Douwe Maan

💡 Lead your remote/distributed teams with empathy (my own experience): Working with remote or distributed teams can be a challenge for Engineering Managers. Keeping your teammates aligned across different time zones, countries, or cultures requires excellent organization, best practices, and a lot of emotional intelligence. One thing I’ve learned is that beyond technology and processes, the human factor is probably the most important to manage. You’ll need to resolve conflicts, build trust, and boost productivity, but you won’t be able to do it without empathy—I can assure you of that. A few quick practices that have helped me are: ▶ Clear goals: Ensure everyone is following the same direction. Keep the goals visible to the team (e.g., JIRA board, Slack, etc.), and provide friendly reminders if you have stand-ups with them. ▶ Good communication and cadence: Schedule regular check-ins. Make sure the team feels heard. ▶ Flexibility and cultural differences: Be flexible with schedules and learn how to communicate with different cultures, as not everyone works in the same way. Practice deep listening with your teammates and set clear expectations. Learn what is "normal" for them and find a balance to create a good fit within your team. ▶ Foster a safe environment: Create open discussion spaces for the whole team, plus 1:1 meetings. A meeting I’ve been using a lot, which often gets overlooked, is the retrospective. But for your team to participate and share their true feelings, they need to feel comfortable. What has been your experience leading distributed teams? I’d love to hear other points of view, thoughts, and reflections! Remember, I’m creating more content related to engineering management at https://daniheredia.com/ So sharing it is always more than welcome 🙇‍♂️ #leadership #engineeringManager #remoteTeams #empathy #distributedTeams #distributedTeams #emotionalIntelligence #diversity #cultures #newsletter #team #teamWork

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💡 Continuous Feedback is key to Building Stronger Teams: As an Engineering Manager, I’ve learned that one of the most powerful tools we have it’s feedback. I think feedback fosters team growth and engagement. I'm not speaking only about annual reviews. It’s about making feedback a part of your day-to-day management style. What have I discovered over the years? 🔄 Real-time feedback builds trust: sharing it openly and regularly, it creates a culture of transparency opening the door for honest conversations. 🌱 Not only focussed in performance: empower growth in your teams, if they're growing, the performance and results will do it consequently. 📈 Small corrections prevent big issues or problems, giving us time to adjust our team's direction. 💬 Two-way street: be open to receiving feedback, not only from your manager but also from your team. I regularly ask my team, "What can I do better?". You can also create a quarterly feedback form to gather their input So, you'll create a team culture in which engagement, better problem-solving, and a stronger sense of ownership will make the difference 🚀 What has been your experience on this? I’d love to hear other points of view, thoughts, and reflections! Remember, I’m creating more content related to engineering management at https://lnkd.in/drVtNeji ♻ So sharing it is always more than welcome 🙇‍♂️ #leadership #engineeringManager #teamGrowth #feedbackCulture #empathy #feedback #emotionalIntelligence #diversity #cultures #newsletter #team #teamWork

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🚀 New Article Alert! 🚀 It’s been a while since my last post, but I'm excited to share my new article!, "Taking the Helm as Engineering Manager: Leading an Established Engineering Team". I dive into key strategies for stepping into established teams. You'll reach out REAL situations that I lived, thoughts and tips. Whether you're already an Engineering Manager or looking to step up, these insights might help guide your path toward effective leadership. Check it out in ♦️ Personal Website: https://lnkd.in/ddiTvbq8 ♦️ Medium Link: https://lnkd.in/dWN3zGTq Subscribe to my Newsletter 👉 👉 👉 https://lnkd.in/dNePvQJV ♻️Reshare if you think it can contribute and a reaction/feedback is always a gift 🎁 #leadership #productivity #trust #management #learning #growth #team #help #engineeringleadership #people #goal #stakeholders #strengths

