Percy Wegmann

Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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2 Comments

Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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As per Brandon Suponchick, CTO of Aviture, in his session at the Kansas City Developer's Conference called "The Agile Architect: Building Product From The Trenches, Not The Tower," one of the many insights he shared was the importance of testing but even more foundational is that code needs to be testable. In order to have "architecture that evolves at the same pace as your business requirements," we need to start with code that is easy to test, and tests should be holistic and stable. If code design is poor and difficult test, our ability to change systems and deploy quickly will be limited. We need to be able to ensure our code will not break through sufficient tests. This includes unit tests. #KCDC #KCDC2024

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There's a big problem in ND: there aren't enough people. Automation is the solution. The state is now supporting businesses to integrate automation - including AI - through their Automate ND grant program. I'm going to share how to use AI to take advantage of the program in a webinar next week. Find link in the comments! Learn how: 1. Primary sector businesses are integrating AI 2. How to apply for the grant using AI 3. How tools like Chipp could qualify for the grant so you can start automating Send me a dm if you have questions!

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I am starting up a new consulting service. The idea was born out of how many times I have a potential client for NS804 reach out with a horror story about their development process. Now let’s be honest most dev agencies and developers are not setting out to do poor work. They simple are not. Some are, but most are not. 90% of the problem lies in communication. So I figured I cannot write software for everyone in the world, but I can advise many more and take an help mitigate the risk on the company and start up. So if you are a start up, or small business that is having trouble me with a software project, is contemplating to engage a developer DM me so we can talk and I can share how I can help you out to avoid pitfalls and likely get your project back on track to success.

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The vast majority of content on software engineering I see out there is tailored towards teams that are already high-performing. This makes sense for a few different reasons: high-performers generally write these articles so they write what they know, it's fun and exciting to talk about the latest and greatest, etc. However most teams have a ton of low-hanging fruit that they can address to dramatically improve team performance with low effort lifts. It's very hard to tune an F1 car to go just a bit faster but the simple fact is that most engineering teams are like a commuter car... just by taking a few minutes to put air in the tires you can see dramatic handling and mileage improvements on the daily commute. What are some easier goals to aim for to improve a struggling engineering team? In no particular order: * How big is the average MR/PR? In general a 1,000 line MR/PR isn't four times harder to review than a 250 line MR/PR, it's much much harder. Several thousand line MRs/PRs dropped every few weeks across a team cause lots of issues including merge conflicts and taking a long time to review. After discussing with Product, can tickets be smaller so that merges aren't so big? * How long on average does an MR/PR stay outstanding before getting merged? The older an MR/PR is at merge time the higher the chance of merge conflicts and merge conflicts are a way to generate work but deliver no value to the end user. MRs/PRs that take a long time to merge could be indicative of the team not correctly accounting for the time it takes to review. Should tickets have bigger estimates? * If you're running sprints (and if you're on an underperforming team I recommend switching to sprints ASAP as they bring into focus these types of issues), how often do you have carry-over and how big is it? Improving these estimates is not just an exercise in accounting. A team that estimates work well is one that is not rushed, performant, reviews well, and has time to think about the highest priority tech debt. But most importantly a team that estimates work well is one that delivers on their promises. You may be on a team where these goals have already been achieved or never were an issue in the first place. That's great! But if your engineering team has been underperforming these could be some of the best places to first look. What's some low hanging fruit that you've seen on engineering teams that when addressed had the biggest impact?

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Ticket velocity isn't the *only* measure of an engineering team's effectiveness. At a high level, the best engineering organizations can predictably deliver against the priorities set forth by the business. That involves proper monitoring (through metrics) and coaching by effective managers. Here's a few non-velocity metrics I use to measure my organization: - Tenure of the team. - Platform uptime. - Number of critical issues in the last 8wks. - Automated code coverage percentages. - *Employee* vs customer detected bugs. - Number of requirements missed during project planning. Read more about my leadership style here: https://lnkd.in/geP2m7DJ #metrics #engineeringeffectiveness #team #leadership #software #tech #startup #management #dora #space #agile #projectmanagement #podcast

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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12 Comments

