Ben Darfler

levered beta is all you need how to win by riding waves you didn't make.

Attention is all you need in this attention economy

ethanding.substack.com/p/levered-be...

Same. The only feature I really appreciate is that it will intercept the questions I ask Google and answer them with AI instead. The other flows I've thought of don't work. Like copy out the text from multiple emails opened in multiple tabs.

Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd A formula for AI in companies

Driving AI at Work: "AI use that boosts individual performance does not naturally translate to improving organizational performance. To get organizational gains requires organizational innovation, rethinking incentives, processes, and even the nature of work."
www.oneusefulthing.org/p/making-ai-...

Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role. For managers who have spent a long time reporting to a specific leader or working in an organization with well‑understood goals, it’s easy to develop skill gaps without realizing it. Usually this…

I appreciate how this mirrors the problem discovery and problem selection elements of the PSHE framework which I leaned heavily on when I reworked the engineering ladder at Honeycomb.

Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role. lethain.com/orchestratio...

Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pus…

This hit reading @charity.wtf's post:

> We’ve spent the past few decades ripping … down and drifting away from these communal hubs. But we haven’t stopped wanting them, or needing them. I hope, … that we are entering into a new era of rebuilding, sadder but wiser.

charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...

Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how "It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."

I'm kinda obsessed now with bridge-based algorithms that elevate content that builds consensus rather than just engagement. Twitter's community notes is an implementation of this.

www.niemanlab.org/2023/10/soci...

I was floored when I read that. Not at all what the right would have anyone believe.

The Vast Majority of Minors Getting Gender-Affirming Surgeries Are Cis Kids, Study Shows The study dispels a well-worn anti-trans talking point about how healthcare providers treat gender dysphoria in kids.

"Researchers found roughly 150 cases in which a minor received gender-affirming surgery in 2019. But of those cases, 146 — about 97% — were chest reduction surgeries performed on cisgender male youth"

www.them.us/story/gender...

Oh boy, that "manor” typo has been there forever hasn't it 😅

Ha! @charity.wtf I'm getting deja vu

> Rails HTTP processing is built on a philosophy of “be liberal in what you accept”

charity.wtf/2025/07/24/h...

> You see Ruby, being the helpful language that it is, very kindly parses all manor of garbage

bdarfler.hashnode.dev/introducing-...

I hear such great things about Teams 🙃

It's 2025, and we are still presenting Google Slides on Zoom in edit mode. How has Slides not addressed this yet? (And yes I know there are options, but clearly they aren't solving the problem.)

In the AI Age, Making Things Difficult Is Deliberate There's a difference between obstacles and the struggle that makes you better. Here's how to tell.

When to use AI and when to keep the friction:

"Preserve friction where it counts, not as nostalgia or high-minded purism, but as method and meaning. This approach will better prepare us to work successfully in the AI age. Offload the boring. Keep the stakes." every.to/thesis/in-th...

And, But, Therefore Storytelling And, But, Therefore guides a story’s flow, keeping the audience’s attention as it builds to the So What action.

And, But, Therefore Storytelling blueprints.guide/posts/and-bu...

My read is the alure of a greenfield called to them

A Simple Hack to Help You Communicate More Effectively Using a structured approach when communicating can help you prioritize what you need to convey. In this article, the author introduces his “What, So What, Now What” framework.

“What, So What, Now What”: a fantastically simple communication framework.
www.physicianleaders.org/articles/a-s...

"True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk, but to increase the odds of success."

hbr.org/2014/01/the-...

the relationship between okrs and strategy Objectives and Key Results can do a lot of things. One thing they can't do is determine your strategy. Here's how to reconcile OKRs and strategy.

Great reminder, that you still have to do the hard work of building strategy. "OKRs … serve the corporate strategy. They do not determine it." jeffgothelf.com/blog/the-rel...

