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How To Start Using OKRs

This article discusses the implementation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in an engineering team of 125 people. Initially, a pilot was attempted but was unsuccessful due to lack of training and context. To ensure success, the team invested in education and set up times for teams to discuss why the business wanted to do things versus why the teams wanted to do them. The article concludes that OKRs are very helpful for giving teams a focus, but it is important to invest in education and ensure that teams are working on the right stuff.

When Growth Frustrates An Employee

The author joined Datadog in 2015 as the first designated security person and had to build a Security team from scratch. After hiring the first person for the security team, the team grew to 25 people and the first person became unhappy due to their title and mandate. The author attempted to address the individual's concerns, but the situation deteriorated and the individual was unable to meet the expectations of the role. The author learned that they should have shared their vision of the team earlier so the individual could have voiced their concerns and been provided with training opportunities.

Scaling Via APIs

Trustpilot had a monolith codebase that was difficult to scale and onboard new engineers. To solve this, they implemented microservices and APIs to encapsulate the monolith. This allowed them to separate the codebase into smaller, more manageable services and enabled engineers to become productive faster. The lesson learned is to look for opportunities to solve organizational issues with architecture.

Avoiding Hiring Under Pressure

The author learned to trust their instincts and develop a well-thought-out and repeatable hiring process when looking to hire a project manager. They found that if they weren't fully convinced from the start, it wouldn't work out and they should feel brave enough to say no, even if under pressure to hire.

A Rapid Recruitment Process

Wonga needed to hire 100 engineers quickly and were able to do so by setting up a multi-step process. This included a screening phone call, an online test, a one to two-hour online coding session, and a final interview. The team was involved in the interview process and the engineers were asked to hire people better than themselves. The process was checked every six months to ensure it was valid and giving the necessary information.

How Meeting Face-to-face Improved A Remote Team’s Output

In order to increase the productivity of an offsite team of 80 engineers, who were equally skilled as the onsite team, a series of actions were taken. These included sending senior engineers to visit the offsite team, changing team leaders, sending whole teams across, increasing communication through Skype, and blending teams. Ultimately, it was found that sending whole teams across and having them co-locate in each location for a week or two worked best. It was also found that people enjoyed traveling and that trust was built when people saw each other face-to-face.

An Onboarding How-To

When the VP of Engineering at Operam started, there were no onboarding materials. To solve this, they created a simple onboarding checklist and handbook, and assigned onboarding buddies to new engineers. It was important to choose the right projects for new engineers and to focus on onboarding, as it makes a huge difference to the company's productivity.

Integrating Remote Teams Post-Acquisition

After Plixi was acquired by Lockerz, the two software teams had to integrate, but were in two different cities. Conflict and jealousy grew between the teams, so the company invested in travel and rented a beach house for the teams to get to know each other. This improved communication and collaboration, and the teams were able to work together more effectively. The lesson learned is that when remote workers are involved, it is important to budget for travel so that teams can collaborate effectively.

Scaling To The Extreme

Plixi, a company that allowed people to put photos on Twitter, experienced outages on their web servers due to high traffic. After a period of investigation, they discovered the problem was due to disk reads locking up. With the help of Rackspace and Fusion-io, they were able to install four servers with the fastest hard-drives in the world, which solved the problem. The lesson learned was that it was important for the CTO to understand the whole stack and collaborate with vendors to find a solution.

The First Step Into Management

The author took a role as a team lead, but found that it was not what they wanted to do for the rest of their career. Through this experience, they learned that the role was 80% management and 20% coding, and that if they wanted to focus on coding, they would need to step back. They recommend that everyone try working as a team lead, as it can be a great learning experience.

Communicate Through Trial And Error

A team leader at Datadog was tasked with leading a large project, but the team grew too large and had to be split. Poor communication between the teams resulted in a mess, so the leader decided to schedule a meeting with everyone involved. After experimenting with various approaches, the team found that having a daily half-hour cross-team meeting was the most effective solution. The lesson learned was that managing multiple teams is difficult and sometimes requires trial and error to find the right solution.

How To Use Values For Structured Hiring

At Datadog, the hiring manager interviews were initially unstructured. To ensure that the right people were hired, the company decided to focus on their values and craft questions that would allow them to decide if the candidate would be a good fit. By using the same questions in multiple interviews, they were able to get a benchmark of what a good answer looks like.

How To Develop Managers Through An Internship Program

This article discusses an approach taken by a company to develop managers internally. They created an internship program that gives engineers bitesize pieces of management experience to help them decide if it is something they enjoy. Through this program, engineers learn how to interview, onboard, and mentor interns, as well as how to give and receive feedback. This has been a successful way to develop managers internally, and has also helped engineers learn what they really enjoy.

