. And I felt, what the hell am I going to do now? (read questions to ask your manager to avoid this)

Most recently, I’ve left my job at Google because I felt content. All I could hear in my head was:

It is much more nuanced than that. Today, we will explore how you can quit more confidently.

🎤 Announcement: New podcast episode

I highly recommend checking out this podcast episode. I share tips and tricks to accelerate your growth. We talk about taking control of your growth journey by asking specific questions.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• Balance quitting at the first sign of distress with misplaced loyalty

• Questions to self-evaluate your situation

😊 Happy Quitting

When we start a new job, we all want to get comfortable. We want to be:

• Part of the team

• Visibly contributing to larger goals

• Encouraged by personal development scope

I had all of these things when I decided to quit Google. My work had the highest visibility I could dream of, my team was no short of extraordinary, and my entire management chain trusted me. But why did I quit? I get this question a lot.

After I announced my intention to leave, I had a career conversation with my VP. We talked about:

• How comfortable I felt in my role, and how used to I got with the culture

• How my work was making my thought process unidirectional

• My motivation to try out something different in the AI space, particularly

You don’t want to get too comfortable if you want to grow. I struggled to understand what being “too comfortable” meant. Now, I have more clarity. Try asking yourself these questions:

• “What are three new things I learned over the last 6/12 months?”

  • Learning new things is the only way to grow.

• “Do I feel confident about this/next quarter’s goals/ambitions?”

  • You’re looking for a “no” or a soft “yes”; a definite yes indicates work isn’t challenging enough.

• “Is my current work aligned with the vision I had for myself?”

  • For me, this was an easy “no”. I wanted to work on securing AI.

Ultimately, leaving a job is okay, even when everything’s going great. Just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Don’t question your loyalty because you want to explore something new.

😠 Rage Quitting

Not everyone is happy in their current role. Are you struggling to stay afloat? I certainly was on multiple occasions.

🚸 Disclaimer: “Rage” is a strong word, but it means “unhappy” in this post.

Common reasons why people feel a strong desire to quit in such environments include,

• Toxic team/manager

• Insufficient growth

• Lack of vision

Imagine walking into your job the first day and feeling “cheated”. The job that was sold to you may be different from reality. I have had this happen to me twice. As someone who doesn’t like giving up, I’d not have it.

A few things were going through my mind,

• I am judging too quickly, and I’m wrong.

• What would the world think if I were to quit in a year?

• What can I do to turn this around? Maybe it’s a good opportunity?

Switching jobs too quickly is seen as a “red flag” in interviews. We often overlook people with shorter tenure to avoid hiring the wrong person. The true story behind the tenure usually goes unexplored.

This forces you to stay at a job where you’re unhappy for longer. We can’t change the hiring practices, but we can change how we approach this problem. I’ve benefitted by

• Giving myself a timeline (usually six months to a year) to avoid kneejerk reactions

  • But coming back to make the decision at the end of the period

• Sharing my concerns and struggles with an external mentor

  • This can be your previous coworkers, managers, etc.

• Solving the problems by working with my new leaders

  • It’s tricky as a new employee. But, surfacing your concerns early can be mutually beneficial.

Leaving a new job is always tricky and causes anxiety. Always prioritize your career and well-being. A bad environment affects not only your career growth but your mental health.

🎁 Bonus: “Once in a Lifetime Opportunity” Quitting

Beyond happy and unhappy scenarios, there are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

There will be moments of opportunity in your career. Regardless of how happy or sad you are in your current position, you must seize them. It’s also hard to create a general framework because it’s personal. 

The key is to be self-aware. For example, if I wait for an offer from Amazon to lead their AWS business, I’ll wait forever.

Here’s how I determine whether it’s an offer I can’t refuse,

• It has the right mixture of challenge, risk, and security

• It takes my career to the next level

  • ✅ Lead a large division (>100 people) in Fortune-5 companies

  • ✅ Founding member for an early-stage startup aligned with my vision

  • ❌ Going from Staff to Principal (those are not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me)

• The upside is more than 100X. If it works, I will never have to work for money again

Define your criteria now. Don’t hold off and be conservative; be reasonably ambitious.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

You’re hurting your career if you’re taking too long to quit. It is important to have a clear understanding of what your current role offers and how it’s aligned with your aspirations. Today, we covered three scenarios,

• Happy quitting

  • “What are three new things I learned over the last 6/12 months?”

  • “Do I feel confident about this/next quarter’s goals/ambitions?”

  • “Is my current work aligned with the vision I had for myself?”

• Rage quitting

  • Don’t react; set a timeline (usually six months to a year) to avoid kneejerk reactions

  • Try to solve the problems by working with your new leaders

  • Share your concerns and struggles with an external mentor

• Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

  • Create a personal, objective criteria to evaluate

  • Dream big, be ambitious, setting the standard

  • Never pass on; it’s rare

Let’s hear your stories of quitting.

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Tips to deal with salary reviews from by and

• Uber tech stack from by

• Do you need certifications from by

• Tips to get promoted from by and

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week, I’m sharing how working at a big tech might just be what you need. In the evergreen debate on startups or big tech, I will talk about my experience. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Startups provide you an opportunity to own multiple big pieces to land impact. Big Tech engineers get told they’re one of a hundred thousand employees.

Another common phrase is, “The process overhead slows down your growth at large companies”.

Do you grow less as a Big Tech engineer?

These might make you question why Big Techs are still relevant.

The Internet is predominantly filled with articles belittling Big Tech. Today, I’m debunking common myths. Big Tech is not all bad.

I will balance the scale to help you choose startups or large tech.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• Big Tech is not slow, nor all bad

• 3 reasons why Big Tech might be the best fit for you

  ---

🥊 Startups over Big Techs?

Over the past decade, I have worked at companies ranging in size from 5 to 200K. Before joining Big Tech, I worked at a couple of startups. Given a chance today, I’d not trade any of them. Each place had different things to teach me.

However, my growth accelerated when I joined Google. (In a collaboration article with , I shared my growth story at Google. )

It's natural to feel insignificant when you enter a workforce of over one hundred thousand people. This feeling is real, but it gets blown out of proportion on social media.

Have you heard any of the following about Big Tech engineers:

• “You are just a small fish in a big pond.”

• “Your contributions are insignificant to the business.”

• “You are too far away from the real world, lacking purpose.”

I don’t agree with a single one of them. In startups, it’s likely you are friends with the CEO; lack of that doesn’t mean your contributions don’t impact the business. Let’s look at some metrics,

That’s almost a Series A startup according to the Q4 2022 US startup's median valuation just by yourself. I will debunk three myths about growth at Big Techs, backed by my experience.

1) Limited Impact

When I was at Chrome, more than 3 billion users used our software. My work touched every single one of them. Does having an impact equate to the number of projects? I don’t think so.

Let’s focus on something I’ve worked on at Google.

“SLSA is a security framework, a checklist of standards and controls to prevent tampering, improve integrity, and secure packages and infrastructure.”

I was one of the early developers who built SLSA. Today, it’s an industry-leading standard that led to the launches of 10+ successful startups.

Big Tech can provide you with the platform to change the world.

2) Slow Development

In recent days, many of us have compared Google with Open AI. But the core technology, “Transformer” was developed at Google in 2017. Getting to market is a business decision; most of the time, it is orthogonal to development.

Another example of this was my interactions with Amazon. Their customer obsession isn’t an unknown fact. We had a use case for supporting a custom pre-signed URL schema in S3. Our account manager worked with the team and released this feature within two weeks.

