Oren Ellenbogen's Thoughts, stories and ideas.
A few days ago, Brian Chesky of AirBnB shared an email he wrote back in 2013 to his team called Don’t fuck up the Culture . At that point, AirBnB raised more than $120MM in funding. It wasn’t “Don’t fuck up the servers”
“If only we had an option to create sub-tasks and use templates, we’d be x10 more productive. We could build more features. We could win!” — Everyone, all the time. Sadly, it’s all lies. In the recent years, there is a huge blossom
For those who don’t know, Leading Snowflakes is my first self-published eBook, taking everything I know about building a great engineering team and condensing it into a step-by-step guide. I wrote this book to help Engineering Managers or aspiring managers become more effective at
I’ve been listening to Scott Chacon ‘s great talk at Cultivate , and during that talk he was sharing how employees at GitHub get to pick their own tasks. They let people pick tasks using a very simple “decision algorithm”:   Crazy, eh? Or is it?
Part of our responsibilities as leaders, is to put our teammates first. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, uses the term “ The Leader’s Paradox ” – As managers and leaders, we need to care deeply and thoroughly about our people, while not worrying about what they think
 Some quirky team of awesome engineers. Obviously. Every time we are interviewing a candidate, may it be over the phone or in person, we invest significant time selling our team and company. We pull out our best story as we want them to get excited about joining us. We
Let me start with sharing an insight from Dan Ariely’s TED talk on “What makes us feel good about our work” (full list of insights from his talk can be found here ): The harder a project is, the prouder we feel about it The Study: Ariely
(discuss on Hacker News ) I believe that many team leaders feel constantly under fire because nobody tells them the entire story. They are too busy loading the ship with goods and pushing it forward, without thinking about their crew, their ship, or for that manner, the big blue ocean and
It all began at Reversim Summit 2013 , when Uri Nativ saw me wearing a t-shirt of SoftwareLeadWeekly : Yo @ orenellenbogen I hope you are giving away some of those cool #SoftwareLeadWeekly t-shirts — Uri Nativ (@unativ) February 18, 2013 Well, to be honest, I only printed a couple
Robots: They look cool, but they don’t give a damn. What if I would tell you that you are outsourcing one of the most powerful motivators at work, without even paying attention ? Do you remember the last time you got a gift at work for your birthday? Well,
Let’s say that you’ve just hired Emma, one of the most talented [title goes here] on the face of the planet! How cool is that, right?! If you’re like most of us, you’ve probably prepared a powerful (mac)laptop and a gigantic,
Three months ago, I’ve started a new side-project called SoftwareLeadWeekly – a weekly email that I curate, packed with great leadership and management articles. So far, I’ve sent 12 newsletters and collected A LOT of feedback regarding the website (where you can subscribe) and the
“Am I investing my full attention in my team’s deadlines at the expense of leading by example?” Deadlines, by nature, create a powerful feedback loop, where you get rewards such as external recognition from your boss/peers and internal ones by removing a task from your
For some, the term “Proactive Leadership” means being aware of gaps, obstacles and faults before it becomes noticeable to others. The problem though, is that noticing a problem and even taking care of it, doesn’t mean you’re being perceived as proactive leader. Let me
[ “ The Junction is an open house for entrepreneurs. Any active entrepreneur (regardless of his/her idea) is welcome to join, be a part of, and work at The Junction ” ] Imagine a place where amazing developers, marketers, creative, designers and biz-dev working on their own cool startup. This