Training For Delegation

This article outlines the importance of delegating tasks to train staff up, even when there is no urgency. The author learned that it can take two to three times longer to train someone else up than to do the task themselves, and that it is important to start training them up before it becomes urgent. This lesson was learned through the author's experience of taking too long to delegate in the early stages of their career as a manager.

Encourage Female Developers’ Confidence

A CTO at a previous startup was interviewing a software engineer who had been in a male-dominated environment where her ideas were not taken seriously. The CTO decided to give her an offer and a senior developer position, and with some training and encouragement, she was able to gain confidence and become an excellent senior developer. This story highlights the importance of taking a diverse approach to hiring and managing a team.

How to Structure Performance Improvement Plans

Performance improvement plans are essential for teams of five or more, and should be tailored to each individual employee. When setting up a plan, managers should ask employees which areas they can improve on, and encourage them to think about their career goals. For employees who are not performing, plans should be structured and milestone-based. For those wanting to be promoted, managers should be transparent to make it easier for them to achieve their goals.

When Company Growth Work Visibility

As a manager, it is important to stay informed about what other teams are doing and to communicate this to your team. This helps to provide context and prevent rumors from circulating. To stay informed, managers should talk to other managers, encourage cross-team mixing, and keep their team up to date in one-on-ones and team meetings. Transparency is key, even if the manager doesn't know much.

Making Remote Work, Work

Datadog has a distributed team across multiple time zones and cultures, and has implemented strategies such as Slack, Google Docs, Pull Requests, video conferences, and phone booths to facilitate communication. Additionally, they have team members travel to each other's offices to ensure that remote workers are seen as people, rather than just resources. It is important to have enough remote workers to make the system work, and to have someone in the same time zone as you.

The Importance of A Clear Company Culture

Drawboard had not taken their culture seriously from the start, leading to a number of problems. Six months ago, mission and vision statements were introduced, which changed the interview process and allowed for more passionate and energetic hires. Values were also created, which can be used to determine whether a candidate is a good fit. The lesson learned is that mission, vision and value statements are fundamental to the health of an organization.

Managing Negative Employee Behaviors

The VP of Engineering hired someone who was great technically but had negative behaviors towards the team. Initially, the team's complaints were ignored, but this resulted in a drop in productivity and morale. When a similar situation happened again, the VP took action and addressed the issues with the engineer. The engineer acknowledged the unacceptable behavior and the VP is now working with him to look at the company's values. The lesson learned is that even if someone is great technically, if they are not aligned with the team, they need to go. However, it is important to be candid and upfront when there is a problem and to provide training and mentorship to help them improve.

How To Start Using OKRs

This article discusses the implementation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in an engineering team of 125 people. Initially, a pilot was attempted but was unsuccessful due to lack of training and context. To ensure success, the team invested in education and set up times for teams to discuss why the business wanted to do things versus why the teams wanted to do them. The article concludes that OKRs are very helpful for giving teams a focus, but it is important to invest in education and ensure that teams are working on the right stuff.

When Growth Frustrates An Employee

The author joined Datadog in 2015 as the first designated security person and had to build a Security team from scratch. After hiring the first person for the security team, the team grew to 25 people and the first person became unhappy due to their title and mandate. The author attempted to address the individual's concerns, but the situation deteriorated and the individual was unable to meet the expectations of the role. The author learned that they should have shared their vision of the team earlier so the individual could have voiced their concerns and been provided with training opportunities.

Scaling Via APIs

Trustpilot had a monolith codebase that was difficult to scale and onboard new engineers. To solve this, they implemented microservices and APIs to encapsulate the monolith. This allowed them to separate the codebase into smaller, more manageable services and enabled engineers to become productive faster. The lesson learned is to look for opportunities to solve organizational issues with architecture.

Avoiding Hiring Under Pressure

The author learned to trust their instincts and develop a well-thought-out and repeatable hiring process when looking to hire a project manager. They found that if they weren't fully convinced from the start, it wouldn't work out and they should feel brave enough to say no, even if under pressure to hire.

A Rapid Recruitment Process

Wonga needed to hire 100 engineers quickly and were able to do so by setting up a multi-step process. This included a screening phone call, an online test, a one to two-hour online coding session, and a final interview. The team was involved in the interview process and the engineers were asked to hire people better than themselves. The process was checked every six months to ensure it was valid and giving the necessary information.

How Meeting Face-to-face Improved A Remote Team’s Output

In order to increase the productivity of an offsite team of 80 engineers, who were equally skilled as the onsite team, a series of actions were taken. These included sending senior engineers to visit the offsite team, changing team leaders, sending whole teams across, increasing communication through Skype, and blending teams. Ultimately, it was found that sending whole teams across and having them co-locate in each location for a week or two worked best. It was also found that people enjoyed traveling and that trust was built when people saw each other face-to-face.