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💡 [TIP] How do you handle unexpected news as an Engineering Manager? In day-to-day work, you and your teams sometimes receive unexpected news that can shake the team's motivation. As Engineering Manager, how are you handling this? Here is how I’m approaching these situations in case it helps you reinforce your own mindset: 1️⃣ Understand this reality: companies evolve. One day, your best teammate might leave. Another day, you might decide to move on. And on another day, the company might make changes. That’s just how it works. 2️⃣ So, I ask myself this question: What opportunities can my teams and I find in this situation? 3️⃣ If you're following step number 3️⃣ , I can ensure you that you'll find at least 1 opportunity to grow. 4️⃣ Communicate this to your teams and remain open to deeply listening to their thoughts and proposals. 5️⃣ Create your own plan to seize the opportunity. The ideal world doesn’t exist. And perhaps it doesn’t because “ideal” means something different to everyone. 🙂 This may sound obvious, but when we receive unexpected news, we tend to ask ourselves why and try to understand it, investing energy in something that probably isn’t up to us. This leads to frustration and exhaustion when it’s unnecessary. I choose to keep fighting to protect my #energy and #motivation. What about you? More content related to engineering management at https://lnkd.in/dNePvQJV #team #growth #engineeringmanager #manager #productivity

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After 4+ years with Le Wagon, helping students and teachers navigate the tech world, I’m taking the next logical step: helping them transform their knowledge into startups as solopreneurs. Since completing my bootcamp in 2019, I’ve built more than 40 Ruby on Rails apps, always starting with the same initial 20 commits: “Add payment gateway,” “Add transactional emails,” “Design yet another landing page,” and so on. To streamline this repetitive process, I created a boilerplate that enables me—and any other #rails developer—to kickstart and launch projects at lightning speed. Meet Lightning Rails Ruby on Rails Starter Kit. If you’re a #rubyonrails developer, you can give it a try here: https://lightningrails.com Special thanks to Marc Lou from Shipfast who inspired me to kickstart this boilerplate—he was not the first to turn commits into a boilerplate, but in my opinion, the one with the best execution and vision for it. If you're a NextJS developer, I highly recommend it 👉 https://shipfa.st/

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Siit’s $5M Seed Round! 🏄‍♂️ I’m incredibly excited to share that Siit has raised a $5M Seed Round to reinvent the IT Service Desk! This journey isn’t just about the funding—it’s about the milestones we’ve achieved and the vision we’re bringing to life. Two years ago, alongside Dimitri Cabete Jorge and Anthony Tobelaim, we founded Siit with a bold vision: to simplify internal processes and interactions. This fundraising marks a significant accomplishment and a huge step towards realizing our vision. At Siit, we’re committed to replacing traditional, cumbersome methods of submitting requests to IT or internal operations teams. Service desks have long been viewed as rigid, complex, and disconnected from the tools employees use every day. How often have we heard the frustrating phrase, “Did you create a ticket?” The ITSM market is ripe for (r)evolution, and Siit is leading the charge. Our conversational, integrated, and AI-powered approach has already helped hundreds of companies redefine their internal support systems – and this is just the beginning! I’m deeply grateful to our investors: StageOne Ventures, Seventure Partners, and our early backers for their trust and support. Seeing our vision resonate with investors and customers alike is both rewarding and energizing for what lies ahead. Now, we embark on an exciting new chapter: growing our team and accelerating product and business development. Special thanks to: Yuval Cohen, Guillaume Echaudemaison, Aviad Ben-laish, Jonathan Anguelov, John Karouby, Anna Lasseri, Matthieu Champenois, Clara Faurère, Inès Chauffert-Yvart, Margaux Fratty, Neumann, Marvell Avocats, Lirane Sitruk—your support has been invaluable. A warm thanks to all Siiters for the amazing work: Arnaud Chemla, Jules Chavent, Mathias DIDIER, Everton Quadros, Morgan Chapeau, Charles L., Yann Hourdel, Gala Pillot. Your dedication and hard work are what make Siit thrive! If you’re passionate about transforming internal operations and taking part of a game-changing journey, let’s connect. We’re hiring! #Startup #SeedFunding #Fundraising #ITSM  #Hiring