Big Techs give you more opportunity to “rest and vest”. But, slow development is universal. Often, it’s an individual choice.

3) Reduced Learning

One of the common questions that I get is, “What do you do besides maintaining? Aren’t all systems already exist in Big Tech?”

It’s true in many cases. Systems exist. But learning isn’t limited to building systems from the ground up. At large companies, you’ll be

• Serving a billion vs. a million users

• Optimizing a system from 99.9 to 99.99+

• Learning from the brightest minds about architecture

Ultimately, learning depends on the individual. Every environment has something to teach.

🤔 What should you choose?

Choosing between startups and large tech companies can be confusing. Each environment exposes you to different challenges. It comes down to:

1. What do you want from your career?

2. Where are you in your life?

3. What are your interests?

Keeping aside financial aspects, Big Tech is a good fit if you:

• Enjoy building systems at a planetary scale

• Want to build deep expertise in a specific area to 

• Prefer structured learning and development opportunities

If I were to redo my career, I’d start it in a Big Tech company. Large companies can provide closer supervision, and their processes can organize your thinking. You get exposed to the scale and challenging work and build a strong network. This is why you might see many startups founded by Big Tech engineers.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Startups or Big Techs is a forever debate. Ultimately, you should never join a company for its status or brand. So far, we’ve talked about the advantages of large companies. Some of these can apply to startups as well.

A career is a personal journey; what has worked for you in your career?

Share in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• 100+ Free resources from by and

• Practical BCrypt from by

• Uber’s insane scale with data from by

• How to consume content from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

Knowing when to stop optimizing separates senior engineers from the rest. This week, I’m sharing practical lessons I learned by making mistakes. They will help you grow beyond Senior. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

When designing a system, do you worry about how long it will stay relevant?

Are you spending weeks optimizing for future scale?

I used to get attached to the lifetime of systems I designed to measure my software engineering quality.

As I tied my success to “no bugs” and “supports insane scale”, I spent endless hours optimizing. The immediate consequence became longer development time. For seemingly simple components, I’d spend weeks on design.

It’s important to consider future issues when designing a system. You don’t want to redesign from scratch every year. But, finding the balance separated me from most senior engineers around me.

After making countless mistakes, I share what I have learned to decide when to stop. You can apply this to your projects. Using these tips, you can grow as a senior engineer.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• How to avoid building software for entirely imaginary scenarios

• Knowing when to spend more time on optimization

• Being aware of premature optimization in code or design reviews

🤯 Learnings from Over-Engineering

In 2020, I was working on securing Chrome builds. The problem was exciting and applied to many other Google products. At my level, having an impact outside my organization was beneficial. I started speaking with several teams to understand their problems.

I was trying to solve this issue across the company. What I didn’t anticipate was that this,

• The solution needs to work across environments

• Made the problem unnecessarily complex and difficult

• Invited opinions from a developer group of >5000 engineers

The intention behind this was efficiency. Solving a common problem together is excellent. But I was spending too much time on flexibility. I’d spend time,

• Optimizing our systems for latency beyond Chrome’s requirements

• Abstracting Chrome concepts from the core to make the framework flexible

• Developing something that is completely outside what we needed for our use case

All this time, my goal was to deliver it for Chrome. A design document would take more than a quarter to review. After chatting with leadership teams and observing the slow progress, we decided to focus on the immediate problem. We had flexibility in the background, but we decided to prioritize Chrome.

My situation wasn’t unique. As I’ve mentored others over the years, many struggle with this. You can avoid optimizing your systems prematurely by,

• Separating “wants” from “needs”. When you write your design, clearly separate “must” and “good to have” requirements.

• Optimizing the right things. Start by evaluating your systems objectively. I have made the mistake of guessing areas to improve. If you focus on optimizing 20% of your code that contributes to 80% of performance, your efforts will be worth it.

• Keep it simple. Elegant solutions are simple. Keeping this in mind will help you pass on over-engineering.

🩹 Learnings from Under-Engineering

Do you feel the speed and quality of engineering work against each other?

Many times, we find ourselves against unrealistic deadlines. We compromise on the solution to get something out the door. I was in a similar situation in 2022. My goal was to design a system for physical machines, and I did just that. However, while the remaining 60% of the fleet was in the cloud, my solution wouldn’t work.

After a couple of quarters, the assumption that “we need a solution only for physical machines” wasn’t true. When I returned to the board, I realized we needed to start from scratch. For context, the scale changed from 10K to 100K (QPS).

Scalability and future-proofing your designs are essential. Otherwise, we will find ourselves working on the same problem for longer. In this case, I ignored an immediate future need that cost me two quarters. It wasn’t the only time. I’ve made this mistake many times, but you don’t have to,

• Navigate “low-hanging fruits” carefully. Quick wins are attractive and sometimes helpful. But, focusing on them is a sign of under-engineering.

• Design, get feedback, and develop. Don’t skip to implementation. Sometimes, reviews take longer, which might make us avoid them. Don’t compromise quality for speed.

• Anticipate the next version of requirements. Focusing on the immediate need is critical, but also think about the next version. It will help you design systems with scalability in mind.

⚖️ Balancing the Scale When Working With Others

The problem of overengineering doesn’t apply to our work. It also affects how we work with others. We need to be careful when reviewing others' code and design.

Those endless threads on unimportant things on a pull request or design review aren’t helping anybody.

Neither of these approaches is the right one. As a senior engineer, I always used to nitpick, thinking it was my responsibility as a mentor. I’d look for potential future problems. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was going a bit too far.

I learned to,

• Evaluate the value of feedback. Before sharing my opinions, writing down the “why” made a huge difference.

  • “Does this design support use case X? It’s going to be important soon”

  • “Caching at the request level is going to be crucial; we have a tight budget on latency”

  • “Do you think we should abstract the implementation details? Module X is where we tend to put all utility methods”

• Make proposals actionable. Including the “how” when sharing ideas makes it easy for others to evaluate.

  • “Did we consider race condition? Checkout module X which provides utilities you can use”

  • “Nit: Can you add a brief description for this method? Checkout link A for the style guide”

  • “Maybe we can break this down further? What do you think about A and B?”

• Context matters. When working with other teams, checking their goals and priorities is important. Optimization isn’t going to help during a production outage.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Every engineer needs help balancing over-optimization and under-consideration. There’s no right way to do it, but it is important to understand the trade-offs when making these choices. We covered two scenarios out of my countless mistakes. The trick is to understand the context and ask the right questions.

You can apply them at work to find the sweet spot. A good balance will help you grow much faster in your career.

How do you avoid overdoing it or cutting corners? Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Secrets behind newsletter success from by

• How to build high-performing teams from by

• Scale to 2.5B users with MySQL from by

• Ignoring security alerts (I know, right?) from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week I’m sharing 7 essential questions you should ask the hiring manager next time you interview. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

“Do you have any questions for me?” - how many times has this question startled you in interviews?

It’s not that we don’t expect it. Yet, it leaves us thinking, “What should I ask?”

The pressure is off the charts if it’s the hiring manager round. We want them to like us. At that moment, we don’t think about whether we like them.

But did you know that people leave their boss 5 out of 10 times, not the company?

It’s sad, but not surprising. Leadership is difficult, and there’s no right way to do it.

People have good intentions, it’s just not the right fit.

Have you ever started on a new role and soon realized it’s not going to work out?

