Podcast

How to lead a development team when you're not technical

Sophia Matveeva · Tech for Non-Techies Free Beginner

Written directly for the non-technical founder trying to tell whether engineering is on track, which is the heart of this question. It focuses on managing outcomes and priorities rather than code, so you can spot a wrong direction without reading the codebase. Practical and grounded in the founder-developer relationship.

  • Manage outcomes and priorities, not hours or lines of code.
  • Insist on seeing working software at a regular cadence.
  • You can judge whether something works without being able to read how it was built.

The question it answers

  1. What are the warning signs a developer is building the wrong thing?

Read with it

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  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. 200+ candid conversations with Indian founders and investors on how they actually found their idea, spotted a trend, and... Apple Podcasts Podcast · podcast series (45-90 min episodes) The Neon Show (formerly 100x Entrepreneur) Siddhartha Ahluwalia
  4. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
  5. The most-quoted primary source on why founders should launch fast and iterate, short, canonical, and from the co-founder of YC.... paulgraham.com Article · ~8 min read Startups in 13 Sentences Paul Graham
  6. Basecamp's battle-tested, opinionated system for shipping meaningful work in fixed cycles without endless backlogs, a primary... Basecamp / 37signals Book · free online book Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters Ryan Singer
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