We often don't prioritize the tiny things that make exceptional products. I share a practice we adopted recently that helps us ship lots of little things every Thursday.

Ben is an experienced talent acquisition leader. We discussed how leaders can work effectively with recruiting, how he coaches recruiters to work better with their stakeholders, how to stand out in the current job market, and what he's learned about leadership himself. He also gives the controversial advice to not jump to hiring a recruiter!

I loved this conversation with Alex Kroman, Chief Product and Technology Officer at LivePerson. We dive into the topic of how to craft great leadership teams, balancing vision with execution, overcoming the hub-and-spoke management model, leveraging diverse skill sets, and improving decision-making quality. Alex is someone I've learned a great deal from, and I invite you to do the same in this podcast!

What can we learn from Paul Graham's "founder mode"? Mostly that it describes a poor way of thinking about delegation. It's not just for founders, and it can be dangerous for founders. But it's a useful tool to have in every leader's toolkit.

I interviewed the founders of Reclaim.ai, a successful startup that was recently acquired by Dropbox. Learn the unusual approaches they took to build a radically customer focused company. We cover how they gave up planning, selected leaders with unusual backgrounds, and kept their technology simple. And they share some of the decisions they made that helped them iterate on their approach and build a product I use every day.

We delve into the concept of "piles", and why it can be a useful tool for seeing how to optimize flow.

We cover a simple process change that is the most impactful way I've seen to prioritize reliability work. It's a rule called the "Don't Repeat Incidents" rule. In this short episode, we cover how we developed this rule, and why it made such a difference.

We discuss the inevitable challenge of being the bottleneck and how to get yourself out of this situation, mostly by growing and training your team. Learn approaches such as

I also share

These are all important techniques for creating teams that can operate more autonomously!

One of the most important concepts in developing a strong organization is "organizational work". I describe the concept, how you can use it to drive lasting improvements in your organization, and how you can use it to build strong, collaborative leadership teams.

Let's talk about macho and bro-ish leadership culture! Macho cultures often exhibit aggressive and sometimes sexist behavior. While risk-taking and aggressive behavior isn't uniformly bad, macho culture can result in groupthink and result in poor decision-making. And it can drive away talent. We explore why these cultures emerge, often due to stereotyped views of leadership, and share techniques for navigating them.