What if there’s a way to avoid it?

Today, I will share 7 essential questions to ask your future manager before you make a decision. I wish someone had shared this with me sooner. I have made bad choices and later regretted them; you don’t have to.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• How to choose your next role carefully by asking questions

• Practical thought process to deal with emotional difficulties of asking questions

• Sample questions you can use on your next Hiring Manager interview

Let’s dive in!

🙋‍♀️ Asking Questions Will NEVER Cost Your Job

Do you feel uneasy asking questions to your potential manager?

I’ve always felt very uncomfortable. I’d tell myself, “it’s okay, I can adjust?” or when I notice some red flags, “they probably didn’t mean it that way”.

Many of us struggle to ask for what we want. We think, “What if they think of me as difficult to work with?” or “Is it the right time? I’m sure I’ll get plenty of opportunities to ask questions.”

If you feel like that, I’m with you. I’ve made the mistake of not asking enough questions. I always thought it’d hurt my chances if they felt interviewed.

The truth cannot be further from this. When you ask questions, the HM knows,

• You have a genuine interest in the role and the company

• You’re a dedicated person who cares

• You are looking for stability

Depending on the company you’re interviewing, you might have an HM interview round,

• at the very beginning of the process (Amazon, Meta)

• at the very end of the process (Google, OpenAI, Netflix)

• multiple times during the process (Apple, Anthropic)

(these are based on my experience interviewing at these companies, it may vary)

I appreciate having an initial conversation with the HM for a quick vibe check. But I prefer saving in-depth questions for later.

If you’ve only spoken to your potential manager once at the start, ask for another call before moving onto the offer stage.

You might want to wait till this stage because:

• Starting with hard questions might not be a great experience

• You can avoid this conversation altogether if others don’t go well

• Now your interview feedback is available, and you’ll get more personalized answers

It’s a personal choice though. The important thing is to ask and assess your match.

Let’s explore 7 questions that you MUST ask before signing your next offer letter.

⁉️ 7 Questions to Ask Before You Decide

🧭 1. What are your core leadership values?

Have you ever felt that your manager isn’t sharing important information?

Not a big fan of how feedback is communicated?

You and your manager have your own set of values. It’s okay if they’re not the same. But, it becomes a struggle when it’s completely opposite.

How do you deal with that?

If you ask someone if they’re a micromanager, you’ll only get a “NO”.

Asking an HM about their leadership principles is a great way to understand their style. You can ask them:

• “How have your leadership values evolved throughout your career?”

  • Tells you about the adaptability and growth journey of their own.

• “What are the top 3 values that guide your leadership approach?”

  • It’s a nice ice-breaker into this topic of core values.

• “How do you ensure that you strike the right balance between values?”

  • It tells you how they adjust their style depending on the situation.

The core idea here is to understand how they lead. And if that aligns with what you’d want from your next manager.

🏢 2. How are decisions made at the team or organizational level?

Engineers spend most of their time not coding. The majority goes into planning and designing systems, all requiring decision-making.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had clarity on how decisions are being made at your new team?

I’ve worked in both engineer-driven and top-down cultures. Some I like more than others. You should know what you’re getting into if you're making a switch.

Try asking these questions:

• “How transparent is the decision-making process?”

  • Tells you about overall company culture.

• “How much autonomy do individual team members have in making decisions?”

  • Know how much influence is with the team vs coming from executives.

• “If there's a disagreement within the team, how is it resolved?”

  • Tells you how escalations are used and handled.

Organizational culture plays an important role in your happiness. These questions can reveal a lot about internal culture and processes.

🚀 3. What are your career goals and aspirations?

If you’re particularly growth-minded, this is for you.

Without going into the “engineers can better manage engineers” debate, I can say an ambitious person is more likely to support your accelerated career goals.

It’s purely based on my experience, but I wish someone had told me this sooner.

Growth is much more than just promotion. Increase in scope, influence are all growth. A leader with very high ambitions for themselves can create spaces for you to grow with them.

But, it sounds a bit intrusive and awkward, right?

Here’s how you can reframe this question,

• “What aspects of your role keep you motivated?”

  • Know about their interests and passions.

• “I'm impressed by your accomplishments so far. What are some of your future aspirations that you're most excited about?”

  • A subtle way to ask the questions is by praising their current position first.

• “How do you see the team's success contributing to your overall career goals?”

  • Tells you about their career goals.

It’s always an interesting conversation with the HM. It’s also one of the questions that can catch them off guard. Try to understand how they see themselves growing into their dream role.

🌱 4. How would you support my growth objectives?

It’s time to turn the table. Understanding how the HM thinks about growth should play a key factor in your decision.

We’d want to avoid joining a company only to realize there’s no growth trajectory.

As a TL at Google, I led a team and multiple impactful workstreams. This was not the case when I transitioned to Apple. They don’t have formal TL roles.

If I hadn’t discussed this clearly with my current manager, I wouldn’t know that Apple works differently.

Here’s what I asked (well, along the same lines),

• “How does performance evaluation work at [Company X]?”

  • Tells you about the process and frequency.

• “How often do you have career development conversations?”

  • Hear how seriously they invest in the team's development.

• “I’m very interested in growing as a leader, what opportunities will be available if I join this team?”

  • Understand the available opportunities and how they support growth in general.

The more context you can provide, the better. You’re trying to gauge potential opportunities and see if they align with your expectations.

🛠️ 5. What is your strategy when someone on your team is underperforming?

How your manager handles difficult times can determine your job satisfaction.

Going into a job, underperforming is likely not on your mind. I wish my performance were always under my control. However, many external factors can affect how you perform.

Sometimes letting go is the right, yet hard decision a leader must take to protect the team (read more in this article from ). 

To understand the HM’s response to a crisis, try these questions,

• “What kind of support and resources do you offer to employees who are struggling?”

  • Tells you about how they provide support to members.

• “What steps do you take if an employee's performance doesn't improve despite your efforts?”

  • Learn whether they can make hard decisions if needed.

• “How do you balance providing feedback with maintaining a positive and supportive environment?”

  • Know how they treat feedback.

Knowing that you’ll get all the support helps with psychological safety.

🤩 6. What excites you the most about this team?

We have many opportunities to learn more about the team’s work. But getting insights from the leader on their vision reveals a lot more.

The lack of a vision is dangerous. Trust me, you don’t want to work there!

You can ask the following questions,

• “What are some of the ways the team is currently innovating or pushing boundaries?”

  • Innovation is a good indicator of a solid vision.

• “How do you think the team will evolve and grow in the coming years?”

  • Clarity in the team direction is important for a leader.

• “Where do you see [Project A] going?”

  • Demonstrate their technical abilities as a leader.

If you decide to chat with the HM last, it generally means your interviews went well. Make sure you’re sold on the vision, not just other things. It’s hard to survive work if you’re not interested at all.

❤️ 7. What do you care about?

The last one is a miscellaneous category. Topics around remote work, expectations, and work hours.

A few of the good managers I’ve worked with say, 

“I don’t care where you work from, what time you’re working, as long as you get sh*t done”.

It’s important to me. Trusting me with the work and offering flexibility is important in today’s world.

Managers have different work ethics. To get to know them more, inquire about things you care about.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

I used to interview often, not to change jobs, but to stay current and prepared. I always hesitated to ask hard, meaningful questions.

I felt I might not get an offer if I offended them somehow.

I’ve joined companies only to realize, it was never going to work out. Since I started being more vocal about my needs, asking questions was never the reason for any of my rejections.