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One of the aha moments from building Nubara? Our real product isn’t just our software... it’s the community we’re nurturing. As our network expands, our value grows exponentially. Each new connection brings hundreds of potential contacts that you want to meet. Welcome to the magic of network effects. But achieving critical mass is a tough nut to crack. It requires a collaborative spirit across our members and their groups. We’re tackling this by creating a space where everyone benefits from intros / referrals, making sure every user contributes to and benefits from our collective growth. Do you know an organizer of a Meetup, Slack / Discord community, alumni group, or chambers of commerce? I'd love to learn from their approaches on community building. #Community #NetworkEffects #Entrepreneurship

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💥 Five years ago, I remember sitting down with one of our engineers, Olmo F. Maldonado, who pitched me a bold idea: “What if we could make Zapier’s automation platform available directly within our partners' products, so they could bring automation to their users?” Fast forward to today, and that vision has become a reality with the Workflow API. 🤖 Next week at ZapConnect, Kei Turner and I will be diving deep into how the Workflow API finally unlocks this capability and makes it available to partners. It took multiple teams across Zapier to bring this to life, and I couldn't be more excited about what this means for the future of automation within partner ecosystems. But this is just the beginning. We have big plans in 2025 to take it even further—stay tuned! 🚀 https://lnkd.in/g663N-u8 #ZapConnect #Automation #WorkflowAPI #Partnerships #Growth #Teamwork #Zapier

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Interesting to see NTQR in action. #AI #Python #NTQR

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Why I’m moving away from LlamaIndex Over the past year, I’ve been building LLM applications with LlamaIndex, progressing from simple retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models to more complex, multi ReAct agents. LlamaIndex provides an accessible framework for building LLM applications, as long as it aligns well with your intended use case. It offers a wide variety of tutorials and sample projects, which can be valuable when getting started. However, as projects grow more complex, the usefulness of these resources diminishes. Here are 3 key reasons why I’m considering moving away from LlamaIndex: 1. Challenges with Debugging Hallucination Hallucinations present a major barrier to deploying LLM applications in production. As applications grow in complexity, understanding the inner workings of LlamaIndex to address hallucinations becomes more challenging. While LlamaIndex exposes APIs for customization, once I began fine-tuning every component, I started to question its value over building a solution from scratch. 2. Limited Flexibility for Advanced or Unique Use Cases Developing unique or highly advanced LLM use cases in LlamaIndex has proven difficult. Custom LLM techniques are evolving rapidly, and each application often requires specific tweaks. Although LlamaIndex provides a framework, it doesn’t readily accommodate my requirements. For example, building a ReAct agent with multiple observers was far simpler when created from scratch, which also made debugging easier. 3. Exploratory Phase for Multimodal Use Cases Multimodal use case support is still in the experimental phase, which limits its viability for production-grade applications. Overall, LlamaIndex is an excellent library for experimenting with different LLM techniques or for quickly building new LLM applications. However, I wouldn’t currently recommend it for production use or for highly specialized cases. The LLM space is evolving rapidly, and a robust framework that can support varied use cases without significant customization has yet to emerge. For now, I’m shifting toward building LLM applications directly on native foundation model APIs. #ML #genAI #RAG #Agents

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Legit quotable and actionable advice: * Power of Threes - 3 mentors, 3 peers, 3 mentees. * If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together

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At LatentForce.ai, we've observed similar limitations with frameworks like LlamaIndex, leading us to move away from such tools. We've developed our own in-house codebase for LLM agents, which has empowered us to build truly unique and highly customizable solutions. This approach provides the flexibility and control necessary to meet the demands of complex, production-grade applications without the constraints of existing frameworks. To know more write to us at contact@latentforce.ai ! #GenAI #LLMAgents #Agents #LatentForce

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People Are Playing a New DOOM-Themed CAPTCHA: An anonymous reader writes: Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product, just used the company's AI site builder to come up with a new twist on CAPTCHAs, one that invites users to play the classic single-player game DOOM and killing at least three monsters. You can check it out here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Spending 1 month in the same house with Topo (YC W24) team. Here’s why we made that move: We are working more efficiently, no distraction during the day.  Fully focus on our objectives and teamwork. Last year, we came to SF with the entire team for the YC Winter batch. This year, our objectives are mostly similar to last year.  Except for one thing:  We know precisely where we’re going. Because: - The results with our AI SDR get better every day. - We developed a unique model, in which the human input (ours) is still super important. We continuously adjust our AI to work more efficiently. - Our team is more solid than ever. Also, San Francisco is the place to be if you’re an AI SaaS right now.  We are meeting partners, clients, friends… every night. it's up to us to keep up the pace!