🚨 For a timely story: I’m looking to speak with parents who are concerned about how the Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling could impact their local schools. DMs open. #education #parenting #LGBTQ #ReligiousFreedom #MahmoudvTaylor

Rigorous thinking: No lazy thinking The best managers teach their team how to think strategically. Here's how to a build culture of good decision-making and thoughtful debate.

Strong overlap here with the idea of "Completed Staff Work". I love how Wes goes a step further and describes how to encourage this in others. newsletter.weskao.com/p/rigorous-t...

I dunno, they are just loud. On the other hand, I'll take a demolition derby every day of the week.

Operational mechanisms for strategy. Even the best policies fail if they aren’t adopted by the teams they’re intended to serve. Can we persistently change our company’s behaviors with a one-time announcement? No, probably not. I refer…

Patterns for operationalizing strategy. How very meta. I love it. Particularly the antipatterns.

Operational mechanisms for strategy. lethain.com/operations-f...

"Who needs to know about this?": Communication as you scale Communication is both one of the most important things to get good at if you want to build a well run, efficient company, and it is also one of the most underestimated things. [To be clear, I’m…

"Basically 'Who needs to know about this?' needs to become your new favorite question. Try asking it at the end of every meeting, see what happens." mollyg.substack.com/p/who-needs-...

Setting policy for strategy. This book’s introduction started by defining strategy as “making decisions.” Then we dug into exploration, diagnosis, and refinement. Those are three chapters where you could argue that we didn’t…

Ooo, categories of strategies … "While there are so many policies you can write, I’ve found they generally fall into one of four major categories: approvals, allocations, direction, and guidance. This section introduces those categories." lethain.com/policy-for-s...

From Data Chaos to Strategic Clarity: The Role of KPI Trees in Product Management This article explores the journey of using KPI trees to sift through complex data, providing a beacon for strategic decision-making.

Not sure how I've never heard of KPI Trees before, but I'm entranced. This is an excellent example of creating clarity by making the implict explict in a simple and visual way. medium.com/@benjamin.du...

Commander's Intent - A Military Principle for Product Leadership – Sudhir's Personal Website How a military concept can revolutionize product vision communication

This, nicely concise treatment of Commander's Intent, has me connecting dots between CI and Os in OKRs. A hierarchy of intent that is broad yet clear at the top and gets more specific as you get closer to the work. guptasudhir.com/blog/command...

Our Field CTO, Liz, will be taking over this account on Thursday and Friday to do an AMA / deep dive into the revamped Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline!

Post your questions in advance here, or at any time through Friday!

a visual pipeline builder showing "receive data -> send to s3 archive" and "receive data -> keep http errors -> keep slow traces -> sample 1 in 10 -> send to honeycomb" an engineer's speech bubble says "Let's adjust the sample rate."

Engineer: What's this user doing? Engineer 2: "Let's enhance with more data from our S3 archive." a Honeycomb query builder is shown with a heatmap and count, with a customer id and url selected. the button "enhance from archive" is highlighted, along with the time range being enhanced

We just launched powerful new capabilities in the Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline, including graphical pipeline building functionality and "Enhance", which gives teams the ability to do the detective show-style "enhance the letters on that plate" for sampled data.

AMA Thurs/Fri on @honeycomb.io!

Harvard Business Review's "The Leader's Guide to Corporate Culture" Harvard Business Review's 2018 "Culture Factor" and article "The Leader's Guide to Company Culture" will help you identify and impact your organization's culture.

This framework highlighted the tension between caring and results oriented cultures, and it gave me words for why I'm drawn to ownership and decision-making approaches that balance independence and interdependence. www.johngibbon.com/blog/harvard...

Demanding and Supportive | RKG My first Instacart board meeting was in November 2015. I had joined a month earlier as CFO. Our financials were ugly. We had $2M of revenue but were chewing through $11M of cash every four weeks, and…

"Most people think of demanding and supportive as opposite ends of a spectrum. You can either be tough or you can be nice. But the best leaders don’t choose. They are both highly demanding and highly supportive. They push you to new heights and they also have your back." www.rkg.blog/demanding.php