Most people are modest about their contributions in the workplace. We also forget how important our contributions are. Then, when it comes time for recognition, you’ve forgotten, others didn’t notice because they don’t understand all the details and moving parts, and work just moves on. What do you do if/when your work goes unnoticed? Here’s what Julia Evans suggests…

Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! This is a pretty common tactic – when I started doing this I mentioned it to more experienced people and they were like “oh yeah, I’ve been doing that for a long time, it really helps”.

Where I work we call this a “brag document” but I’ve heard other names for the same concept like “hype document” or “list of stuff I did” :).

BONUS — Julia included a basic template for a brag document at the end of the post.

What does it take to be successful as a CTO? The stories of founder/CEO transitions is plentiful, but what about the evolution of a company and the need for a CTO who has a vision of how to do things and the team and skills needed to make it happen?

A CTO at this point still needs to mainly look inward and know how to code, know the structure of the application and infrastructure, but the focus is shifting towards managing a team, establishing a culture and processes to be able to grow quickly. Growing also means hiring but also making sure that every hire is an effective team member as soon as possible.

For the entrepreneurial type: this is a great dive into the fundamentals of product-market fit by @sparkszilla. The whole read is worth it if you’re interested in raising funds in the future. The heart of the article stems from three axiomatic theories:

• Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success: Rachleff says, “The #1 company-killer is lack of market. When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.”
• Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success: “The only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit.”
• BPMF and APMF: The lives of startups are divided into two categories, before product-market fit (BPMF) and after product-market fit (APMF).

And the Vohra questionnaire to see if you have PMF is one I’ll keep on hand for the future. 👌

For the final show of 2018 I’m talking with Travis Kimmel, the CEO of GitPrime. Travis has spent years as an engineering manager. Travis’s mission at GitPrime is to bring crystal clear visibility into the software development process and bridge the communication gap between engineering and stakeholders. This communication gap is often an ongoing plague in product development lifecycle. We talked through focus, tech debt, leading teams, predictability, and more.

Lorenzo Pasqualis on why agile practices and vision must coexist. And why.

The important thing to remember about leading is you have to have clear lines of communication with those you lead. I love the ideas Lara shared in this guide to writing a “week in review” team update.

This doc helped me set records straight, disseminate info to lots of people at once, and open up conversation internally, while reflecting on the themes that had come up in weekly one-on-ones, backchannels, team meetings, etc. What I chose to write about each time widely varied.

Though the teams who reported to me were the primary audience for this doc, I kept it internally-public, meaning that anyone at the company could read and comment in it. I found that some other managers just weren’t talking about hard things that were happening…

Hey leadership friends out there — Rui Peres did a great job breaking down his experience being an engineering manager of 10 people in 2017 and how it impacted him as a professional.

My negotiation skills also improved. I used to start a conversation with “no”, now I make a conscious effort to say “no, but” and present alternatives. Thanks to a fellow engineering manager, I learned to make the distinction between what needs to be built and when it needs to be done (big difference). This innocuous detail helps me have better judgement of a situation.