I will now explain why at least 50% of your team finds your current All Hands to be a waste of their time. They believe: Now, I will describe how to build an All Hands that will exceed their expectations. Let’s define the All Hands: Everyone. Together. There’s an important organizational inflection point when you… more
Welcome, new leader. We’re glad that you are here. Your arrival fills a critical vacancy in our team, and we can’t wait to see what you can do at this company. We’re going to say that we’re not in a hurry and you should take your time, but we’re in a hurry. Before you arrive,… more
Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he’s fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff meeting — read the notes from last week. Exec review — figure out the biggest fire, have a defensible opinion. Wait — Mark Team… more
Carolyn, my chief of staff, sat on the couch as I ran into my office. The Palo Alto building wasn’t built for tech; it’d been adapted to support the use case over the years. My office was in the center of the building, which had an inner atrium. Way too many windows. Maybe a salon?… more
I write this from the latest MacBook Pro. I’ve been running this as my primary machine for almost a month. When I’m not grinding out the latest soon-to-be-released I-swear-I-am-on-schedule book in a coffee shop, I sit at my desk and plug the MacBook into a Studio Display. This braided black cable does it all: video,… more
The Head of Product, Customer Service, and the CTO of Slack were sitting in the front row at an important conference. This was peak Slack; we were all the buzz, the fastest-growing enterprise software company in history. The conference speakers were singing out praises, and at that precise moment, Slack was down. Again. I wish… more
They don’t want to hear it. They don’t. It is legit good feedback. It is substantive, and it is 100% true, but they do not want to hear it. How do you know this? You’ve provided the feedback several times. Three different variants of the critical feedback, and each time, the response is one of… more
You can read all the reviews you want about new hardware, but if it’s hardware you touch, there is one test that can only be performed in person, and it’s important: you hold it in your hand and you feel the answer to the question, “Is this a piece of junk?” I was skeptical about… more
Back in 2013, Alex King and I redesigned the Rands in Repose. Thirteen years — still happy with the design. It’s readable, clean, and prominently features typography I love. What you look at this moment is 90% Alex’s original design. But there was one more thing we never finished. Over the years, Esquire featured a… more
I’ve never built more interesting, random, and useless scripts, tools, and services than I have in the last six months. The cost to go from “Random Thought” to “Working Something” has never been lower thanks to Claude Code. However, this increase in speed has only made my desire to move faster and more efficiently higher.… more
