Roles & Titles

Being a Data Coach

After taking a vacation to reflect on his career, the author decided to become a freelance coach in the data space. He has since been successful in his role, and has learned that freelancing allows him to choose what he works on and when, and that he must be visible and part of the team he is coaching in order to demonstrate his value. He also advises to just do it and not be overwhelmed by self-doubt.

Simultaneously Transitioning Two Offices from Waterfall to Agile

A consultant was brought in to roll out Agile to a 50 person engineering team across two offices. The consultant worked with the VP of Engineering and Product to develop pods aligned to business objectives, and then brought in a consultant to each office for 2 days of Scrum Master training. The consultant then provided coaching and guidance for each team for two months, and worked with the executive leadership team to set expectations around adoption and velocity. The lessons learned were that it is important to start with one team/pod that has practiced Agile before, and to roll out Agile to teams one at a time, allowing each team to adopt to Agile at their own pace. It is also important for all team members to have training and it's best if the team can do the training together.

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

Keeping Up With Rapid Growth for High-Performance Engineering Teams

This article discusses the challenges faced by a rapidly growing engineering organization, and the steps taken to address them. These steps included restructuring the team into three focus areas, defining roles and responsibilities, introducing processes and procedures to increase transparency, and establishing guilds and an architecture council to promote technical excellence. The article also highlights the importance of customizing existing solutions to the organization's unique needs, and the need for patience and perseverance when introducing new processes.

To Contractor or not to contractor? Pros and cons of putting off full time hiring.

Rogue Rocket was founded in 2011 with the goal of staying lean and hiring staff on a project-needs basis. They used contractors to fill positions and minimize cash flow risk, and eventually made a few full-time hires. The strategy was to create great products and maximize quality and creativity, but this may not be a wise choice in the current business environment due to the shortage of skilled technical personnel. Companies must decide on the best strategy for their needs.