Rands in Repose: Mastering the Art of Managing with Michael Lopp (Apple, Palantir, Slack, Pinterest) and Michael Sippey (Descript, Medium, Twitter)
Last week, Enrich members and select guests gathered for an intimate conversation with Michael Lopp. Lopp writes Rands in Repose, runs a private Slack community for 30,000 leaders, and is the author of three books with multiple editions: Small Things, Done Well, The Software Developer’s Career Handbook, and Managing Humans. He’s also the co-host of the podcast The Important Thing.
To paraphrase Michael Sippey (Enrich member and former product leader at Descript, Medium, and Twitter), Lopp’s book Managing Humans is the “the book that the people who work for you wish you had read.”
Michael Lopp is also an accomplished engineering leader; previously holding leadership positions at Palantir, Slack and Pinterest during each company’s hyper-growth stage. He is currently a senior engineering leader at Apple working on top-secret projects.
We were lucky enough to join him and Michael Sippey for an insightful and hilarious discussion about management, collaboration, writing, and growing at the Bloomberg Beta offices.
If you’d been there, here’s what you’d still be thinking about today:
Leadership is about giving things away and allowing others to thrive. A lot of leaders don't understand that their job is to make themselves irrelevant. Instead, they want control; they want to be involved in every step. A better approach is to give everyone who works for you the strategy, goals, resources, skills, etc. so that they don't need you anymore. When you trust them, they trust you more and they grow - and they push you up! (This comment was the thing we’re still thinking about most a few days later).
Writing makes you a better leader. Jennifer Bailey (VP, Internet Services - Apple Pay at Apple) once asked Lopp if writing makes you a better leader. He confirmed it does, as it forces you to think deeply and structure your thoughts. As he put it, “writing makes you pass something through your fingers and give it sanity and structure.” Writing isn’t the only way to do this - some leaders do this verbally or socially, or any number of other ways, but for Michael Lopp writing is the way to distill the truth.
An ideal team structure is a power “tripod” between product, engineering and design. For non-enterprise companies, Lopp advocates for “product engineers” who have a deep knowledge of how the product is built and a vast understanding of the complete product (not just individual features). That doesn’t mean engineers can run everything (though Lopp used to think they should) - many functions are best run by specialists in that function: real estate, marketing, etc.
We also jotted down some truly genius points on leading vs. managing, how to be transparent without introducing instability, and a shortlist of Lopp’s favorite AI products. To get access to the rest of our notes…join Enrich!