ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT Jim Everingham at Instagram I didn’t intend to go into computer science, and I deifnitely didn’t expect to become a manager. Instead, I started out thinking I’d be a laboratory scientist. In college, this led me to astronomy and physics, which prompted me to start writing sotfware. And while these leaps felt intuitive, the subsequent shitf into leading teams did not. In fact, I disliked my early engineering management job at Oracle so much that I took a less senior role at Netscape, just to start coding again. But life is unpredictable. I discovered challenges at Netscape that were so important and interesting that I couldn’t just stand by — I had to take the lead (which meant managing a team) and ifgure out how to do it in a way that made sense to me. That’s when it struck me that instead of approaching management like being a therapist (only with more process and politics to deal with), I could think of it from a problem- solving perspective. I started to design a management system the way I would design a machine or sotfware system, with few dependencies, single owners, minimal decision points. Using this model, we immediately saw a jump in productivity, output, and happiness. Our ultimate email and news product, code-named Grendel, was the only piece of Netscape’s massive Java rewrite that survived, and it remained a part of Mozilla’s sotfware for a decade. 7