Don’t take chances. Start asking questions that fulfill your needs. Interviews are a two-way process, use it.

Tell us about your favorite questions to ask your potential manager.

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• All you need to grow from by

• Tips to grow to senior from by

• Incentives at work from by

• Secrets behind 10x engineers from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly to akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

This week I’m sharing 5 key strategies you can adopt today to spark motivation in your team. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Do you ever feel like the team is not making significant progress in the last few quarters? Are you missing those interesting conversations in your team chat? Do you suddenly start getting too many reasons for not being able to finish the work?

There’s a good chance they’re all connected. Studies indicate 80% employees feel more productive if they’re inspired. The downtrend in performance might indicate a lack of motivation in the team. As a new leader, I mistook it for cycles of ups and downs. I'll admit, often I assumed everyone else was as excited as me.

Today, I’m sharing 5 changes that you can make to fight the boredom in your team. You’ll be able to apply them and get your team as excited as you’re.

⭐ Main Takeaways

• How to look for signs of boredom in your team

• Simple changes to get your team back on track and performing at its best

🚧 Signs to Look For

How often does someone on your team tell you that they're bored? They're not enjoying their work anymore. As much as we’d love to hear it directly, it’s rare. 

In my case, I knew our team was doing important stuff. I assumed everyone must be pumped. But the results were telling me a different story. Are you making similar assumptions about your team?

After making this mistake long enough, I started noticing some patterns.

• 🥱 Behavioral Signs

  • team chat drying up, participation in discussions going down

  • less attention to detail, code reviews taking longer

  • lack of enthusiasm in meetings, disengaged body language

• 🐌 Output Changes

  • no new ideas, reliance on existing solutions, reluctance to experiment or take risks

  • slower task completion, more bottlenecks, less output overall

  • waiting for instructions rather than proactively suggesting solutions, avoiding ownership

• 🙄 Subtle Clues

  • losing focus on current priorities

  • more complaints about tech stack, tools, or processes

  • increased hesitancy to ask for help or clarification

Initially I thought these were signs of burnout or individual issues with a few folks. That was a mistake. I never thought it was missing something. I was the Tech Lead and I went to my manager for advice.

We implemented 5 changes that reinstalled our team’s motivation. You can learn from my mistakes and boost your team’s motivation.

⚖️ 1. Balance “Grunt” Work

Not all projects are created equal. Some will have more visibility than others. Your team may have responsibility to:

• Work with legacy systems

• Maintain existing software

• Participate in busy on-call rotation

We noticed that our team was brand new but had a lot of “grunt” work. This affected the team’s morale. There weren’t enough time left to work on some of the interesting problems. Everybody needs to pick up some uninteresting work, but that can’t be the majority.

Keeping a healthy balance between new, exciting projects and maintenance work will improve motivation of your team. Depending on your team’s place in the organization, try keeping grunt work below 30% of your team’s time.

🎯 2. Set Ambitious but Achievable Goals

For a period we missed OKR promises for two consecutive quarters. We had pretty ambitious goals. Setting high targets is important, but ours felt like unachievable. This hurt the team’s morale.

After looking back, I noticed that everyone was stressed about OKRs from the beginning of the quarter. We never spent enough time to assess whether they were achievable.

To avoid this you need to:

• Manage expectations of stakeholders

• Spend extra time on project estimations, read more about engineering project estimation

• Prioritize goals properly, not everything can be a P0

We’d score an OKR “1.0” when you go above and beyond. “0.7” was the default score for complete. Discussing this with the team helped everyone divide milestones and prioritize effectively. Communicate your expectations clearly with your team.

Another important clarification was using OKRs as guides, not set in stone. Based on priorities we became more open to shifting things around. Establish best practices that suit your team and communicate.

🏆 3. Incentivize Model Behavior

Generally incentives are rewards given at the end of a milestone. The problem with that is there’s no certainty. This was one area that was beyond my control and was going well. Our team lead (manager) had this sorted. Here’s what I learned from him:

• Positive reinforcement works: Due to cultural background, positive reinforcement was always a foreign concept to me. Here I saw it working. Callout good behaviors and appreciate your peers publicly.

• Personalized growth plan motivates: Not everyone is trying to rush to the next level. Some individuals (including me) wanted to grow faster. But, some wanted to work on deep technical problems. Our manager did a great job creating unique plans for everyone.

• Celebrate wins publicly: Despite the size of the win, our manager did an awesome job highlighting model behavior. Kudos were very common in team meetings.

As I was aspiring to be a team lead, I spent quite some time chatting about incentives. If there’s one thing I remember from those conversations, it would be:

“Most managers fail to create a systematic incentive structure”

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can build that, read this article.

♻️ 4. Create Space for Failure

One of the biggest mistakes for me was assuming leadership was just a promotion. When I first became a lead, I thought I needed to do the same thing more.

My obsession with delivery and speed got the better of me. As a side-effect, I was:

• killing team’s innovation, you don’t innovate with a tight deadline

• responsible for quality decline, as we were scrambling to get things done

• destroying collaboration, everybody started to focus on their piece

The quality of the work was trending down. Productivity soon followed suit. Are you noticing that your team is doing “just what’s told”? Here are some ways you can fix this:

• Delegate: Transfer ownership to individuals, have them own it end to end

• Delegate: Get yourself out of decision making as much as you can

• Communicate: Celebrate failures more than you enjoy successes

Acknowledging failures are inevitable when you’re doing something meaningful. Me stepping back from decision making boosted team’s productivity.

🤝 5. Engage Team in Crafting Vision

Defining roadmaps, dividing work streams are works of a leader, right?

That’s how I started leading. I used to have all the conversations with stakeholders and plan for our quarters.

It worked well when the team was brand new. But, as people grew in their roles, getting interesting work wasn’t good enough. Rightfully so. I don’t know if I’d survive an environment where I’m told exactly what to do and how to do it.

Here’s what I learned:

“People don’t like to follow processes, they want to be part of the process”

This changed how I thought about vision and planning. If you notice people disinterested in talking about their work, you should start to:

• Involve everyone in crafting vision for your team. We used to draft our team goals every year. This was a collaborative document. Everyone knew the overarching direction and they’d write their own parts.

• Establish shared values and lean into them. One of Google’s core value was “Respect the user”. All of us cared about that. Additionally, our work reaching 3b+ lives was a common motivation.

You can increase motivation within your team when people feel heard. Tapping into organizational values/impact is helpful.

Once we started distributing process ownership, thoughtful conversations started to reappear. I’d participate in highly technical discussions, mostly as an active listener.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Building and maintaining a high performing team is difficult. If your team is putting out fires all the time, it’ll drain them quickly. To bring back the spark, you can:

1. Balance “grunt” work

   1. Keep uninteresting work below 30%

   2. Reframe maintenance as objective improvements

2. Set achievable targets

   1. Set the right expectations with stakeholders

   2. Invest and improve on project estimations

3. Reward model behavior

   1. Celebrate wins publicly

   2. Create personalized growth plans

   3. Highlight positive behaviors

4. Embrace failure

   1. Get yourself out of most decision making and delegate

   2. Remove negative connotation with failures and embrace them

5. Involve your team in setting direction

   1. Run planning exercise with the team, for the team

   2. Tap into shared values and culture to inspire your team

I was the very first hire on my team at Google. We were overwhelmed with years of tech debt when we started. In 3 years, we delivered a high visibility project that had an impact all over the company.