An Onboarding How-To

When the VP of Engineering at Operam started, there were no onboarding materials. To solve this, they created a simple onboarding checklist and handbook, and assigned onboarding buddies to new engineers. It was important to choose the right projects for new engineers and to focus on onboarding, as it makes a huge difference to the company's productivity.

Integrating Remote Teams Post-Acquisition

After Plixi was acquired by Lockerz, the two software teams had to integrate, but were in two different cities. Conflict and jealousy grew between the teams, so the company invested in travel and rented a beach house for the teams to get to know each other. This improved communication and collaboration, and the teams were able to work together more effectively. The lesson learned is that when remote workers are involved, it is important to budget for travel so that teams can collaborate effectively.

Scaling To The Extreme

Plixi, a company that allowed people to put photos on Twitter, experienced outages on their web servers due to high traffic. After a period of investigation, they discovered the problem was due to disk reads locking up. With the help of Rackspace and Fusion-io, they were able to install four servers with the fastest hard-drives in the world, which solved the problem. The lesson learned was that it was important for the CTO to understand the whole stack and collaborate with vendors to find a solution.

The First Step Into Management

The author took a role as a team lead, but found that it was not what they wanted to do for the rest of their career. Through this experience, they learned that the role was 80% management and 20% coding, and that if they wanted to focus on coding, they would need to step back. They recommend that everyone try working as a team lead, as it can be a great learning experience.

Communicate Through Trial And Error

A team leader at Datadog was tasked with leading a large project, but the team grew too large and had to be split. Poor communication between the teams resulted in a mess, so the leader decided to schedule a meeting with everyone involved. After experimenting with various approaches, the team found that having a daily half-hour cross-team meeting was the most effective solution. The lesson learned was that managing multiple teams is difficult and sometimes requires trial and error to find the right solution.

How To Use Values For Structured Hiring

At Datadog, the hiring manager interviews were initially unstructured. To ensure that the right people were hired, the company decided to focus on their values and craft questions that would allow them to decide if the candidate would be a good fit. By using the same questions in multiple interviews, they were able to get a benchmark of what a good answer looks like.

How To Develop Managers Through An Internship Program

This article discusses an approach taken by a company to develop managers internally. They created an internship program that gives engineers bitesize pieces of management experience to help them decide if it is something they enjoy. Through this program, engineers learn how to interview, onboard, and mentor interns, as well as how to give and receive feedback. This has been a successful way to develop managers internally, and has also helped engineers learn what they really enjoy.

Training For Delegation

This article outlines the importance of delegating tasks to train staff up, even when there is no urgency. The author learned that it can take two to three times longer to train someone else up than to do the task themselves, and that it is important to start training them up before it becomes urgent. This lesson was learned through the author's experience of taking too long to delegate in the early stages of their career as a manager.

Encourage Female Developers’ Confidence

A CTO at a previous startup was interviewing a software engineer who had been in a male-dominated environment where her ideas were not taken seriously. The CTO decided to give her an offer and a senior developer position, and with some training and encouragement, she was able to gain confidence and become an excellent senior developer. This story highlights the importance of taking a diverse approach to hiring and managing a team.

How to Structure Performance Improvement Plans

Performance improvement plans are essential for teams of five or more, and should be tailored to each individual employee. When setting up a plan, managers should ask employees which areas they can improve on, and encourage them to think about their career goals. For employees who are not performing, plans should be structured and milestone-based. For those wanting to be promoted, managers should be transparent to make it easier for them to achieve their goals.

When Company Growth Work Visibility

As a manager, it is important to stay informed about what other teams are doing and to communicate this to your team. This helps to provide context and prevent rumors from circulating. To stay informed, managers should talk to other managers, encourage cross-team mixing, and keep their team up to date in one-on-ones and team meetings. Transparency is key, even if the manager doesn't know much.

Making Remote Work, Work

Datadog has a distributed team across multiple time zones and cultures, and has implemented strategies such as Slack, Google Docs, Pull Requests, video conferences, and phone booths to facilitate communication. Additionally, they have team members travel to each other's offices to ensure that remote workers are seen as people, rather than just resources. It is important to have enough remote workers to make the system work, and to have someone in the same time zone as you.

The Importance of A Clear Company Culture

Drawboard had not taken their culture seriously from the start, leading to a number of problems. Six months ago, mission and vision statements were introduced, which changed the interview process and allowed for more passionate and energetic hires. Values were also created, which can be used to determine whether a candidate is a good fit. The lesson learned is that mission, vision and value statements are fundamental to the health of an organization.

Managing Negative Employee Behaviors

The VP of Engineering hired someone who was great technically but had negative behaviors towards the team. Initially, the team's complaints were ignored, but this resulted in a drop in productivity and morale. When a similar situation happened again, the VP took action and addressed the issues with the engineer. The engineer acknowledged the unacceptable behavior and the VP is now working with him to look at the company's values. The lesson learned is that even if someone is great technically, if they are not aligned with the team, they need to go. However, it is important to be candid and upfront when there is a problem and to provide training and mentorship to help them improve.