🟠I built a prompt evaluation tool that allows you to test dozens of different prompt variations in a fraction of the time it used to take me and open sourced it. I've been doing a ton of prompt engineering recently for my API - and testing long prompts with 3 different placeholders, each with a dozen unique variables for each one was getting unmanageable. I was pretty surprised to find nothing exactly like this existed yet (or at least I was able to find) so I just hacked together a solution for myself. I give you: prompt evaluation tool - Auto detects placeholders in prompt and creates tables for defining variables for each placeholder (can define in the table or upload a json file) - Runs all API request async (takes 10 seconds vs 5 mins) - Results displayed in a table for easy comparison - Integrates with Claude API That's it. Super simple but it has been very useful for me, so figured others might appreciate it. I open sourced it and hosted the app on Hugging Face so you can use it for free with your own API keys. Loom (1 min) shows how it works but you can just use it here: https://lnkd.in/gx9cT8hc https://lnkd.in/gCCCYDv3

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Time to be fair.... In past posts, I have been less than complimentary of the DLC regulations that now make it more difficult to implement SMS into an application. I understand that all sorts of organizations use (and misuse) SMS millions (billions?) of times daily. I get that the new regulations make an attempt to reduce, as much as possible, SMS Spam. All in all, it just seemed like another example of hand-cuffing the good guys while trying to put some limits on the bad actors. My experience at the time was with #Twilio... and I tried to make it very clear that my frustration wasn't necessarily with them - they were doing the best they could to handle an avalanche of organizations trying to comply with new rules that everyone was stumbling their way through. I've been using Twilio for years and can't complain AT ALL about the platform performance for my particular small-scale needs. It was the nearly impossible approval process that really soured me. After nearly a year of living without application-based SMS (email only), I decided to revisit. The application was already all wired up for the feature - it was just dormant. This time around I was able to get up and running in 3 days... 99% of which was the DLC approval - which happened today. Kudos #Twilio for suffering through the tough days and making SMS once again something that can be done with very little pain. #twilio #sms #dlcapproval

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It’s rare to find someone who has gone through a decade scaling developer workflows in a single company. I sat down with Kent Wills recently discussing the evolution of developer platforms at Yelp and dove into their ownership architecture. Listen to full episode on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Youtube: https://lnkd.in/g722icVw Some key takeaways: 1️⃣ Yelp transitioned from a monolithic codebase to a service-oriented architecture that improved code ownership and productivity. 2️⃣ Yelp has internally built most of the tooling circled around ownership to handle tech debt and track vulnerabilities. 3️⃣ Yokyo Drift is an internal tool to support migrations across the organization Pre-commit is an internal tool (now open source) to help standardize the coding practices 4️⃣ AI-powered coding assistance has the potential to further enhance productivity and reduce repetitive work. #developerproductivity #ownership

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I’m frequently asked about our tech stack at Mosaic.. which is awesome because it gives me an excuse to write a nerdy LinkedIn post about it! As a tech-enabled GC, we have a very cross-functional team of designers and full stack engineers. Our real secret sauce (and the challenge of any full stack / tech-enabled business) is how operations and technology collaborate. This has a much greater impact than our tech stack, but for those curious - here it is! :-)  TypeScript React NextJS tRPC Tailwind Postgres AWS (Lambda, RDS, S3, ECS, Cloudfront) SST If you’re in software or con-tech (and interested in learning more), let me know and I can share more about how we’re using them. Or, if you’re tracking other softwares relevant to the construction or real estate industry, feel free to drop them in the comments below. I’d love to see the industry do more technology sharing!