In fact, Google open sourced it and now it’s a leading industry standard. Techniques we discussed today, brought back the spark from temporary setbacks. That’s how we got the “Engineering Excellence Award”!

Have you experienced gradual drop in performance across the board? How did you deal with it?

Share them in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Building credibility in engineering from by

• 4 steps for better technical decisions from by

• How to build focus from by

• Stripe’s idempotent api from by

  ---

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

👋 Hi, this is Akash with this week’s newsletter. I write about leadership in software engineering. Thank you for your readership.

This week I’m sharing 3 simple questions to ask yourself to be more self-aware. Hope you enjoy this edition!

Subscribe now

Are you tougher on your team than yourself?

Do you think about how others see what you say?

Let’s take an example.

Transparency is a core leadership value.

But did you know that I almost destroyed my team's motivation by being too transparent?

Self-awareness is at the center of it all. I’ve made many mistakes by not paying attention to how others might see my actions. A leader’s actions have a deep impact on individuals. You should choose them carefully.

In this article, we will uncover my mistakes and how you can learn from them to be a better leader.

You’ll be able to apply these lessons and improve your 360° communication.

There’s a lot to cover, let’s get started!

💡 What makes Self-Awareness so important?

Self-awareness is like having an internal mirror to help you see yourself clearly. The purpose is to understand your:

• Own thoughts

• Feelings and behaviors

• Strengths and weaknesses

Let’s say you had bad traffic on your way to the office, you’re frustrated. But is it okay to be extra direct to your team that day? 

We’re all humans and how we feel has a lot to do with how we communicate.

Self-awareness helps you be more mindful and be consistent with your communication.

Self-aware leaders are better at:

• Navigating challenges and leaving a lasting impact

• Inspiring their team and getting things done by encouraging growth

• Setting boundaries at work and advocating for it

• … and many more

Enough on why it’s important. Let’s explore how you can implement some changes to be more self-aware.

❓🤔 3 Questions to Ask Yourself

Have you ever walked away from a conversation feeling satisfied, only to realize later that it did more harm than good?

When I started my leadership journey, self-awareness was not at the top of my list. Authenticity was. I thought, if I can be trustworthy and authentic, others will understand my intentions.

One time I got feedback that I reassigned some bug without properly communicating. Similar things happened before, but I could never connect them together. Luckily at the time, I was doing my leadership course at Harvard Business School. That week we were talking about self-awareness; and it all clicked.

When I assigned the bug, I assumed the person would connect the dots. This was in their area of ownership. I thought I was being respectful of boundaries. But, it was perceived as an exercise of authority. Looking back, it was completely my mistake. At the time, there were some other reorg conversations going on. I didn’t consider how that could make them feel that way.

Could I have done anything better? Of course. Here’s 3 questions to ask yourself before acting as a leader.

1) Would you want to work for yourself?

Personally I’ve always appreciated honest conversations. Being a straight shooter is good, but are you thinking of how the other person will feel? Forget the other person, if you’re treated the same way, how’d you feel?

In the earlier example, what I meant was not what was perceived. You can do better,

• Take a moment before responding. This will buy you time for self-reflection.

• Notice your body language. Are you tense? Indirect cues impact how your words are received.

• Is there a way to say this more clearly and kindly?

If I had considered these, my actions would’ve been better. Putting aside my assumption, I’d have sent them a simple note before assigning the work.

2) Are you evaluating your actions periodically?

I used to treat my mistakes as individual interactions. I learned from previous ones, but I’d make new mistakes. What I missed was identifying the underlying problem, self-awareness.

You can avoid making the same mistakes, if you:

• Create a safe space for honest feedback. Ask your team how they felt.

• Replay your interaction after important conversations. What were your word choices? Tone?

• Seek feedback from trusted colleagues.

Investing in regularly checking how others see you is the best thing you can do today. If I had done this earlier, I'd have noticed the pattern much sooner.

3) Do you balance your core leadership strengths?

One of my core leadership strengths is “authenticity”. My default strategy was to be completely transparent. It was working well for the most part. But one time, I heard some concerning changes in the organization from up. As I shared the news with the team, everyone panicked.

At that moment, I knew that I messed up. Next few weeks went by doing damage control. My mistake was not balancing transparency with limited disclosure. Leadership skills are generally on a spectrum. A leader tries to balance on this spectrum depending on the situation.

Inquire about your own leadership strengths and weaknesses. You’ll be able to identify how some of your strengths need balancing. Think about the second order consequences (There’s a great article from , give it a read).

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

The core idea behind self-awareness is understanding how others perceive you. That was the theme of the entire post. Remember, you want to treat people how you want to be treated. I still make a lot of mistakes; they’re unavoidable. The key is to continuously iterate and improve.

If you want to start investing in self-awareness today, try to:

• Slow down and think: Before speaking in meetings, take a breath and ask yourself, "Is this necessary? Is this helpful?"

• Reframe negatives: Focus on solutions, not just problems. Rephrase "We can't" into "How might we...?"

• Be aware of your non-verbal cues: Acknowledge your emotions. Ask yourself, “Am I being a little too direct today?” (check out this article from )

If you remember only one thing, remember to ask yourself “Would I work for myself?”. That is the most important question for self-reflection.

What self-prompt do you use for self-awareness? Share it in the comment!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Story on Junior -> Senior in 2 years from by

• Saying “NO” from by

• Conflict resolution (one of my favorite topics) from by

• Interesting take on remote work from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

Is there a more challenging task than predicting the future?

Yet, engineering teams go through cycles of planning and estimating the length of projects.

In pretty much every place I've worked, we've set OKRs to plan for the upcoming quarter.

Unless the project is trivial, you’re dealing with unknowns.

The result? Lots of surprises towards the end of the quarter.

How often do you push OKRs to the next quarter?

Today, I’m going to share 5 tricks from my experience that will make you a better predictor. The post is divided into 3 parts as follows,

• 🤯 Why we struggle with estimates

• ⚙️ Top-down and bottom-up estimation

• 🛠️ 5 tricks to be less inaccurate

You can apply these to understand the limitations of planning and estimate like a pro. This post is all about the balance between targeted accuracy and time invested.

Let’s dive in!

Project estimation is the process of making a calculated guess about how long it will take to finish. This helps in,

• Better resource planning

• Right prioritization

• Making business decisions

There’s no avoiding it, even if we are not good at it.

🤯 Why do we suck?

Broadly, we can divide engineering work into two categories.

🐜 1. Trivial Projects

Projects with widely accepted solutions across the industry. These types of projects are concrete and the only variable is organizational integration. Complexity can still vary, but proper design can make them manageable.

⛰️ 2. Ambitious Projects

Working on the cutting edge of technology, problems don’t have answers on stack overflow anymore. There are more unknowns and less concrete milestones. Most of the time you’ll find yourself here. Planning becomes particularly challenging.

Irrespective of type, a variety of other factors influence estimation. When you’re dealing with complex systems, no one knows anything with 100% certainty. I’ve worked on systems with more than millions lines of codebases. I felt clueless every time it came to planning how long a project should take.

⚙️ Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Estimates

We will not get into setting SMART goals, that’s for another time. Our focus will be on estimating the timeline of a project. Like Dynamic Programming, estimates of a project can be two ways.

⬇️ Top-Down Approach

You use experience from past, similar projects. Starting from the top, here we’re not worried about specifics of individual tasks. This is fast and helpful in estimating a rough timeline. Due to lack of visibility into line items, this can be inaccurate.