How To Start Using OKRs

This article discusses the implementation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in an engineering team of 125 people. Initially, a pilot was attempted but was unsuccessful due to lack of training and context. To ensure success, the team invested in education and set up times for teams to discuss why the business wanted to do things versus why the teams wanted to do them. The article concludes that OKRs are very helpful for giving teams a focus, but it is important to invest in education and ensure that teams are working on the right stuff.

When Growth Frustrates An Employee

The author joined Datadog in 2015 as the first designated security person and had to build a Security team from scratch. After hiring the first person for the security team, the team grew to 25 people and the first person became unhappy due to their title and mandate. The author attempted to address the individual's concerns, but the situation deteriorated and the individual was unable to meet the expectations of the role. The author learned that they should have shared their vision of the team earlier so the individual could have voiced their concerns and been provided with training opportunities.

Scaling Via APIs

Trustpilot had a monolith codebase that was difficult to scale and onboard new engineers. To solve this, they implemented microservices and APIs to encapsulate the monolith. This allowed them to separate the codebase into smaller, more manageable services and enabled engineers to become productive faster. The lesson learned is to look for opportunities to solve organizational issues with architecture.

Avoiding Hiring Under Pressure

The author learned to trust their instincts and develop a well-thought-out and repeatable hiring process when looking to hire a project manager. They found that if they weren't fully convinced from the start, it wouldn't work out and they should feel brave enough to say no, even if under pressure to hire.

A Rapid Recruitment Process

Wonga needed to hire 100 engineers quickly and were able to do so by setting up a multi-step process. This included a screening phone call, an online test, a one to two-hour online coding session, and a final interview. The team was involved in the interview process and the engineers were asked to hire people better than themselves. The process was checked every six months to ensure it was valid and giving the necessary information.

How Meeting Face-to-face Improved A Remote Team’s Output

In order to increase the productivity of an offsite team of 80 engineers, who were equally skilled as the onsite team, a series of actions were taken. These included sending senior engineers to visit the offsite team, changing team leaders, sending whole teams across, increasing communication through Skype, and blending teams. Ultimately, it was found that sending whole teams across and having them co-locate in each location for a week or two worked best. It was also found that people enjoyed traveling and that trust was built when people saw each other face-to-face.

An Onboarding How-To

When the VP of Engineering at Operam started, there were no onboarding materials. To solve this, they created a simple onboarding checklist and handbook, and assigned onboarding buddies to new engineers. It was important to choose the right projects for new engineers and to focus on onboarding, as it makes a huge difference to the company's productivity.

Integrating Remote Teams Post-Acquisition

After Plixi was acquired by Lockerz, the two software teams had to integrate, but were in two different cities. Conflict and jealousy grew between the teams, so the company invested in travel and rented a beach house for the teams to get to know each other. This improved communication and collaboration, and the teams were able to work together more effectively. The lesson learned is that when remote workers are involved, it is important to budget for travel so that teams can collaborate effectively.

Scaling To The Extreme

Plixi, a company that allowed people to put photos on Twitter, experienced outages on their web servers due to high traffic. After a period of investigation, they discovered the problem was due to disk reads locking up. With the help of Rackspace and Fusion-io, they were able to install four servers with the fastest hard-drives in the world, which solved the problem. The lesson learned was that it was important for the CTO to understand the whole stack and collaborate with vendors to find a solution.

The First Step Into Management

The author took a role as a team lead, but found that it was not what they wanted to do for the rest of their career. Through this experience, they learned that the role was 80% management and 20% coding, and that if they wanted to focus on coding, they would need to step back. They recommend that everyone try working as a team lead, as it can be a great learning experience.

Communicate Through Trial And Error

A team leader at Datadog was tasked with leading a large project, but the team grew too large and had to be split. Poor communication between the teams resulted in a mess, so the leader decided to schedule a meeting with everyone involved. After experimenting with various approaches, the team found that having a daily half-hour cross-team meeting was the most effective solution. The lesson learned was that managing multiple teams is difficult and sometimes requires trial and error to find the right solution.

How To Use Values For Structured Hiring

At Datadog, the hiring manager interviews were initially unstructured. To ensure that the right people were hired, the company decided to focus on their values and craft questions that would allow them to decide if the candidate would be a good fit. By using the same questions in multiple interviews, they were able to get a benchmark of what a good answer looks like.

How To Develop Managers Through An Internship Program

This article discusses an approach taken by a company to develop managers internally. They created an internship program that gives engineers bitesize pieces of management experience to help them decide if it is something they enjoy. Through this program, engineers learn how to interview, onboard, and mentor interns, as well as how to give and receive feedback. This has been a successful way to develop managers internally, and has also helped engineers learn what they really enjoy.

