And… we’re back. If you’re just joining, every month on or near the 15th I share things I’ve read, products I’ve used, music I’ve listened to and anything else that I think you should know about and give a whirl. If you want to see previous lists, here’s March and February of this year. Without […]

It’s not often I read a book and immediately put the practice into action, but I recently did with Deep Work by Cal Newport. While the subject matter of the book is not new (we live in a culture of interruption, etc.), the methodologies that Newport suggests are worth implementing with your team immediately. The […]

Over the past couple of years, I’ve done fractional CTO work for a number of startups, both in Raleigh-Durham, NC and elsewhere. There are times when this model works really well and times when it’s not a good fit. In this article, we’ll cover: What to consider when evaluating this alternative The typical business arrangement […]

So, you’ve fallen out of love with your CTO, have you? Ready to pull the trigger and make them exit stage left? Not so fast. Every senior-level person in a company carries with them a certain degree of risk if you need to make a change that is contentious or hostile, but few carry the […]

There are two ways to present yourself when you join a new company: You already know everything about the company and their problems You are there to discover the details about the company and then apply your skills and expertise I’ve seen this done both ways, most recently observing someone take the approach of #1. For […]

You know the drill by now. Every month, on or near the 15th, I publish a list of blogs, podcasts, books, products or anything else I consider to be a must-have or must-do. Let’s get to March 2017’s Must-Haves Farnam Street – Recently discovered this site and it’s now in my Feedly RSS feed. So […]

I was listening to the How I Built This episode with Herb Kelleher last night and something he said leapt out at me. Herb continued his law practice for the first ten years of Southwest’s existence, from 1971-1981. The first TEN YEARS. He did so to pay his bills and so that the company could […]

If your company is under 50 employees, everyone on your team has real work to do every day that isn’t managing. In other words, you can’t have people on your team who can’t do actual work. You know, produce. Build stuff. Hammer. You might be tempted to hire that awesome head of marketing with 20 […]

I don’t know about you, but I go through periods where my brain simply refuses to work, refuses to generate fresh thinking. It’s during those times that I find myself wandering through Twitter or various blogs looking for “inspiration.” Out there, somewhere, is the answer. I only have to find it. This happened recently and […]

This is the last post in my series on Building Distributed Teams. So far, we’ve covered why you need to be building a distributed team,  what makes an ideal distributed team member, individual vs pods when hiring, team leadership and team communication. As a reminder, this series is focused on building a distributed technology product team. While the principles […]