Viewing profile — edmondlau

My mission is to: “Empower engineers and technical leaders with the tools and mindsets to perform at their highest levels, so that they create the meaningful impact they’re capable…

Awesome, I'm happy you enjoyed it! In some sense, it might actually be easier to tell at a startup because what matters at a startup is growth. That can be growth of revenue (if yo…

The perspective I'll offer is that good sales copy is also a skill, just like engineering or any of the other skills you mention. To be good at sales copy also involves many factor…

Thank you! It means a lot to me hear its impact on you -- stories from readers are what keep me excited about doing this work.

Wow, that is an amazing story. Thanks for sharing. It really hammers home how hard it is to disentangle good & bad advice and how easy it is for an outsider looking into to really …

They're orthogonal dimensions. My fault that this isn't clearer. Here's a simpler ordering of operations: 1. Start with the most valuable, highest-leverage thing you want to focus …

Awesome! Thanks for adding your notes to the discussion.

I like the bottom-line perspective you provide at the end, of "success = preparedness + luck." Preparedness is what we can train ourselves for, and preparedness also has the effect…

For every person who rode a powerful technology wave, there are also many others who rode the wrong ones. One of my favorite stories from Drew was that when he first started Dropbo…

Your observation is a key reason why taking the time to define your impact and to measure it is so important. As Drucker says, what gets measured gets improved. In business context…

At Quip, we run one coding interview that happens on a laptop, and where your conversation and discussions with the interviewer, including how you handle suggestions and feedback, …

Yep! I've read The Effective Executive. One of my big motivators for writing the book was that there were all these great ideas that were encapsulated in business books or personal…

There's for sure a tricky balance on what fits into a CS education. I remember when I was at MIT (oof, over a decade ago), many project-based CS courses where students were just pu…

Your observation is a great one, and I'd love to see more data on this as well. A related point, though, also rings true. Soft skills like being a good coach and effective listenin…

If there are engineers you highly respect on your team, their code is a great place to start. Otherwise, many top tech companies now open source software that they've written inter…

I also just remembered that I wrote this blog post a while back on what self-publishing taught me about shipping products. It also shares a few vignettes and lessons from my self-p…

Two things I've learned since writing the book: 1) It's also important to align your energy levels and what you want to do with your list of high-leverage tasks. When you're really…

Yes, "high-leverage" is a phrase I use in the book. I learned about leverage when I read Andy Grove's High Output Management. Why the word leverage? Time is our most limited resour…

In many ways, it was similar to building a startup product. I quit my full-time job at Quora and spent ten months full-time on the book (with bits of traveling). Like any other pro…

It's less about management and technical ability, and more about soft skills and hard skills. A recent Washington Post article shared an analytical study from Google on what made e…

Hi! I'm Edmond, the author of the book. Happy to answer any questions about my two-year journey in self-publishing the book.