Startup-CTO-Handbook/StartupCTOHandbook.md at main · ZachGoldberg/Startup-CTO-Handbook

Ultimately, your goal in a 1:1 meeting is to build a relationship with another person and have vulnerable and critical conversations that enable you to help them do their best work. If your direct report has a broad agenda, that s great, start there. However, if their agenda is consistently limited to tactical in-progress work items and you're not ... See more

Your engineers should be venting at you regularly, so if they are, don't panic this is totally normal, and in fact highly desirable. You should have a 1:1 meeting with every member of your team at least once every two weeks, if not weekly. Your goal in these meetings is to create a safe space for your engineers to tell you what s on their mind, and... See more

Kaizen is the Japanese word for improvement. Thephrase was popularized as part of the Toyota Production System. At Toyota, all personnel are given a (literal or metaphorical) red handle to pull that stops the entire production line. If a worker identifies a problem with production, the idea is for them to pull the red handle, gather coworkers and r... See more

Many video games involve a concept of a skill tree. For those unfamiliar, a skill tree is a sequence of skills or abilities that are unlocked as the player progresses through the game. Each skill is unlocked by spending skill points. Here s the rub: at any given time, there are more skills to unlock than you have skill points to spend. The skill tr... See more

Every single person with whom you work has a vastly different set of needs. Fulfilling these needs is one way to make them content and productive. It is your full-time job to listen to these people and mentally document how they are built. is is your most important job. I know the senior VP of engineering is telling you that hitting the date for th... See more