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Getting into YC changed our company's trajectory I wrote a blog post a few months ago about how YC transformed our trajectory (link: https://lnkd.in/gNuSkYPN) It can't be overstated enough. If you're a pre-product-market-fit company, just filling out the application is a worth its weight in gold If you get an interview.. you get a taste for what each office hours in YC is like And if you get in.. There are 3 surprising benefits to YC: 1. YC helps you create a peer-group of founders in the same position as you, which can be an incredibly motivating force 2. Bookface, YC’s internal social forum, is a trove of high quality discourse, and acts as an implicit source of warm intros to other YC founders 3. YC’s Launch pad is great for getting your product in front of lots of startup-minded people And there are 2 things that ended up mattering a little bit less than I thought: 1. Fundraising — it turns out that building a great product and generating revenue far outweigh YC’s brand when raising money 2. YC’s Brand — while useful as social proof, it doesn’t replace the need to have a great product / solve a real problem

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“If computers were the bicycle ​f​or the mind​,​ it feels like AI is the rocket ship​ for the mind” Great interview by Acquired with Guillermo Rauch of Vercel. Some of the best companies are born from an entrepreneur identifying a pain point and creating a product that addresses it. By solving the complex challenges of deploying and scaling modern web applications, I believe Vercel will be one of the most powerful platforms for developers in the coming decade. Links to the full interview below: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/40nXc5Q Youtube: https://bit.ly/3Usu2yv Imprint Engine was born from a similar story. We experienced firsthand how complex and painful this market was in our previous ventures, and we knew there had to be a better way. We've spent over a decade building and refining our platform to support some of the biggest global brands in the world, with a culture built around serving high-performance brands that strive to be market leaders. While competitors like BDA, LLC, Staples Promotional Products, and HALO Branded Solutions have scale and do a great job at selling commodities, Imprint Engine takes a different approach. We don't sell commodities - we provide a platform that transforms how global brands scale. While others compete on price, we've built a system that ensures your brand standards aren't just maintained, they're elevated. Full disclosure, Vercel is a client of Imprint Engine and I am a huge nerd 🤓

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Our Y Combinator batch became the only one in history to have their Demo Day canceled mid-program. We were 2 months into the YC's Winter 2020 batch, experiencing the legendary in-person YC experience - mentor sessions, founder dinners, pitch practice - everything we'd dreamed of. Then COVID hit. Companies before us had massive in-person Demo Days with 100s of investors. Companies after us had well-organized virtual programs. But we were caught in the absolute worst transition - right in the middle of our batch. We had no demo day. Instead, we uploaded a video pitch to potential investors during peak market uncertainty. What followed was a brutal fundraising environment: • Low evaluation • 4 months to close during complete market uncertainty And on top of that, we weren't able to enjoy the full YC experience. As a founder, you have to be ready for any situation. Also, getting into YC does help a lot but it's only the beginning, you never know what's coming for you. If you liked this post, repost and share it with a rejected founder from YC. It's not the end of the world!

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I recently talked with Paz Yanover, VP of Product at Amplication, about creating and managing effective docs. Here is his developer docs success formula (check 1st comment): In this interview, Paz shares his formula to creating developer docs that drive product adoption. You'll learn: - The important role docs plays in support and attracting devs - Tips for balancing technical accuracy with user-friendliness in your docs - Strategies for effective collaboration between technical writers and product teams Check the first comment for the full interview. --- Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Derick Ruiz for more.

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