Managing people over time
Most advice about managing people is about the meeting: the one-on-one, the review, the feedback you rehearse on the walk to the room. The harder part is quieter, and it happens between the meetings. You form a read on someone, you mean to come back to it, and the next sprint closes over it. By the time it matters, at a review or a promotion call or a hard conversation, you're working from the last few weeks and treating them as the whole story.
These pages are about holding that read somewhere other than your own memory, where recency and noise wear it down. You write what you believe about each person as a plain sentence, say how sure you are in plain words, note what you notice when you notice it, and let the read change on the record instead of in your head. It never becomes a score on anyone, and it stays private. After a few months you can see not just what you concluded about someone, but how the read got there and when it moved.
If you've just made the jump, start with going from engineer to manager, then the day-to-day practice of keeping track of your reports; the 1:1 notes template has the fields ready to copy. If a review is bearing down, recency bias in performance reviews is the one to read, and the ten-question test will tell you how current your picture is before you write a word. There's a walkthrough of doing this in Notion and where a notes app stops keeping up, and, for the point where the roster outgrows what memory reliably holds, how many direct reports is too many.
From engineer to manager
The hardest part of the switch runs under the visible parts: holding an evolving understanding of several people at once, with memory as the only storage.
4 min read
How to keep track of your direct reports
A light habit for holding an evolving read on each person you manage: what to write down, how to let it change on the record, and how to keep the notes fair.
6 min read
A 1:1 notes template
The fields I fill in after each 1:1: the meeting note, what I noticed about the person, and the read I revise later. Works on paper or in any notes app.
5 min read
Recency bias in performance reviews
Why the last few weeks dominate a review, what the research does and doesn't show, and the cheap habit that gives you the whole arc back instead of memory.
6 min read
Managing your team in Notion
A simple Notion setup for keeping notes on the people you manage, the two things it does well, and the point where a flat notes tool stops keeping up.
5 min read
How well do you know your team?
Ten questions to answer from memory about someone you manage, how to check your answers, and what the age of your evidence says about your read of them.
4 min read
How many direct reports is too many?
Where the folklore numbers come from, what actually breaks as a team grows, and how to keep a real read on each person when there are nine of them, not four.
6 min read
Full disclosure: I make Continuum, a Mac app for exactly this practice. You write beliefs about the people you manage and revise them over time, with every earlier version kept underneath; you tag what you notice, and those notes fade unless you see the same thing again, so what surfaces is what's current; and it opens on the reads that have gone stale and the people you haven't written about in weeks. It does the remembering so the noticing stays yours. It never scores anyone, nothing leaves your Mac, and it's free for up to three people, with Pro a one-time purchase if you'd rather not subscribe. Everything on these pages works in a plain document too, and the pages say where.