Training For Delegation

This article outlines the importance of delegating tasks to train staff up, even when there is no urgency. The author learned that it can take two to three times longer to train someone else up than to do the task themselves, and that it is important to start training them up before it becomes urgent. This lesson was learned through the author's experience of taking too long to delegate in the early stages of their career as a manager.

Encourage Female Developers’ Confidence

A CTO at a previous startup was interviewing a software engineer who had been in a male-dominated environment where her ideas were not taken seriously. The CTO decided to give her an offer and a senior developer position, and with some training and encouragement, she was able to gain confidence and become an excellent senior developer. This story highlights the importance of taking a diverse approach to hiring and managing a team.

How to Structure Performance Improvement Plans

Performance improvement plans are essential for teams of five or more, and should be tailored to each individual employee. When setting up a plan, managers should ask employees which areas they can improve on, and encourage them to think about their career goals. For employees who are not performing, plans should be structured and milestone-based. For those wanting to be promoted, managers should be transparent to make it easier for them to achieve their goals.

When Company Growth Work Visibility

As a manager, it is important to stay informed about what other teams are doing and to communicate this to your team. This helps to provide context and prevent rumors from circulating. To stay informed, managers should talk to other managers, encourage cross-team mixing, and keep their team up to date in one-on-ones and team meetings. Transparency is key, even if the manager doesn't know much.

Making Remote Work, Work

Datadog has a distributed team across multiple time zones and cultures, and has implemented strategies such as Slack, Google Docs, Pull Requests, video conferences, and phone booths to facilitate communication. Additionally, they have team members travel to each other's offices to ensure that remote workers are seen as people, rather than just resources. It is important to have enough remote workers to make the system work, and to have someone in the same time zone as you.

The Importance of A Clear Company Culture

Drawboard had not taken their culture seriously from the start, leading to a number of problems. Six months ago, mission and vision statements were introduced, which changed the interview process and allowed for more passionate and energetic hires. Values were also created, which can be used to determine whether a candidate is a good fit. The lesson learned is that mission, vision and value statements are fundamental to the health of an organization.

Managing Negative Employee Behaviors

The VP of Engineering hired someone who was great technically but had negative behaviors towards the team. Initially, the team's complaints were ignored, but this resulted in a drop in productivity and morale. When a similar situation happened again, the VP took action and addressed the issues with the engineer. The engineer acknowledged the unacceptable behavior and the VP is now working with him to look at the company's values. The lesson learned is that even if someone is great technically, if they are not aligned with the team, they need to go. However, it is important to be candid and upfront when there is a problem and to provide training and mentorship to help them improve.

How To Start Using OKRs

This article discusses the implementation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in an engineering team of 125 people. Initially, a pilot was attempted but was unsuccessful due to lack of training and context. To ensure success, the team invested in education and set up times for teams to discuss why the business wanted to do things versus why the teams wanted to do them. The article concludes that OKRs are very helpful for giving teams a focus, but it is important to invest in education and ensure that teams are working on the right stuff.

When Growth Frustrates An Employee

The author joined Datadog in 2015 as the first designated security person and had to build a Security team from scratch. After hiring the first person for the security team, the team grew to 25 people and the first person became unhappy due to their title and mandate. The author attempted to address the individual's concerns, but the situation deteriorated and the individual was unable to meet the expectations of the role. The author learned that they should have shared their vision of the team earlier so the individual could have voiced their concerns and been provided with training opportunities.

Scaling Via APIs

Trustpilot had a monolith codebase that was difficult to scale and onboard new engineers. To solve this, they implemented microservices and APIs to encapsulate the monolith. This allowed them to separate the codebase into smaller, more manageable services and enabled engineers to become productive faster. The lesson learned is to look for opportunities to solve organizational issues with architecture.

Avoiding Hiring Under Pressure

The author learned to trust their instincts and develop a well-thought-out and repeatable hiring process when looking to hire a project manager. They found that if they weren't fully convinced from the start, it wouldn't work out and they should feel brave enough to say no, even if under pressure to hire.

A Rapid Recruitment Process

Wonga needed to hire 100 engineers quickly and were able to do so by setting up a multi-step process. This included a screening phone call, an online test, a one to two-hour online coding session, and a final interview. The team was involved in the interview process and the engineers were asked to hire people better than themselves. The process was checked every six months to ensure it was valid and giving the necessary information.

How Meeting Face-to-face Improved A Remote Team’s Output

In order to increase the productivity of an offsite team of 80 engineers, who were equally skilled as the onsite team, a series of actions were taken. These included sending senior engineers to visit the offsite team, changing team leaders, sending whole teams across, increasing communication through Skype, and blending teams. Ultimately, it was found that sending whole teams across and having them co-locate in each location for a week or two worked best. It was also found that people enjoyed traveling and that trust was built when people saw each other face-to-face.