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I was recently asked what’s the single most important trait that sets apart good leaders? My answer - providing air cover. In other words, delegating thoughtfully. Too many times I see leaders simply adding stuff to the plates of their directs without helping take something off. Passing down asks from the top with no filtration or sense of priority whatsoever. As a leader you have a broader view of the landscape than your team. Use it. Resist the instinct to simply push things down as opaque directives. For instance, something like “Hey this just cropped up. Looks urgent. Can you take care of it?” simply suggests ‘something’ has to be done. But the recipient has no idea why it’s urgent, what the impact is and what is needed of them. Instead “Hey this just cropped up and seems to be affecting customers. I’d like an update on the number of customers impacted so we can better prioritize.” gives them the context they need and makes it clear what you need from them. Not all situations present itself with context, especially in fast paced environments. But it’s key to be transparent, by acknowledging lack of context and actually following up when more info becomes available. “This is a developing situation and there isn’t a lot of context. Until we have more, treat this as top priority. I’ll follow up when we have more.” - goes a long way in fostering a vested interest and a sense of partnership. Without air cover, your team may self organize to a point. But sooner than later they will stop seeing things as a challenge and start feeling jaded. Instead, go that little extra mile, and you will greatly increase the chances of better outcomes, and preserve your teams’ sanity.

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Story time: I talked to Plaid's DevRel team last month I learned 30% of devs who get API access NEVER onboard because they never make it through the integration process. Imagine you're Plaid and you worked super hard to get developers to use your products — but then they quit and use a competitor because yours is too hard. 𝑻𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒎𝒆𝒂𝒏𝒔 𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒖𝒆 𝒐𝒏 𝑨𝑷𝑰 𝒖𝒔𝒂𝒈𝒆. This is the problem that we're aiming to solve at Layer. We add an Integration Expert (ie. extension) on top of VSCode to help DevRel teams at companies like Plaid make onboarding devs easier.  Like a cake with icing, VSCode is better with another Layer.

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I don't usually talk politics on here, but this is an exception I am prepared to make as the proposed Fast Track, in its current form, is that outrageous and has to be stopped. I am not opposed to fast tracking certain projects that this country needs, hell no, do it, by all means, BUT the way this government is proposing to go about things, giving just 3 ministers ultimate control and ultimate power of what gets fast tracked allowing them to bypass literally every single protection this country has in place to protect our country and its environment, is simply overreach, dangerous, undemocratic, and quite frankly blatantly open for corruption as has already been shown by the number of recent conflict of interest stories around donations and mining companies linked directly to ministers that are one of the 3 ministers that will have ultimate control. There are companies already on the provisional fast track list that have had various projects denied before for by concerned groups, ministries, ministers, select comittees, and even the courts, yet these projects are now back on the table and entirely within the control of 3 ministers that hate transparency, oversight and due process. So, if you share my concerns with how much control this bill gives with nearly zero oversight and transparency, then come along to this March for Nature and help STOP THE FAST-TRACK bill. This bill is dangerous and needs to be stopped. This government needs to hear this in the strongest way possible.

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I've been improving the Communal Plot since it went live a couple weeks ago! The features I'm most proud of so far: - The plot updates fully in real-time! No need to refresh the browser to see new responses come in. - Analytics around percentiles, correlation, and clustering that also update in real-time as new responses come in. - Wordle-esque text sharing (this has been fun in my group chats!) - The timelapse feature which shows how today's plot was formed

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Met Aaron from CED (Council for Entrepreneurial Development)'s latest GRO cohort, and wow, this dude's onto something big. After my Product-Market Fit workshop, Aaron stuck out. He's building Celestic, and it's clear he's not messing around. He knows what needs to be done. We talked for ages about the problem he's tackling, not just his solution. This is a reminder to all founders: fall in love with the problem, not your fix for it. That will morph. Aaron's a deep thinker. Our chat flew by, and I left wanting to keep it going for hours more. Keep an eye on Aaron and Celestic. I bet we'll be hearing a lot more about them soon, especially with his laser focus on the real issues. Miss ya already Aaron! #startups #entrepreneurship #productmarketfit #innovation

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I've been hard at work, getting ready to stand up Pixel Valley! Got a lot done on the conversation engine and created a quick StreamLit app to test it. Doesn't look like much, but I feel this is a big deal because it is "not just another chatbot". As you can see here, I am having a coherent conversation with an entire group of agents, that are each responding or not responding as appropriate. This was created with off-the-shelf gpt-3.5-turbo. Instead of using expensive fine tuning, it is accomplished using a combination of clever prompt engineering, RAG, and AI function calling. It's getting close!

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