Hello friends,

Greetings from Utrecht!

I don't know about you, but I've had a pretty good start to the year.

Doing my annual review and restating my goals for the year left me feeling incredibly energized and optimistic for what's to come. Next to that, I've been having great talks with both current and potential clients about the problems we can work on together. Besides the intellectual stimulation, a practical outcome of this has been that my pipeline already contains more than the financial goals I'd set for myself for the entire year. This takes a lot of the stress out of self-employment, meaning I can focus all of my energy on doing great work with great clients.

As part of the goals I've set for myself, I'm still working on re-summarizing most of the book notes in Better Book Notes. To keep myself a bit more accountable and provide transparency, I'm going to include a counter in the "at a glance" section from now on.

When the counter hits zero, I will increase the price of the notes a bit to reflect the higher production cost. I'll then add a new counter for the 15-or-so books I've read since starting the re-summarization. When those are done, I'll increase the price a bit again to what will likely be its final price for a good while.

All of which is to say - if you've been on the fence about getting the notes, now is the time to get it, as it will only get more expensive moving forward.

Today at a glance:

• Essay: The secret to better 1-on-1s
• Adapting your leadership style as your team grows
• The dawn of mediocre computing
• The true promise of Web3
• Book notes left to summarize in backlog: [11]

The Secret to Better 1-On-1s

One-on-one meetings are one of the most powerful tools you have for driving alignment in your company. The problem is that most companies don't prioritize them.

For example, in one of my roles at a gaming start-up, I would travel to and from work together with my manager. Our best conversations about the business happened during these hours. Free from the day-to-day restraints of the office environment, we were free to brainstorm and dream about what the company could be, and how we could get there. We were looking at the big picture, and I could clearly see my role in it.

And then we moved office, and these talks just... stopped. No more commute, no more one-on-ones with my manager.

Slowly but surely, I lost touch with the bigger picture for the company, and my own role in it. I wasn't as enthousiastic as I was before, and I eventually moved on from that role. Had the commute talks been replaced by regular one-on-one meetings, I'm convinced it would have made a difference.

And as valuable as one-to-one meetings are in any industry, they're especially important in the fast-paced world of videogame development. These regular check-ins offer an opportunity to connect with team members on a personal level, gather feedback, and ensure everyone is (and stays!) on the same page.

The question, then, is how to have productive and effective one-on-one meetings with your reports that make the most of the time you set apart for them. Here's a blueprint that will get you started.

Frequency and Length

One-on-one meetings should be a priority and held regularly, preferably once a week. Ideally, these last for 60 minutes, but this can vary depending on the number of reports. Radical Candor author Kim Scott suggests that the commitment to one-on-one meetings should form a natural bottleneck for the amount of reports you can have. If you're starting to feel like you have too many meetings, you have too many reports. In that case, consider cutting back to 25-minute meetings every two weeks.

Agenda

The agenda for each meeting should be set by the report. The goal is to keep things light and focused on building a relationship. Avoid diving too deeply into work-related topics, as the focus should be on checking in with the person, not the work.

Your Role

As the manager, your role in one-on-one meetings is to give and receive feedback. One way to structure these conversations is to ask CEO coach Matt Mochary's "Five Magic Questions":

• How are you feeling about your life at work?
• How are you feeling about your work-from-home setup?
• How are we performing as a company?
• What is it like to work with the rest of the team?
• What is it like to work with me?

For each question, follow up by asking: "What would get it to the next level?" This helps keep the conversation focused on continuous improvement and growth.

Red Flags

While one-on-one meetings are generally a positive experience, there are some red flags to look out for.

• If a report starts cancelling meetings frequently, it may indicate they don't feel it's worth their time.
• If the meeting consists of updates that could have easily been sent in an email, encourage them to use their time more constructively.
• If the report only shares good news, ask explicitly for the bad news as well.
• If there's no criticism, ask: "What should I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?"
• And finally, if there's no agenda, it's important to ask why. Emphasize the report's responsibility in making the most of this time.

Done well, one-on-one meetings are a critical part of building a strong, healthy team. By taking the time to check in with each person, gather feedback, and address any red flags, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards a common goal.

The Best Bits

​Adapting your leadership style: In this HBR essay, former VP of Product Design at Facebook Julie Zhuo shares her experience of navigating the contrasting challenges of managing small and large teams. Insightful read for managers with (rapidly) growing teams.

​The dawn of mediocre computing: Great essay by Venkatesh Rao, commenting on the implications of ChatGPT and similar tools. He argues that the true standard by which AI should be judged is not whether it's better than the best humans, but whether it can achieve indistinguishability from mediocre humans.

​The true promise of web3: This article, shared by Cory Doctorow on Twitter, argues that the current web3 discourse is overly focused on decentralization-via-redundancy (read: ledgers). Instead, we should be focused on the more desirable decentralization-via-subsidiarity: essentially, a network of networks.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn

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