An Onboarding How-To

When the VP of Engineering at Operam started, there were no onboarding materials. To solve this, they created a simple onboarding checklist and handbook, and assigned onboarding buddies to new engineers. It was important to choose the right projects for new engineers and to focus on onboarding, as it makes a huge difference to the company's productivity.

Integrating Remote Teams Post-Acquisition

After Plixi was acquired by Lockerz, the two software teams had to integrate, but were in two different cities. Conflict and jealousy grew between the teams, so the company invested in travel and rented a beach house for the teams to get to know each other. This improved communication and collaboration, and the teams were able to work together more effectively. The lesson learned is that when remote workers are involved, it is important to budget for travel so that teams can collaborate effectively.

Scaling To The Extreme

Plixi, a company that allowed people to put photos on Twitter, experienced outages on their web servers due to high traffic. After a period of investigation, they discovered the problem was due to disk reads locking up. With the help of Rackspace and Fusion-io, they were able to install four servers with the fastest hard-drives in the world, which solved the problem. The lesson learned was that it was important for the CTO to understand the whole stack and collaborate with vendors to find a solution.

The First Step Into Management

The author took a role as a team lead, but found that it was not what they wanted to do for the rest of their career. Through this experience, they learned that the role was 80% management and 20% coding, and that if they wanted to focus on coding, they would need to step back. They recommend that everyone try working as a team lead, as it can be a great learning experience.

Communicate Through Trial And Error

A team leader at Datadog was tasked with leading a large project, but the team grew too large and had to be split. Poor communication between the teams resulted in a mess, so the leader decided to schedule a meeting with everyone involved. After experimenting with various approaches, the team found that having a daily half-hour cross-team meeting was the most effective solution. The lesson learned was that managing multiple teams is difficult and sometimes requires trial and error to find the right solution.

How To Use Values For Structured Hiring

At Datadog, the hiring manager interviews were initially unstructured. To ensure that the right people were hired, the company decided to focus on their values and craft questions that would allow them to decide if the candidate would be a good fit. By using the same questions in multiple interviews, they were able to get a benchmark of what a good answer looks like.

How To Develop Managers Through An Internship Program

This article discusses an approach taken by a company to develop managers internally. They created an internship program that gives engineers bitesize pieces of management experience to help them decide if it is something they enjoy. Through this program, engineers learn how to interview, onboard, and mentor interns, as well as how to give and receive feedback. This has been a successful way to develop managers internally, and has also helped engineers learn what they really enjoy.

Training For Delegation

This article outlines the importance of delegating tasks to train staff up, even when there is no urgency. The author learned that it can take two to three times longer to train someone else up than to do the task themselves, and that it is important to start training them up before it becomes urgent. This lesson was learned through the author's experience of taking too long to delegate in the early stages of their career as a manager.

Encourage Female Developers’ Confidence

A CTO at a previous startup was interviewing a software engineer who had been in a male-dominated environment where her ideas were not taken seriously. The CTO decided to give her an offer and a senior developer position, and with some training and encouragement, she was able to gain confidence and become an excellent senior developer. This story highlights the importance of taking a diverse approach to hiring and managing a team.

How to Structure Performance Improvement Plans

Performance improvement plans are essential for teams of five or more, and should be tailored to each individual employee. When setting up a plan, managers should ask employees which areas they can improve on, and encourage them to think about their career goals. For employees who are not performing, plans should be structured and milestone-based. For those wanting to be promoted, managers should be transparent to make it easier for them to achieve their goals.

When Company Growth Work Visibility

As a manager, it is important to stay informed about what other teams are doing and to communicate this to your team. This helps to provide context and prevent rumors from circulating. To stay informed, managers should talk to other managers, encourage cross-team mixing, and keep their team up to date in one-on-ones and team meetings. Transparency is key, even if the manager doesn't know much.

Making Remote Work, Work

Datadog has a distributed team across multiple time zones and cultures, and has implemented strategies such as Slack, Google Docs, Pull Requests, video conferences, and phone booths to facilitate communication. Additionally, they have team members travel to each other's offices to ensure that remote workers are seen as people, rather than just resources. It is important to have enough remote workers to make the system work, and to have someone in the same time zone as you.

The Importance of A Clear Company Culture

Drawboard had not taken their culture seriously from the start, leading to a number of problems. Six months ago, mission and vision statements were introduced, which changed the interview process and allowed for more passionate and energetic hires. Values were also created, which can be used to determine whether a candidate is a good fit. The lesson learned is that mission, vision and value statements are fundamental to the health of an organization.

Managing Negative Employee Behaviors

The VP of Engineering hired someone who was great technically but had negative behaviors towards the team. Initially, the team's complaints were ignored, but this resulted in a drop in productivity and morale. When a similar situation happened again, the VP took action and addressed the issues with the engineer. The engineer acknowledged the unacceptable behavior and the VP is now working with him to look at the company's values. The lesson learned is that even if someone is great technically, if they are not aligned with the team, they need to go. However, it is important to be candid and upfront when there is a problem and to provide training and mentorship to help them improve.