⬆️ Bottom-Up Approach

Here, you divide a larger project into smaller chunks. By estimating timelines for individual tasks, you calculate the overall timeline. This can be more accurate but takes more time.

Obsessing over either of them can be problematic. One time, I planned my team’s OKRs and put in multiple work streams, only to realize half of them were dependent on others. This is a result of not digging deep enough. On the other end, the next quarter I spent way too much time breaking down. An unexpected surprise in production integration made it all a waste.

In short, there’s a trade off. Depending on what you’re planning to get from the estimate, you need a hybrid approach.

Next, let’s dive deeper into some mistakes I made and how you can learn from them to be less wrong on estimates.

Subscribe now

🛠️ 5 Tricks to Be Less Wrong

1/5 ⚔️ Divide and Conquer

In my most unproductive quarter at Google, I had four medium-sized tasks on my plan. Grouping these items made complete sense. They were closely related. However, as soon as I started on one of them, I got blocked by another team. While waiting, I couldn’t pick up any of the other three tasks! Because, they depended on the completion of the first one.

Another time I had too many design tasks in a single quarter. External dependencies slowed me down. Design discussions took longer than I anticipated.

Here’s what you can do to avoid making the same mistakes,

• 🧩✂️ Divide the project into sizable, independent tasks

• 1️⃣2️⃣ Understand the order at which they need to be delivered

• 🧠🤝 Borrow expertise from the team, let people estimate the time and adjust accordingly

How we break down a large project matters. Break it down into logical chunks and understand the order. This will help you estimate better.

2/5 🪢 Untangle Dependencies

When I picked up too many designs for a quarter, I forgot to consider a few things,

• I will have to work with multiple teams

• Each discussion may drag for days

• I might end up working on multiple designs at a time

• Too much cognitive load, a lot of context switches

Additionally, waiting on discussion threads quickly became painful. Seemingly independent work streams can be highly dependent on external entities. Failure to identify these early is a major cause for off estimates.

Here’s how you should avoid them,

• 🏷️ Label work items properly, e.g. design, experiment, develop, testing, launch etc.

• 👥 Identify stakeholders and dependencies

• 🎯 Reserve time with external teams, put it on their OKR

• 🔀 Lookout for potential parallelism, choose items that can be concurrent

Better estimate relies on your understanding of the problem. Your goal is not to eliminate all unknowns. Instead aim to reduce ambiguity when planning.

3/5 🛋️ Leverage Cushions for the Unknowns

No matter how hard I tried above two, there’d always be some misses. After overlooking the inevitability of bad estimates for consecutive quarters, I learned to embrace it.

We strive to set ambitious goals, it’s fair to push the limits. At the same time, never finishing what we promised can be seen as a performance dip. Balancing these two is crucial to sustain productivity in the longer term.

What helped me prepare better for unpredictable future,

• Accepting that things will go wrong, at every opportunity

• Incorporating “slack” time into planning

A common way to estimate team bandwidth is to collect availability. Typically this is 13 weeks in a quarter. We started reserving one extra week for slack. This would account for sick hours, prolonged timelines and other surprises.

The psychological impact on a team after missing delivery is huge. Preemptive actions to create a supportive environment goes a long way.

4/5 🔢 Use Fibonacci or T-Shirt Sizing

I’ve worked with some leaders who want to account for every hour spent. We already suck at estimating quarters, how would hours work? Well, it doesn’t. We’re often estimating on the best case side. Thanks to how human minds work (optimism bias).

Planning and discipline are very important for a team. My goal has always been to respect the process and do our best to keep promises. Rounding up is the remedy that worked for me to balance the inherent bias.

Fibonacci works really good for tasks,

• Tasks are well scoped, measurable key results

• But once it grows beyond 5w, break it down

T-Shirt sizing works well for larger projects,

• Projects often have moving pieces leading to ambiguity

• Here you get a less accurate, estimated range of weeks

Based on what you’re estimating, you can use a combination of these. For high level estimates, start with T-Shirt sizes. Once planning OKRs and distributing tasks, use a fibonacci estimate in the number of weeks.

5/5 📈 Continuous Tracking

Finally, the biggest mistake I’ve made with project estimation was not valuing it. As an engineer, it's easy to view planning as unnecessary overhead. And I was no different. I began my leadership journey believing that planning wasn't important. And that it was acceptable to do things without a plan because that was the reality in engineering.

Downsides were obvious, the team regularly missing on organizational priorities. When we were collaborating with other teams, missing timeline hurt our reputation. This cost lost confidence from the leadership as well.

You don’t have to make the same mistakes:

• Continuously monitor progress against plan, keep the team focused

• Re-prioritizing is okay, but communicating early is key to building trust externally

• End of Quarter OKR evaluation can demonstrate a team's consistency externally. It can also boost the team’s morale and foster motivation

Benefits of investing in planning may not be obvious, but it’s necessary for sustainable performance. Establishing a process and respecting it will help you build a high performing team.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Remember, the goal is not to get it right, but to get it less wrong. The hidden complexity in engineering projects is not going anywhere. This will always cause drifts from planned paths. Accepting this reality and continuously refining strategy is the key.

Today, I shared mistakes I made repeatedly before getting better. Hope you could resonate and apply some of these techniques into your planning.

What’s your one strategy that significantly increased accuracy in project estimation?

Share in the comments!

Leave a comment

🐦‍🔥This Week’s Favorites

• Skills to grow beyond Senior from by

• Rate limiting using Redis from by

• Reading whitepapers for growth from by

• 4 steps for making technical decisions from by

  ---

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

Have you ever felt the team will miss an important deadline and there’s not much you can do?

How do you ensure the output of your team stays reliable?

When I started facing such problems, my instinct was to jump in and do it myself.

By doing that, I made others feel:

• Not respected, as I breached their boundary by taking on their tasks

• Micro-managed, by constantly asking updates to avoid end moment slips

• Not trusted, as I took all the ownership and others didn’t feel empowered

• Inferior, as I expressed my frustration like I could do it better

While none of those were my intentions, I’m sure it didn’t feel good to work with me.

Are you struggling with something similar?

The real challenge in a TL’s life is missing context and accountability. I didn’t know what others were going through when they were unproductive. But I was responsible for making sure the results were on time.

Since then, I made some changes to be more hands off, at the same time ensure timely delivery.

Today, we will explore strategies that can help you become the favorite TL. Both for the team members and the organizational leaders.

This is what we will cover:

• 🦠 Getting over “I’m better than everyone”

• 🤝 Building a support system for team members

• 🗓️ Weekly accountability meetings

• 🛑 Preset rules for dropping things repeatedly

There’s a lot to cover, let’s begin!

1/4 🦠 Getting over “I’m better than everyone”

A lot of the time the senior person on the team becomes the lead. When I first became TL more than 5 years ago,

• I was struggling with feeling productive. I took every opportunity to write code. A lot of the time, at the expense of taking on someone else’s work.

• Another mistake was providing direct answers and showing how to do things.

These instincts led me to build a superiority complex. I always jumped in voluntarily when someone was stuck. Because I didn’t want to delay the projects.

I don’t need to spell out how bad of a TL I was. It’s one of my biggest embarrassments to date. Once I recognized this anti-pattern, I went on to understand why I always had the answer. Turns out, I wasn’t smarter than others. I just happened to write the majority of the codebase from the ground up.

