Of all the skills you could attribute to high-performers–motivation, tenacity, creativity–writing rarely makes the list.

Yet, it doesn’t matter whether you’re leading a team, launching a newsletter, or building a personal brand, good writing is a superpower.

As Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart and former President of Google Apps explains:

“Words and software share a wonderful attribute: Write them once and they can benefit an infinite audience at no additional expense.”

Writing is so much more than just a transference of information. Yet reaping the benefits of good writing is harder than it looks. …

When you’re heads-down working on a huge project, it’s easy to forget that the smallest things can sometimes have the biggest impact on your success.

Let’s say you’re working for NASA and your job is to get a rocket to the moon (no biggie, right?) But during your pre-launch checklist, you discover that you’re off target by 0.1 degrees. There are so many other major factors to worry about. And what’s 0.1 degrees anyway?

Well, a mile into space, you’ll only be off by 9.2 feet. …

When you’re trying to grow your business it’s easy to get CATV-customer acquisition tunnel vision. Acquiring new customers is sexy. It’s exciting. And it makes you feel good because more people want what you’ve made.

But what happens when those users decide they want to leave?

The majority of advice on offboarding focused on employee offboarding-the process you go through when a teammate leaves. The goal of employee offboarding is to help you understand what went wrong, why they chose to leave, and how you can improve your culture and workflows to keep future employees happy.

It’s a powerful opportunity…

There’s a saying in the music industry that the easiest way to ruin a song is to keep working on it. Add enough effects, extra guitar parts, or more cowbell, and you’ll turn Woody Guthrie into Guns N’ Roses.

Knowing when a piece of art is “done” is subjective and often difficult to define. But that can’t be the case with projects, features, or products.

Without a clear definition of done, your development team doesn’t know what they’re working towards, your stakeholders are free to increase the scope, and your users most likely end up with a product that’s cluttered…

There’s no denying that we’re living through uncertain times. The spread of COVID-19 has forced more people than ever to adapt to working from home.

Along with relearning how to communicate and collaborate when you’re not in the office one thing is becoming painfully clear: Home is rarely a distraction-free space.

Home is rarely a distraction-free space.

Out of the nearly 90,000 people who took StackOverflow’s latest developer survey, the majority said the greatest challenge to their productivity is a distracting work environment.

Whether it’s the ding of an incoming email or someone asking you to help out with family…

Not every project goes as planned. And while it’s great to celebrate your wins, the best teams (and project managers!) know it’s just as important to dig into your failures and capture lessons learned.

Unfortunately, when a project fails, the last thing most people want to do is dig into why it did.

Failure sucks.

But whether it’s pride or future deadlines that cause you to turn a blind eye, ignoring failed projects as a source of future knowledge is a huge mistake.

Even at a massive company like IBM, only 40% of projects successfully hit all their criteria. But…

What’s the difference between a project manager and a project leader?

If you’ve ever gone hunting for a definitive answer to this question, you probably ended up disappointed.

Depending on your company’s size, policies, and management, these terms might be used interchangeably or they might signify wildly different roles. Leadership is a hot topic in every part of a growing business. And if you have ambitions to lead a project team, then you need to understand exactly what makes a project leader different from a project manager.

So what does it take to get your team up on top of their standing desks reciting “ O Captain, my captain “ to…

With the power to fit our workday into our pocket and the unrelenting rise of “always on” work culture, its no wonder so many people struggle with work-life balance.

According to a Harvard Business School survey, 94% of service professionals put in 50+ hours a week. And while some people claim long hours are necessary, study after study shows that when we lose work-life balance, everyone suffers the consequences.

Once we pass a certain threshold of working hours, our sleep starts to become impaired; we’re more likely to feel depressed and stressed; and can even have a harder time communicating…