One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.

I believe email-based status reports are the clearest and best signs of managerial incompetence and laziness.

Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I'm wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it.

A milestone is less date and more definition.

Your work speaks for you.

If we're 15 minutes into a lifeless, redundant, status-based 1:1 and I don't have anything sitting in my back pocket, I'm going to turn it into a performance review.

Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good.

Innovation is not born out out of a committee innovation is a fight. It’s messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.

Good design isn't about making decisions for your users, it's about making those decisions irrelevant.

Watch with awe and amazement at how quickly an engineer will become totally annoyed by inefficiency.

Criticism is the best sign you're onto something.

I am a firm believer that you need a well-defined leadership role to deal with unexpected and non-linear side effects of people working together. You need someone to keep the threads untangled and forming a high-functioning web rather than a big snarl of a Gordian knot.