You can avoid making the same mistakes. Here’s what I did,

• Delegate Ownership: Divided the project into smaller, independent components. Worked with team members to find owners for individual pieces.

• Listen, then Guide: My instincts to immediately spit out answers didn’t foster innovation. I changed it by understanding their issues and share my techniques to find the answer.

• Create Platform for Visibility: Weekly, our team had leadership updates. I created a rotation for others to be the face of the project. This further enhanced their sense of belongingness and ownership.

By making these changes, I was able to step back and provide the space needed. It significantly improved everyone’s sense of ownership. Also increased the team’s opinion on designs and architectural choices. Win-win!

2/4 🤝 Building a support system for team members

In the fear of missing deadlines, my biggest mistake was always rushing. This prevented me from creating a safe space where people could:

• Try out innovative ideas

• Discuss alternatives thoroughly

• And more importantly, be unproductive from time to time

This resulted in a lack of trust, innovation, and a toxic work environment. I assumed that as a TL, it wasn’t my job to fix. I guess I forgot to be human. One day, I was speaking with one of my friends, and he was complaining about his TL. That was my wake-up call.

I started having weekly 1:1s with all my team members. Checkout 5 Keys to 1:1s to get my template. We’d talk about everything except compensation. This regular chats helped everyone feel,

• Part of a team where they’re valued

• Mistakes are acceptable, in fact encouraged

• It’s okay to occasionally feel unproductive, and deadlines can be pushed

• Supported without being judged. We’d have career conversations and strategize for growth.

A TL is responsible for execution but prioritizing people over tasks is the key to any high performing team. Now, I started communicating my good intentions clearly.

3/4 🗓️ Weekly accountability meetings

It’s important to be supportive and empathetic. But one thing the market doesn’t like is unpredictability. Teams are working on building the products with some business goals. In that context, timely delivery is non-negotiable.

As I transitioned from the “not nice” to the “nicest” TL, we experienced,

• More things are being dropped on the floor

• Frequently timelines needed adjusted

• With no one’s fault, productivity was very unstable

All of this affected our deliverables. Delegating ownership worked for better quality but at the cost of longer delivery windows. The balance between support and accountability is hard. We implemented a per-project weekly status meeting with all stakeholders.

These meetings were structured as,

• Going over deliverables for each team member for an update

• Highlighting any blocker and identifying a stakeholder who can help unblock

• Taking meeting notes and sharing with the team and relevant leaders

This was a suggestion from one of my leaders. It’s tied to how the human mind works. Providing updates in a social setting enforces accountability. No one likes to say “no update” for consecutive weeks.

It’s important to look at it from a support perspective. Rather than blaming one for not delivering. The goal was clear, for members it was a platform to show progress and get unblocked. The results of this change were extremely positive.

4/4 🛑 Preset rules for dropping things repeatedly

Personally I’ve experienced many productivity hits that affected my deliverables. Everyone goes through ups and downs. It’s important to be mindful and create space for such downtimes. But it’s also very important to keep the output reasonably stable.

Starting 2021, a lot of us were going through cycles of unproductivity. Now, I didn’t want to blindly do it myself. So there was nothing much I could do. After speaking with some seniors and my manager, we spoke about a few strategies.

I learned that abruptly taking on work was the problem. But as a lead, we need to act as the glue from time to time. This led us to creating a rule within the team,

“If you drop this more than X number of times, someone else will temporarily pick it up”

While the someone else was mostly me, the proactive messaging helped everyone. It didn’t feel unexpected and the team actually appreciated the gesture. It made everyone feel more supported. Everyone helped each other out in challenging times.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Balancing the team and deliverables is a real challenge for every leader. Between getting 💩 done and being supportive, I struggled a lot before getting it right. The journey was hard and long, but I think each mistake taught me something new. To be completely honest, I still make mistakes and readjust. The 4 strategies I shared today are my constants.

You can apply these into your work and create a more open, supportive work environment. Bonus, you can become the favorite leader everyone wants to work with!

Subscribe now

What strategies do you use to maintain timely delivery? Share them in the comments!

🐦‍🔥This Week’s Favorites

• Managing overthinking from by

• Dealing with Imposter Syndrome from by

• Data Pipeline choices and trade offs from by

• Recognize potential in engineers from by

  ---

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

There’s no escaping it.

I used to hate spending multiple weeks every six months to get a good rating.

I never liked preparing for self-reviews. Until my manager helped me find a way to be excited about it.

Today, let’s talk about how you can turn your reviews into accelerator for growth.

In the rest of the post, I’ll use “perf” as the replacement word for self-review.

The template that I’ll share with you captures my learnings after reviewing 100+ perf packets. You will learn how to:

• 🎯📍 Focus on the right things on your perf

• 📊🚀 Use Perf reviews as a tool for accelerated career growth

• 📝🌟 Create a structure to format your responses to highlight impact

• 🎁💝 Bonus: Get the template that got me the highest rating at Google, twice!

We’ll get started with who’s looking and what are they looking for.

There’s a lot to cover today, let’s get to it!

🧐 👀 Who’s looking?

This is fairly company specific but typically it’s,

• You

• Your manager

• Peers you ask for review

• Managers in your organization

There may be others in your company or for higher levels. For example, Google used to have out of organization reviews for L6+ promotions. But for today’s discussion, this wouldn’t be very relevant.

⁉️ What are they looking for?

The secret behind writing a good perf relies on your understanding of the audience. Unfortunately, you’ve a single document to convince everyone.

My biggest mistakes were,

• Treating perf as a periodic public status update

• Summarize what I achieved during that period

• Not providing clear evidence for impact

• Writing very long stories that hid my achievements

Most of the time, your performance rating is directly tied to your compensation. My mistakes cumulatively have cost me a lot of money. I learned about the importance of the audience when my manager pointed them out. Here’s what you can do to avoid making the same mistakes:

• You: Instead of treating it as a chore, see perf as an opportunity to demonstrate impact.

• Your manager: They’re your partners and biggest advocate. Work with them to create the document. It should equip them with all ammunition needed to defend your promotion or rating.

• Peer reviewers: They are looking for data points to include in your review. Make it clear where you collaborated with them.

• Organizational managers: They are mostly looking for impact. Often there’s a stack ranking. Basically engineers within the same level gets ranked. Your perf needs to make it very clear why you deserve that high rating.
  Their job is not to hand them out. Every organization sets a budget on these things. Often the decision depend on your ability to convince the committee that you deserve it.

When you know who’s going to read your packet, you can customize it accordingly.

🆙 ⏫ Level Up your Career with Perf

I was always in a hurry to finish my self-evaluation. It was just another chore on my list. I got lucky because my manager caught this before it was too late. Let’s explore how you can use Perf as a tool to accelerate growth.

📍 1. Set a target rating: Chat with your manager at the beginning of the cycle. Set goals and align with a target rating. This will help create accountability and facilitate continuous development.

🏃 2. Maintain a work log: Drop every win into a living document. However small or big. It’ll save a lot of time and be the primary source for “What did I do?”

🪜 3. Align with ladder expectations: Match your achievements with organizational expectations document. Most organizations have these. If not, work with your manager to define expectations for your current and the next level.

👥 4. Know your peer reviewers: Work with your peer reviewers to explain areas to focus on. This will help you avoid surprises. Your peer reviewers are going through their own reviews. Senior folks usually get many of these requests. Expecting they will have all the context will disappoint you.

