Lessons from Jade Rubick

On Leadership

"The higher you go in an organization, the less you know what is going on. Yet, the higher you go in an organization, the more you're responsible for fixing what's going on." [3]
"People don't lie to leaders to be malicious, they hide things that are problems or downplay things because it's often not safe for them to bring it up." [3]
"Many people fetishize straight communication and feedback but don't understand what it takes to actually build a culture where it is safe (for everyone) to do that." [3]
"Humans are hierarchical creatures. Like other apes, we naturally think of ourselves in hierarchy. Leaders are constantly deferred to. They have their ideas validated as brilliant... This reinforces confidence in leaders." [3]
"If you're doing an important job you will end up being a bottleneck at some point. There is an art to disentangling yourself from doing things directly, and it's a skill and it's actually pretty hard to learn." [4]
"What I see is that leaders struggle to balance their need to be involved with the fact that they can't do it all." [4]
"I think the key framing for this is that you want to make your organization produce the outcomes the way you want instead of doing those things yourself." [4]
"If you are an information hub where everything's coming through you you are necessarily going to be a bottleneck." [4]
"What do you do when you don't have the authority to accomplish your goals? To answer that, I'd like to talk today about a concept I called reflecting power." [5]
"Reflected Power is using the authority of those above you to amplify your influence and achieve your goals." [6]
"Most leaders do not seem to be very good at seeing the long-term impact of things." [7]
"You want all of your long-term trends to be heading in a positive direction, so that your flywheel of value delivery is getting faster over time." [7]
"Organizational work is work that you do ON an organization, to make it more effective. Organizational work is a critical concept for leaders, a sort of “second job”."
"If you don't invest in organizational work, what happens? The default drift in an organization is toward entropy and increasing complexity."
"As your position in the company rises further and further up, the percent of your time spent on organizational work will naturally increase."

On Team and Culture

"You want a leadership team not a group of individuals. so get your team to work with each other." [4]
"If you're genuinely trying to make your company be a great place to work, you should talk about that." [8]
"A good interview plan allows you to have confidence you'll vet and find the right candidate. A poor interview plan results in a terrible candidate experience." [8]
"One tip: pair people up in the interviews. People learn from seeing others interview, so this will make your interviews automatically improve themselves." [8]
"You shouldn't rely on hope as a strategy, but have a plan that identifies how you'll appeal to the best applicants you can attract." [8]
"For especially promising candidates, you can even refer them to other companies, or make little suggestions on how they might improve their interviewing." [8]
"The universe bends towards entropy, and it's only through good engineering and constant vigilance that we can even keep things running. It's a constant battle constant fight." [9]
"We often had to do these hard pivots between reliability work and project work something would get so bad that our customers were so angry with us that we would just basically halt the world and focus on reliability work for a while." [9]
"The idea was, it doesn't even matter if you have deadlines, you always do that work before you get back to your project work." [9]
"When an incident would happen no matter what you had the space to do a little bit of work to prevent that from happening again or to make it not as bad next time." [9]
"Let's talk about the magic of small things: delivering mini-features, fixing bugs. These things are often the difference between a poor product and something you're proud of." [10]
"I also saw Tiny Thursdays as a useful way to keep a steady stream of value coming from engineering. Even if we're working on something larger, that will take a while, it ensures a continuous drip of value." [10]
"Generally product teams find it very difficult to prioritize small things i think the reason for that is that prioritization has overhead." [11]
"We tend to undervalue small things we don't actually see how valuable they can be." [11]
"It seems to me that sometimes you can deliver these small mini projects that often deliver as much value as bigger projects." [11]

On Product and Strategy

"As a consultant, I have a view across many companies. So I've seen a lot of product strategies. Most have been problematic." [12]
"If your company's success depends on growing effectively, you need to get these things right. When a company grows quickly, it undergoes stress. The faster the growth, the more the stress."
"Platform teams underestimate how much pain they cause when they deprecate their offerings. You should make deprecation rare."
"It's inevitable that your team will need things from other teams. This is especially common in product engineering."
"Software often feels like a house of cards, where it is surprising that anything ever works at all." [9]
"If you are in a situation where the way the organization is structured does not fit what you need to drive some outcomes a task force is something you can turn to." [2]
"A task force is basically like a temporary team that is either full-time or part-time that works against a particular problem." [2]
"Communication delays overwhelm everything else i think that's actually really true." [2]
"The setup of a task force is really important you don't want people to think it's a waste of time you need people to really buy into it it needs to feel important." [2]
"Be careful not to overuse task forces they shouldn't have happening all the time. and if they are happening all the time that is probably a sign that your organization actually isn't very well structured." [2]

On Growth and Scaling

"When looking at a problem... Identify the largest driver to the problem. This is the 'input'. There can be multiple inputs, but try to look for the largest ones." [7]
"I usually look for two types of solutions: (A) a solution that fixes it forever, and (B) a solution that merely gets you to a situation where things are always getting a little better." [7]
"If it's always getting a little better, you pretty much don't have to worry about it. But if the gap between these two types of solutions isn't major, you might want to bite the bullet and solve it for good." [7]
"Make it a business decision: 'do we want to accept the security risk for this until a better, more scalable version of my team is in place, or do we want to increase the headcount by X amount?' This becomes a tradeoff decision." [7]
"When people say 'I intend to do X,' it does a number of things. one it helps people know what's going on so that you can coordinate with that person two it gives people a chance to intervene if there would be bad consequences. three there's a default to action instead of deadlock." [4]

Learn more:

Lessons from Jade Rubick

On Leadership

On Team and Culture

On Product and Strategy

On Growth and Scaling

Written by Antoine Buteau

Lessons from John Cutler

Lessons from Erik Bernhardsson, founder and CEO of Modal