Templates from Best Operators

"The best way to 'manage up' is to deliberately over-communicate 3 things."

"Successful product execution relies on decoupling the 'Why' from the 'How'."

"A rational decision-making framework designed to remove ego and emotional bias from software acquisition strategies. It evaluates the 'Build vs. Buy' dilemma through specific dimensions including Core Capability (is it your main value prop?), Cost (ecosystem TCO vs. just headcount), Complexity (does off-the-shelf fit?), Competence (internal skill vs. opportunity cost), and Cohesion (integration with existing systems)."

"For early-stage startups (pre-PMF), OKRs are too slow and To-Do lists are too granular. Weekly Goal' (WG) is the right unit"

"A holistic evaluation model that assesses engineers across four distinct dimensions—Project, Better Engineering, People, and Better Organization—visualized like a 'Pokémon stats polygon' to allow for diverse individual strengths while prioritizing business outcomes over simple effort."

"Well executed perf reviews can be the highest-leverage for career acceleration."

"A holistic 'Voice of Customer' framework that unifies disparate feedback channels—support tickets, direct emails, public reviews, NPS surveys, and interviews—into a single pane of glass. This approach allows product leaders to correlate technical incidents (e.g., log delays) with sentiment drops and prioritize roadmap items based on multi-source validation rather than isolated complaints."

"Effective one-on-ones separate conversations into 3 distinct cadences: weekly for tactical, monthly for happiness/feedback, and bi-annually for career development."

"This essay highlights a subtle but powerful truth: engineering performance issues often stem less from ability and more from mismatched expectations. Sebastiano shows how vague directives, shifting priorities, and unspoken assumptions quietly undermine even strong engineers. His core insight is that clarity—specific outcomes, shared definitions of "good," and aligned understanding between manager and IC—is the real engine of consistent performance, and most problems dissolve when expectations are explicit rather than implied."

"Inspired by Timothy Clark's model, this template presents a pyramid approach to shaping high-performing engineering teams. It walks leaders through four levels of team safety, offering practical guidance on fostering inclusiveness, continuous learning, autonomy, and candor, while also highlighting the key dysfunctions to watch out for at each stage."

"Balance high-velocity engineering with quality control by allowing autonomous shipping to 'Early Access' tiers, while gating General Release behind a rigorous, data-backed checklist with a strict 48-hour 'review or it ships' leadership deadline."

"Shift the focus of AI quality assurance from subjective 'Answer Evaluation' to objective 'Retrieval Evaluation.' By isolating and testing the retrieval component separately from the generation component using ground truth pairs (query + source excerpt), teams can identify 'garbage in' failures 20x faster than testing final answers and scientifically determine the optimal context cutoff threshold."

"Psychological safety is not a binary state but a sequential hierarchy—Inclusion, Learner, Contributor, and Challenger safety—that acts as an essential nutrient for team energy and innovation, much like Vitamin B complex does for the body."

"Great code reviews are achieved by dismantling engineering silos and balancing three specific quality factors—the Pull Request, the Reviewer, and the Reviewee—supported by automated communication workflows (e.g., Slack bots) to ensure visibility and prevent approvals from getting lost in emails."