How To Start Using OKRs

This article discusses the implementation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in an engineering team of 125 people. Initially, a pilot was attempted but was unsuccessful due to lack of training and context. To ensure success, the team invested in education and set up times for teams to discuss why the business wanted to do things versus why the teams wanted to do them. The article concludes that OKRs are very helpful for giving teams a focus, but it is important to invest in education and ensure that teams are working on the right stuff.

When Growth Frustrates An Employee

The author joined Datadog in 2015 as the first designated security person and had to build a Security team from scratch. After hiring the first person for the security team, the team grew to 25 people and the first person became unhappy due to their title and mandate. The author attempted to address the individual's concerns, but the situation deteriorated and the individual was unable to meet the expectations of the role. The author learned that they should have shared their vision of the team earlier so the individual could have voiced their concerns and been provided with training opportunities.

Scaling Via APIs

Trustpilot had a monolith codebase that was difficult to scale and onboard new engineers. To solve this, they implemented microservices and APIs to encapsulate the monolith. This allowed them to separate the codebase into smaller, more manageable services and enabled engineers to become productive faster. The lesson learned is to look for opportunities to solve organizational issues with architecture.

Avoiding Hiring Under Pressure

The author learned to trust their instincts and develop a well-thought-out and repeatable hiring process when looking to hire a project manager. They found that if they weren't fully convinced from the start, it wouldn't work out and they should feel brave enough to say no, even if under pressure to hire.

A Rapid Recruitment Process

Wonga needed to hire 100 engineers quickly and were able to do so by setting up a multi-step process. This included a screening phone call, an online test, a one to two-hour online coding session, and a final interview. The team was involved in the interview process and the engineers were asked to hire people better than themselves. The process was checked every six months to ensure it was valid and giving the necessary information.

How Meeting Face-to-face Improved A Remote Team’s Output

In order to increase the productivity of an offsite team of 80 engineers, who were equally skilled as the onsite team, a series of actions were taken. These included sending senior engineers to visit the offsite team, changing team leaders, sending whole teams across, increasing communication through Skype, and blending teams. Ultimately, it was found that sending whole teams across and having them co-locate in each location for a week or two worked best. It was also found that people enjoyed traveling and that trust was built when people saw each other face-to-face.

An Onboarding How-To

When the VP of Engineering at Operam started, there were no onboarding materials. To solve this, they created a simple onboarding checklist and handbook, and assigned onboarding buddies to new engineers. It was important to choose the right projects for new engineers and to focus on onboarding, as it makes a huge difference to the company's productivity.

Integrating Remote Teams Post-Acquisition

After Plixi was acquired by Lockerz, the two software teams had to integrate, but were in two different cities. Conflict and jealousy grew between the teams, so the company invested in travel and rented a beach house for the teams to get to know each other. This improved communication and collaboration, and the teams were able to work together more effectively. The lesson learned is that when remote workers are involved, it is important to budget for travel so that teams can collaborate effectively.

Scaling To The Extreme

Plixi, a company that allowed people to put photos on Twitter, experienced outages on their web servers due to high traffic. After a period of investigation, they discovered the problem was due to disk reads locking up. With the help of Rackspace and Fusion-io, they were able to install four servers with the fastest hard-drives in the world, which solved the problem. The lesson learned was that it was important for the CTO to understand the whole stack and collaborate with vendors to find a solution.

The First Step Into Management

The author took a role as a team lead, but found that it was not what they wanted to do for the rest of their career. Through this experience, they learned that the role was 80% management and 20% coding, and that if they wanted to focus on coding, they would need to step back. They recommend that everyone try working as a team lead, as it can be a great learning experience.

Communicate Through Trial And Error

A team leader at Datadog was tasked with leading a large project, but the team grew too large and had to be split. Poor communication between the teams resulted in a mess, so the leader decided to schedule a meeting with everyone involved. After experimenting with various approaches, the team found that having a daily half-hour cross-team meeting was the most effective solution. The lesson learned was that managing multiple teams is difficult and sometimes requires trial and error to find the right solution.

How To Use Values For Structured Hiring

At Datadog, the hiring manager interviews were initially unstructured. To ensure that the right people were hired, the company decided to focus on their values and craft questions that would allow them to decide if the candidate would be a good fit. By using the same questions in multiple interviews, they were able to get a benchmark of what a good answer looks like.

How To Develop Managers Through An Internship Program

This article discusses an approach taken by a company to develop managers internally. They created an internship program that gives engineers bitesize pieces of management experience to help them decide if it is something they enjoy. Through this program, engineers learn how to interview, onboard, and mentor interns, as well as how to give and receive feedback. This has been a successful way to develop managers internally, and has also helped engineers learn what they really enjoy.

