David Singleton

If you put someone through an interview process, you've spent maybe 8 hours with them. A reference has spent thousands of hours. References are often where you get the best conviction on a hire.

A value without a practice behind it is just words. You need a predictable, regular activity that makes the value real — otherwise it never actually happens.

Engineer Occasion: clear your calendar for 3-4 days, join a team, pick up a small feature, ship it to production, and keep a friction log the whole time. It gives managers more context for the next year of prioritization decisions than almost anything else.

Friction logging: pick a specific user persona, walk through your product end-to-end, and write a stream-of-consciousness log of every point of friction. Do it on a regular cadence. Senior leaders should do it too — recursively at every level.

Stripe deploys changes to its core API 16.4 times a day on average with 99.999% uptime. The secret: automated tests in 15 min, auto-deploy to production in ~45 min total. Feedback from users in the morning, fix live by end of day.

Stripe's planning uses an 'inverted W' process: teams surface ideas → leaders synthesize into a draft company strategy → take it back down to teams → bring it back up → distribute with full context. Works well at scale.