Using these tools you can make this tedious process benefit your career. As you get more involved, you’ll be essentially shortening your feedback cycle. In an ideal world, a peer or manager shouldn’t wait for reviews to provide feedback.

When developmental feedback impacts you’re next year compensation, it loses effectiveness. Whether you’re a leader or IC, proactively identify and close gaps. Don’t wait for it to impact salaries.

💥 ✨ Success Formula: Structure for Impact

Exponential impact comes from optimized ideas and a stellar delivery mechanism. Now let’s focus on how you can organize your perf to demonstrate maximal impact.

My mistake was to dump all details in my perf. This made it difficult for others to understand:

• The problem statement

• The impact it had on the business

• The complexity of the problem

• What was my contribution

You can avoid this by structuring your perf. On your next perf try this form,

• Objective: Clearly communicate the problem statement.

• Impact: Highlight metrics to demonstrate impact. Don’t leave any room for ambiguity here.

• Difficulty: Briefly explain the challenges and the complexity of the project.

• Leadership: Feature any coordination or ownership attributes.

• Team work: Bring out any intra or inter team collaboration.

You might need to repeat this pattern for each of your projects. Consider combining related items under a single title. The goal is to demonstrate the maximum impact with fewer words. Typically there will be a limit of 1000 words.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

Mistakes I made with not writing good perf packets had real financial consequences. I got lucky with a leader who showed me the path. It was a game changer for me when I shifted my strategies. Many engineers struggle to connect their ratings to their work. It might feel unjust at times. I hope you can apply some of these into your next self-review and get better results.

Be specific and be concise. Formats and pillars might differ between companies. What are some important factors for your organization? Share them in the comments!

Do you want a template that you can use directly in your next review? Subscribe to Leadership Letters and reply to the welcome email. It’s a free forever publication, what’s there to lose?

Subscribe now

If you are an existing subscriber, thank you for supporting me in this journey so far. Please reply to this email and I will send you the template!

🐦‍🔥This Week’s Favorites

• AI in the workplace from by

• Ways to enhance mental health from by

• Structure tech innovation in teams from by

• Productivity challenges for leads from by

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.

Share

Share Leadership Letters

Quick Recap

We covered how to respond when a member of your team -

• ⛔ Denies to work with a person or group of people

• 😑 Constantly express dissatisfaction in working in a project

• 💪 Shows sign of contest beyond healthy competition

Today, let’s talk about how you can handle conflicts between two teams and find a constructive solution.

Conflicts between teams are very common. I used to suck at conflicts and always made it about me. The strategy I’ll share today helped me handle some serious conflicts at Apple and Google. You’ll learn how to:

• Control the narrative of a conflict

• Respect the boundary of the other team

• Reach your desired outcome

  Not subscribed yet? Do that now and never miss an update. This publication is free forever.

There’s a lot to cover, let’s get started.

🔥 De-escalate the Situation

Conflicts are an unstable stage after a series of disagreements. It is expected that both parties will be very frustrated. But when your team clashes with another one, your ability to directly influence reduces. My intuitions told me to,

• Defend your team externally. It’s not a bad idea. As a leader, you are taught to correct in private and defend in public. When faced with a conflict with another team, my natural instinct was to protect my team.

• Back-channel conversations to gain support. Conflicts outside your direct influence sphere require additional lobbying. It makes sense and is prevalent in politics. But in engineering teams, it causes a trust deficit.

The outcome was obvious, losing the ability to influence. There was no mutual trust. In addition, it made me look not ready for collaboration. So I changed my behavior by,

• Separating emotions from the problem

• Taking a deep breath, and resetting the tone

• Acknowledging concerns with respect

In the middle of chaos it’s important to show empathy. Defense is not a good mechanism at this stage. A leader should defend their members, but not by discounting others. Listen, build trust. Once they recognize you as a reasonable person, conversation becomes easier.

🕵️‍♀️ Empathize with the Unknowns

In my experience, the majority of cross-team conflicts happen due to mismatching priorities. Every team is trying to fulfill some company goal. When you aren’t exposed to that, it might feel unreasonable. My typical responses were to:

• Build a case to convince. With my local knowledge, I used to look for evidence to support my team’s mission. By trying to make our team seem more important than the other team. It can easily upset them.

• My way or the highway. I'd happily drag conversations for weeks, if not months until the desired outcome. This involved escalations, unending discussions on the same topic, and speaking with different individuals.

Your goal is NOT to win! It should be about what’s good for the company. The ugliest conflict I was involved in happened due to organizational misalignment. Between our teams, we didn’t agree on the priority. We pushed for changes when they had a do/die situation at hand. 

This team got an ultimatum from the executives to deliver on a project. On failure, the outcome would be dissolving the entire team. We didn’t know about it until we,

• Asked open-ended questions to uncover the other side

• Gathered the full story without assumptions

• Found common grounds wherever possible

Every team in your company has some unique goals. Priorities can change between teams. I used to assume intent, which led me to craft a winning argument in conflicts. Before doing so, try to understand the reason.

In my case, if I'd known that this team was going through a stressful time, the conversation would’ve been much different from my side. Before assuming intent, it’s important to investigate the reason. Understanding why will solve the problem most of the time.

💡 Respond with Impact

We spend a lot of time figuring out who’s right. The impact of losing a conflict felt like a weakness in my leadership ability. I often found myself in a conversation so far from the actual conflict. Trying to prove superiority, I forgot I was wasting everyone’s time. I used to,

• Overanalyze the downstream impact. When both sides are there to win, arguments become pointless. People grab whatever they can get to support their cause. An example, “if we don’t do this, our customers will not be happy 5 years from now”.

• Leave conversations ambiguous. We found ourselves walking out of meetings without any clear progress. This resulted in repeatedly coming back to the same topic.

One of the major reasons for dragging out resolution is lack of ownership. A leader who owns the narrative can really stand out. Now, I started doing the following in conflicts:

• Focusing on the outcome, not winning it for my team

• Being more approachable by offering collaboration

• Leading with clear next steps, and finding the right owners

Most humans react to stress. When we start responding instead, it makes a huge difference. It also increased my influence. Nobody likes conflict. If you can make visible progress in solving them, people become more considerate.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

I used to suck at conflicts. I started with the idea that there’ll be a winner - And I liked winning. It was not long before I realized it was all wrong. The moment I shifted my strategy towards handling conflicts better, I noticed a huge difference across multiple aspects of my leadership. Building trust became easier across teams. Other leaders pulled me in to diffuse conflicts they were dealing with.

A big part of a leader’s job is convincing others and dealing with conflicts and other stressful interactions. Having a framework really helps set yourself apart. I Hope you enjoyed this three-part series, let me know in the comments.

How has your experience been with escalations? What’s your goto strategy to resolve conflicts between teams? Share them in the comments!

Special thanks 🤗 to for proofreading this edition and providing tons of actionable suggestions! Anton also writes practical tips for leading teams, subscribe to , if you haven’t already!

📢 🎤 Announcement

Our favorite , the author of , recently launched a library of 100+ actionable career growth insights you can read in an hour!

It’s filled with very actionable tips that you can gradually ingrain into your work life and accelerate your career growth!

Use the link above to get a 20% discount on your copy, and I assure you won't regret it. The price is minimal compared to the value packed in the material.

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Use your mentors right from by

• Managing up from by

• Top AI tools for productivity from by

• Done is better than perfect from by

  ---

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org. 

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and subscribe 🔔 if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going. It truly makes my day!

Share

Share Leadership Letters