Social Capital; Product Distribution; Leadership & LLMs; Team Cuts
Issue #60 Bytes
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Social Capital: The Compound Interest of Your Engineering Career
You know that feeling when a critical system fails and you have no one to call? This article by Rafa Páez shows how social capital—the trust, credibility, and relationships you build at work—can be your secret weapon to solve problems fast.
Think of it like a bank account: you make deposits by helping others, and you make withdrawals when you need urgent help. The article explains how to build this "social currency" through three key pillars—trust, credibility, and relationships—and why it's not the same as favoritism. It even offers a weekly playbook of micro-habits to help you get started.
Article of the Week ⭐
“The marketing leader is responsible for demand generation through various channels like advertising, content, and SEO.
Product’s role is to ensure that the product is/does what marketing promises.“
Beyond 'understanding': Why product managers must co-architect distribution
In an era where shipping features isn’t enough, distribution determines success. To meet this challenge, PMs must operate beyond their lane, in concert with marketing, sales, and leadership, especially in high-growth, complex environments.
Product quality alone no longer drives outcomes. Rapid software commoditization and rising user expectations mean that getting your product into users' hands. Keeping them engaged is the true differentiator.
PMs and the 3 Growth Models
Else breaks down how the PM’s influence on distribution shifts depending on the company’s primary growth engine:
Sales-led: PMs are feature suppliers for sales. Risk: turning into a support function.
Marketing-led: Product builds what marketing promises. Risk: over-optimizing for campaigns, not retention.
Product-led: PMs shape experience and onboarding. But PLG often depends on marketing or sales to prime the funnel.
Across models, the pattern persists: PMs adapt to distribution.
Macro Trends Raising the Bar
Four forces are pulling product teams out of their comfort zones:
Economic pressure is turning PMs into general managers with P&L awareness.
Generative AI speeds up delivery with distribution becoming the moat.
Exploding competition makes distribution strategy a survival skill.
PLG expectations force product to own discoverability and self-serve UX.
Distribution Is a Team Sport
To make smarter, faster decisions, companies must decentralize authority. Top-down orgs slow everything down. Else draws from Laloux’s “teal” organizations: decisions are shared, specialists act as coaches, and strategy is built collaboratively.
In one example, a startup treated GTM like a team mission. PMs, sales, marketing, and CS leaders shared concerns, tested assumptions, and made distribution a company-wide effort. PMs raised red flags and influenced pivots because the structure expected it.
How to Get Involved (Without Stepping on Toes)
Talk to your growth leads: Ask where distribution is breaking down
Map your GTM: Understand how leads are acquired, converted, and retained
Guess where things break: Note bottlenecks, gaps, missed handoffs
Test small bets: Try tweaks with buy-in from sales/marketing without waiting for permission
PMs are no longer feature factories. Your success now depends on how well you can influence what gets shipped and how it gets adopted. If you’re not shaping distribution, someone else is, and you’ll be stuck adapting to their decisions.
Other highlights 👇
Leadership co-processing with LLMs
James Stanier explores how LLMs can act as a co-processor for engineering leaders.
From tackling to-do lists to stress-testing big decisions, he outlines six practical modes of interaction:
1. Prompting
Keep an LLM open all day. When facing a non-trivial problem, ask it:
“What are the options I’m not seeing?”
“What would someone with a different viewpoint say?”
This habit injects momentum and expands your thinking.
2. Pair Prompting
Treat the LLM as a third participant in decision-making.
Great for async collaboration
Share the session link so others can see your reasoning
Use it during research, design reviews, or planning
3. Deep Research
LLMs replace hours of scattered web searches. Stanier uses them to:
Analyze competitors
Investigate legal or compliance topics
Explore new markets and customer segments
Just fire off a prompt and read the digest later.
4. Contrarian Thinking
Challenge your assumptions.
Ask the LLM to disagree with your decision
Force it to identify risks and alternative viewpoints
Use it before controversial calls or strategy shifts
5. Executive Assistant
Feed it your tasks, calendar, and priorities.
It will help structure your day
Identify what’s critical, what’s noise
Suggest where to delegate or defer
Use it to cut through mental fog.
6. Coach & Sounding Board
Use an LLM to prep for emotionally charged leadership moments.
Plan your messaging for reorgs or big changes
Anticipate how your team might respond
Reflect on your leadership style under pressure
Team got cut. Scope didn’t.
The roadmap’s still full. Half your team is gone. And now you’re on-call for systems you’ve barely touched.
In this sharp and relatable piece, Anton Zaides writes for every engineering manager who’s heard “do more with less” and felt the silent cost that follows. Layoffs are called “hard decisions” but the truly hard part is living with decisions like saying no to scope, customers, and pet projects. That rarely happens.
Anton offers two concrete levers for managers navigating this chaos:
Show the cost: Move the conversation beyond feature delivery. Highlight maintenance, support, and context-switching debt as first-class constraints.
Map the new reality: Reassess who owns what, and protect your team from hidden load and burnout. Sometimes “everyone knows everything” isn’t feasible anymore.
This is a call to shift from silent endurance to structured advocacy. A must-read if you’re inheriting systems, absorbing extra load, or trying to keep your team afloat while the company pretends everything’s fine.
If your scope just doubled but your team got halved, your job is to make the tradeoffs visible. No one else will do it for you.
Find Yourself 🌻
That’s it for Today!
Whether you’re innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
See you next week(end), Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Featured Authors - Rafa Páez, Else van der Berg, James Stanier, Anton Zaides
Sponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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