This week, we feature shadow boards as a way to tackle young employee churn, the benefits of note-taking in research, dual-track career paths, and why soft skills are important to develop at tech companies. We also define serverless systems, how to maintain a component library effectively, and start a discussion on responsible future-focused designs.
Enabling the Team
Why You Should Create a “Shadow Board” of Younger Employees by Jennifer Jordan and Michael Sorell
A shadow board formalises a board of younger employees to increase their retention and help the executive committee keep up with emerging trends.
Software Engineering - The Soft Parts by Addy Osmani
Some of the soft skills Addy learned as a Senior Staff Engineering Manager at Google Chrome.
Product Direction
Product Leadership & Dual-track Career Paths by Kate Leto
Product organisations should be offering a dual-track career path (at a minimum) and stand behind it with equal support and opportunity.
Should you Validate your Product Vision? by Andrea Saez
Companies often fail because they didn’t take the time to understand if the product they are building is solving real-world problems.
Continuous Discovery
Note-taking remains to be an important and valuable part of user research: it greatly improves the speed of analysis, and gives you an idea of what to focus on.
We can learn a lot from support tickets, sales conversations, behavioural analytics, but how do we deal with these fragmented inputs? Teresa explains.
Continuous Design
Notes on Maintaining an Internal React Component Library by Gabe Scholz
Gabe shares his thoughts on maintaining a component library as part of an existing design system.
Setting Global Goals for Your Project by Damien Lutz
Using life-centered design thinking, you can expand your design project’s value by aligning with global goals and contributing to a sustainable future.
Continuous Delivery
Front-of-the-Front-End and Back-of-the-Front-End Web Development by Brad Frost
With SPA’s, a lot of companies moved to full-stack developers. But this is a lot of scope for individual developers. Brad pitches a new separation at the front-end.
Serverless Systems aren’t Software Systems by Paul Johnston
Paul explains why, with serverless, you need to shift your thinking from layers in your stack to think about highly decoupled, event-driven, highly independent pieces of software.
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