Leadership & Strategy

Evaluating Engineers: A Three-Step Guide

The author was tasked with deciding who would stay on the team and created a three-step guide for evaluation: performance assessment, career path conversations, and productivity measurement. Performance assessment involves understanding the company needs and evaluating technical competence and interaction with team members and the business. Career path conversations involve discussing plans for the upcoming quarter or year and providing support for professional development. Productivity is measured by tracking work closely but without obsessing over metrics. The author learned that without time pressure, people are empowered to choose tasks that can unlock their potential, document performance-related activities, and have regular one-on-ones.

How to Successfully Transition From Engineer to Product Leader

This article outlines the steps taken by an engineer to transition to a product manager role. These steps include expressing interest to management, investing in learning, and building a brand. The combination of these steps enabled the engineer to successfully transition to a product manager role. The article also emphasizes the importance of continuing to develop skills and knowledge once in the role.

Managing and Running Large Engineering Teams Successfully

This article discusses how to manage a large engineering team, including the importance of metrics, creating a narrative, learning and development, and engineering career frames. It emphasizes the need to use numbers and metrics to assess team health, as well as the need to create a narrative to motivate the team and provide learning and development opportunities. It also suggests the use of a promotion panel to replace the yearly promotional cycle.

Creating a Useful Product Vision

A product vision is an important part of a company strategy that serves as a North Star for the product organization, motivating them to create a compelling product that solves customer problems. It should not be confused with the company mission or product roadmap. It is important to create a product vision when teams need to be aligned in a common direction. It is worth the investment to create a product vision that is short and straightforward, and everyone should understand the purpose behind it.

Securing Buy-In for New Metrics

After introducing metrics to measure the times from pull requests being open and interacted with to being completed and merged, the team cohesion strengthened and the team started to operate more like a team. Initially, the team was skeptical of the metrics, but they soon realized that the metrics provided them with more ammunition when it came to performance assessment and salary reviews. Communication was key to securing buy-in and enforcing a data-driven culture. Metrics around reviews, pull requests, bug meantime to resolution, and the amount of time spent on a story combined with its estimate were all found to be successful.

Making of a Bi-Directional, Prioritized Roadmap

A product roadmap was created for an application and platform product line that was overly detailed and caused long meetings. To improve the process, the product leaders created a list of priorities that were discussed and weighted against strategic initiatives. The top 3-4 priorities were chosen and presented to the rest of the team. The roadmap was then circulated to stakeholders and executives and was committed to. The lessons learned from this process were that the roadmap should have high-level themes, it should be both bottom-up and top-down, and all stakeholders should be included and executive buy-in should be secured before committing.