142: Jason Cohen - Learning to Hire and Manage a Team

07/01/20 • 55 min

Full Stack Radio

Topics include:

How do you decide what role to hire for?
Why it's so important to figure out exactly what your biggest struggle is before hiring
How to decide what the most important thing to focus on is when it feels like there's too much to do
Why it's important to consider the impact of hiring for a specific role on your own happiness vs. just the company's bottom line
Coming to terms with the fact that you can't do everything, and why it's important to focus on something instead of spreading yourself thin across everything
Mistakes people make when they start managing a team for the first time

Links:

Jason's blog, one of the greatest treasure troves of startup advice on the internet
Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business, one of Jason's MicroConf talks

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Topics include:

How do you decide what role to hire for?
Why it's so important to figure out exactly what your biggest struggle is before hiring
How to decide what the most important thing to focus on is when it feels like there's too much to do
Why it's important to consider the impact of hiring for a specific role on your own happiness vs. just the company's bottom line
Coming to terms with the fact that you can't do everything, and why it's important to focus on something instead of spreading yourself thin across everything
Mistakes people make when they start managing a team for the first time

Links:

Jason's blog, one of the greatest treasure troves of startup advice on the internet
Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business, one of Jason's MicroConf talks

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Previous Episode

141: Jason Fried - Running the Tailwind Business on Basecamp

Topics include:

How did Basecamp evolve from being a team/client communication tool to focusing on keeping your whole company organized, and is it really even that different?
How exactly should we set up Basecamp on day one to support a small 3-5 person remote software team? What tools should we use and which ones should we ignore for now?
Finding the balance between being organized enough and splitting things up too much
How big should projects be? Is "HEY v1" a project, or is a project something more like "HEY File Attachments"?
What tools do you normally enable for regular projects, and how do you use them?
How are you normally using chat at the individual project level?
Why todo lists should be created by the individuals doing the work, and not the people assigning the work
How should we use the company HQ project? What are some less obvious ideas we can apply there that can make a big difference?
Using a "what we're working on" project to keep everyone on the team in the loop and feeling connected
Using "heartbeats" to summarize the work a team has been doing over a period of time for the rest of the company
Advice on bringing on new employees and how to assign them their first project
When you're such a writing-driven company, how do you make sure decisions get written down when they are made in real-time instead of naturally occurring within Basecamp?

Screenshots:

Links:

Basecamp
Shape Up, Basecamp's recent book on how they work
Going Remote: Basecamp Walkthrough, a livestream where Jason and DHH go over their real Basecamp account

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Next Episode

143: Rich Harris - Svelte and Defending the Modern Web

Topics include:

What is Svelte and how is it different than other JS frameworks in the space?
What special behavior does the Svelte compiler layer on top of vanilla JS syntax and why?
Why the lack of render functions in Svelte isn't a real problem in practice
What are you giving up when you choose to build your application with something like Rails instead of JavaScript?
Why should we be trying to write our applications in a single language, and why should it be JS?
What's wrong with striving to write an application entirely in a language like Ruby instead of entirely in JS?
Why HEY doesn't really make a good argument against the modern web
Thoughts on bundle sizes, code-splitting, and why aggressive code-splitting is still better than frequent round trips to a server-rendered app
How Svelte and Sapper handle SSR
Why page transitions are the killer argument for building SPAs if we want to be able to compete with native experiences
Should we be thinking about JavaScript applications as native applications in terms of offline-support and eventual consistency, or should we keep thinking of them as webpages that depend on the network?

Links:

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.