For the last couple weeks I've been on an "Management Sabbatical" – a term I dubbed for where I'm working full-time, but on none of my typical leadership/management type work. 

Instead, I'm getting to just explore ideas and reconnect with some IC work. Almost no calls/meetings, just Maker Time – for nearly the whole summer. Couldn't be more excited about it!

I decided to do this since the timing seemed perfect:
- We split our big Product/Eng team into 6 smaller teams at EOY (I'll write more about this re-org later), and those teams are now fully up-and-running
- We recently got back from our Paris all-company retreat where the whole company got increased clarity/alignment around product vision & roadmap
- Some key leadership hires on my team were hired and fully onboarding recently, and doing great.
- With AI, there's never been a more exciting time to just build!

What exactly am I up to? 
- Deeper exploration of AI Coding Agents
- Getting re-acquainted with some more modern coding practices and actually shipping code on @Close again
- Exploring other creative ideas that may be impactful to the business
- Whatever else seems interesting :) 

I expect this time of being less-busy will be refreshing, give me better perspective, and ultimately help me come back as a better Leader.

Very grateful for the full support from @Steli & @anemitz and other EPD leadership coworkers to give me space to do this!

Management Sabbatical: Maker Time

Just getting back to regular work this week after an incredible week outside of Paris with the @Close team, followed by some vacation fun touring around Switzerland with my wife!

Remote is great, but there's nothing like in-person time for re-energizing teams on a laser-focused vision.

We set a clarified product vision and shared roadmaps, showed did a bunch of AI demos from engineers and non-engineers alike, and just had some good valuable in-person relationship & brainstorming time.

Paris Retreat

Everyone loves to hate on cold sales calls & emails.

Normally I do too. Annoyed by volume of junk email. Annoyed by people finding my cell phone # to try to sell SaaS or recruiting services to @Close

But just now I got a cold call on my cell. Just when I was about to hang up...

I realized they were providing a solution to a problem that I have a burning need to solve right now – one of our top product priorities!

Similar happened last week – a cold email from another SaaS company that meets the same burning need.

Those two emails/calls just hit different because they offer a solution to a real, active need of mine. I couldn't help but engage! One of them looks so good it's a real consideration for us to purchase soon – I'm really happy they reached out.

People wonder why cold outbound sales works – this is why. When you can be highly targeted in your outreach + offer a great solution to problems they're likely to have... it doesn't feel like spam. It even feels helpful.

Cold Sales

Started reading through "Remote Works" – good stuff for any manager or leader in a remote team. Also was cool to get a few of my quotes in print in this one.

About to kick off an "Async Week" next week at @Close within Eng/Product/Design.

We work pretty asynchronously normally and don't have a ton of meetings, but we use Async Weeks to flex our async muscles further with 0 prescheduled meetings during the week.

The idea is to encourage deep work and be extra thoughtful about our communication.

After doing a couple test runs, the team overwhelmingly agreed we should do these Async Weeks regularly. We follow a Shape Up inspired product development process with 6-week Cycles and 2 week cool downs, so we're doing Async once every couple months.

Managers are also encouraged to have an async (written or @Loom) 1:1s during that week, which has been a nice forcing function to encourage questions/answers that may require  reflection vs. an off-the-cuff answer.

Some good questions (that I stole)

Biggest hesitation heard was "we already don't have many meetings". Also very common for new hires to tell us we work much more async than their previous companies. I think these are good things!

As our team grows (EPD now at 35) we'll continue to experiment with how to work.

What would you get done if your calendar looked like this?

Async Weeks

Good thread on Product Engineers.

Over time I’ve learned engineers can be motivated by different things:
- Hard problems
- Performance/scalability
- Elegant code or system design
- Deeply understanding their craft

All are valuable but very different than Product Engineers. https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/1631700836609818635

When a startup is tiny they need everyone to wear multiple hats and the “product engineer” role is most crucial IMO.

Over time specialization is necessary and the hard/important thing is good collaboration cross-functionally.

But still, working with engineers that are especially laser focused on delivering user-facing product / customer value is special.

Original thread: https://twitter.com/_swanson/status/1631691930345037824

Why is it hard to have/hire true Product Engineers past the early startup phase? One big reason is that technical complexity, design quality, and also "risk of shipping the wrong thing" all increase as a company grows.

Even just taking technical complexity, the larger the company, the less likely any one engineer will be capable of creating an entire user-facing feature independently in high-quality way.

Product Engineers

In case I'm not the only person for whom TreasuryDirect's login form virtual keyboard is infuriating... 

I wrote a little browser extension to make the password field editable:
https://github.com/philfreo/password-enabler-extension 

It's not published in any browser extension stores yet (let me know if you care!) but it can be downloaded &amp; used in dev mode...

TreasuryDirect password field

Simplest way to have good SaaS technical support is to not ask a customer for any additional info without trying to reproduce the problem or get that info yourself first.

Got my 5yo LEGO Boost for Christmas – really impressed, fun way to get kids into programming/robotics.

@LEGO_Group https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1611160877977190407 

iPad app is high quality – simple enough 5yo can do it with very little help (but it’s fun to do with him). We’ve only built 1 of 5 programmable robots so far, definitely a high value of fun/learning for one kit. 

https://amzn.to/3iaZgKM

LEGO Boost

Might be going overboard organizing my kids LEGO… 

Labels/PDF: https://brickarchitect.com/labels/#download_lego_brick_labels

Drawers: https://amzn.to/3vg3UK6