Software Lead Weekly editorial newsletter

A weekly newsletter by Oren Ellenbogen with the best content I found around people, culture and leadership in tech. You can also read this issue online and recommend this newsletter to your teammates for a great discussion. In a world where it's hard to keep up with so much content, I hope my curation helps you find high-signal content worth reading slowly and deeply. Under "Culture," you'll find content worth reading and sharing with others; you'll need others' help to pull it off. Under "Peopleware," you'll find content that can help you approach situations differently with new perspectives and frameworks. This Week's Favorite The UI Is Not the Product: When Agents Do the Work, What's the Shape of the Product That Remains? 6 minutes read. Great take by John Moriarty on where design effort goes once agents do the work: the approval moment: "The surface we author will get thinner, but the end-user experience will be richer. One question might pull from multiple sources, collapsing what used to be three separate tasks into one answer. [...] As Agents absorb more of the interface, what’s left to design gets smaller and more consequential. Fewer screens, each carrying more weight. The way you get those right is by deeply understanding the system underneath, because that’s what now drives the experience." Read it later via Instapaper. Share it via Twitter or email. Product [sponsored] DX: Engineering intelligence for the AI era Measure and improve software health, R&D productivity, and AI-human collaboration for a truly AI-native SDLC. Track AI-generated code by commit, PR, team, agent, and repo to understand AI's real impact on productivity. Promote your product on SWLW and reach over 30,000 software leaders Culture Best Resume I've Seen So Far 1 minute read. My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile. Read it later via Instapaper. Share it via Twitter or email. Predictability vs Outcomes 4 minutes read. I love this framing by Marty Cagan: "The real trade-off is the relative priority of outcomes versus predictability." Read it again. Outputs make it easier to predict when something is ready, not its value. Don't confuse features with dates to impact if you didn't verify the value first. If you can't verify it beforehand, at least focus on learning as much as you can by observing how users interact with the new feature and talking with them about it. Read it later via Instapaper. Share it via Twitter or email. Zapier's CEO Will Grade Your AI PM Skills Live (Video) 74 minutes read. Great watch for anyone leading product teams. Wade Foster on the transformational level: "If a factory produces a defective part, what does the worker do? Does he try to fix each part individually? No, not really. He just rejects a batch, checks the equipment and asks himself: Why did the machine produce these defective parts? [...] And that's what the work is actually shifting to." -- This is the playbook for agentic engineering orgs too: the leader's job moves from reviewing every output to auditing the system that produced it, and deciding where the human checkpoints sit. Read it later via Instapaper. Share it via Twitter or email. Building a Second-Wave AI Business 7 minutes read. Most businesses want to grow more than they want to optimize what they have. It's harder to predict what will drive higher revenue growth than to automate well-defined areas, so we're tempted to focus there. Seth is a master at narrowing down incentives and strategy to help you seek growth opportunities (relevant to everyone, and maybe more so for a bootstrapper who's aiming to get "default to live" urgently). If you map out your investment, how much of your time is invested in growth? How much is in optimization? Do you think the ratios serve the business or serve predictability? Read it later via Instapaper. Share it via Twitter or email. Peopleware What It Takes to Run Inbound Sales With AI (Video) 13 minutes read. Thi