Principal Engineer

Reasons Promoting From Within Is Better for Growing Your Business

When a principal engineer left a team without a backup plan, the Associate Director had to decide whether to groom a senior engineer to the next level or hire a Lead engineer from outside. The Associate Director chose to groom the senior engineer, giving him more ownership and products, and dividing the project lifecycle into three phases. The Associate Director invested a lot of time with the senior engineer, providing feedback and 1:1s, and after two quarters the senior engineer was ready to lead independently. The lessons learned from this experience were to invest in the internal team, be tactful in choosing and nurturing second-line leaders, and lead by example.

Pleading With Your Executive Team

This story is about a company that specialized in mobile app downloads and wanted to get into programmatic ad-buying. The author was recruited to manage the product and business development, and worked closely with the engineering team to increase the throughput of the system. Despite the author's efforts to optimize the system and acquire users for as little as a dollar, the CEO chose to ignore the data and shut the product down a few months later. The author learned that leaders can make ego-driven decisions, and it can be difficult to disagree with them.

Establishing a New Function

Niche's QA team was struggling to keep up with their increased automation needs, so the QA team leader proposed a new departmental structure with a separate function for automation. This new role, the Software Engineer in Test, would be dedicated to automation, allowing the QA Analysts to focus on manual testing. After a year of refining the role, the team was able to hire additional Software Engineers in Test and begin revitalizing their automation efforts. The lessons learned from this experience included the value of specialization, the importance of face-to-face communication while vetting candidates, and the importance of trusting in the expertise of team members.

Helping Your Reports Become Managers

At Niche, the author had the privilege of growing a department from two people to over a dozen. To enable further growth, the author needed to foster and develop a new layer of management within the team. To do this, the author set a six-month plan for the most senior member of the QA team to become a manager. Through a SWOT analysis, reading curriculum, and mentorship sessions, the author was able to equip the emerging manager with the skills and confidence to become a successful manager. The author learned that having a longer preparation time was helpful in changing the emerging manager's perception within their team and that nurturing talent internally is a sound business decision.

Why Rearchitecting Might Not Always Be the Best Idea

This article outlines the steps taken by a team to improve the performance of a system that was only handling a low number of transactions per second. The team was unable to re-architect the system due to tight deadlines, so instead they documented the main flows of the system, ran load tests, and identified low-hanging fruit that could be improved. The team's efforts resulted in significant performance gains, and the article outlines the lessons learned from the experience.