The 5-Minute Startup CTO #11

Code reviews, User feedback, Leadership journal

Here are your picks for this week:

If it ain’t code, don’t fix it

Code reviews are rightfully seen as an essential, healthy practice. But adopting them is not free of challenges - bottlenecks, bike-shedding and personal conflicts to name a few.

So hats off to Google for sharing their code review process - full of great guidelines for both developers and code reviewers, all no doubt born out of experience. Dev teams could do worse that adopting these to save themselves a lot of trial and error.

Process makes perfect

As a startup grows from a few early adopters to dozens of customers, gathering and understanding user feedback becomes more complex. Intercom have a nice write-up on how to collect, qualify and process user feedback at scale - to better focus and act on what truly matters.

Something to try

A simple and powerful idea to encourage quiet reflection: keep a leadership journal! I especially liked the 10 questions provided, great to trigger interesting thoughts.

As an alternative, or a complement, I recommend the 5-Minute Journal, which I have been using for several years. So simple it’s difficult not to stick with it!

I hope you enjoyed this. Have a great week

Fabrice

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The 5-Minute Startup CTO: every Sunday, 3 top insights in 5 minutes for startup CTOs and Tech Leads. Subscribe for free, and share!

Hand-picked by Fabrice, a UK-based consulting CTO. Let me know if you need help with your startup!