Training For Delegation

This article outlines the importance of delegating tasks to train staff up, even when there is no urgency. The author learned that it can take two to three times longer to train someone else up than to do the task themselves, and that it is important to start training them up before it becomes urgent. This lesson was learned through the author's experience of taking too long to delegate in the early stages of their career as a manager.

Encourage Female Developers’ Confidence

A CTO at a previous startup was interviewing a software engineer who had been in a male-dominated environment where her ideas were not taken seriously. The CTO decided to give her an offer and a senior developer position, and with some training and encouragement, she was able to gain confidence and become an excellent senior developer. This story highlights the importance of taking a diverse approach to hiring and managing a team.

How to Structure Performance Improvement Plans

Performance improvement plans are essential for teams of five or more, and should be tailored to each individual employee. When setting up a plan, managers should ask employees which areas they can improve on, and encourage them to think about their career goals. For employees who are not performing, plans should be structured and milestone-based. For those wanting to be promoted, managers should be transparent to make it easier for them to achieve their goals.

When Company Growth Work Visibility

As a manager, it is important to stay informed about what other teams are doing and to communicate this to your team. This helps to provide context and prevent rumors from circulating. To stay informed, managers should talk to other managers, encourage cross-team mixing, and keep their team up to date in one-on-ones and team meetings. Transparency is key, even if the manager doesn't know much.

Making Remote Work, Work

Datadog has a distributed team across multiple time zones and cultures, and has implemented strategies such as Slack, Google Docs, Pull Requests, video conferences, and phone booths to facilitate communication. Additionally, they have team members travel to each other's offices to ensure that remote workers are seen as people, rather than just resources. It is important to have enough remote workers to make the system work, and to have someone in the same time zone as you.

The Importance of A Clear Company Culture

Drawboard had not taken their culture seriously from the start, leading to a number of problems. Six months ago, mission and vision statements were introduced, which changed the interview process and allowed for more passionate and energetic hires. Values were also created, which can be used to determine whether a candidate is a good fit. The lesson learned is that mission, vision and value statements are fundamental to the health of an organization.

Managing Negative Employee Behaviors

The VP of Engineering hired someone who was great technically but had negative behaviors towards the team. Initially, the team's complaints were ignored, but this resulted in a drop in productivity and morale. When a similar situation happened again, the VP took action and addressed the issues with the engineer. The engineer acknowledged the unacceptable behavior and the VP is now working with him to look at the company's values. The lesson learned is that even if someone is great technically, if they are not aligned with the team, they need to go. However, it is important to be candid and upfront when there is a problem and to provide training and mentorship to help them improve.

How To Start Using OKRs

This article discusses the implementation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in an engineering team of 125 people. Initially, a pilot was attempted but was unsuccessful due to lack of training and context. To ensure success, the team invested in education and set up times for teams to discuss why the business wanted to do things versus why the teams wanted to do them. The article concludes that OKRs are very helpful for giving teams a focus, but it is important to invest in education and ensure that teams are working on the right stuff.

When Growth Frustrates An Employee

The author joined Datadog in 2015 as the first designated security person and had to build a Security team from scratch. After hiring the first person for the security team, the team grew to 25 people and the first person became unhappy due to their title and mandate. The author attempted to address the individual's concerns, but the situation deteriorated and the individual was unable to meet the expectations of the role. The author learned that they should have shared their vision of the team earlier so the individual could have voiced their concerns and been provided with training opportunities.

Scaling Via APIs

Trustpilot had a monolith codebase that was difficult to scale and onboard new engineers. To solve this, they implemented microservices and APIs to encapsulate the monolith. This allowed them to separate the codebase into smaller, more manageable services and enabled engineers to become productive faster. The lesson learned is to look for opportunities to solve organizational issues with architecture.

Avoiding Hiring Under Pressure

The author learned to trust their instincts and develop a well-thought-out and repeatable hiring process when looking to hire a project manager. They found that if they weren't fully convinced from the start, it wouldn't work out and they should feel brave enough to say no, even if under pressure to hire.

A Rapid Recruitment Process

Wonga needed to hire 100 engineers quickly and were able to do so by setting up a multi-step process. This included a screening phone call, an online test, a one to two-hour online coding session, and a final interview. The team was involved in the interview process and the engineers were asked to hire people better than themselves. The process was checked every six months to ensure it was valid and giving the necessary information.

How Meeting Face-to-face Improved A Remote Team’s Output

In order to increase the productivity of an offsite team of 80 engineers, who were equally skilled as the onsite team, a series of actions were taken. These included sending senior engineers to visit the offsite team, changing team leaders, sending whole teams across, increasing communication through Skype, and blending teams. Ultimately, it was found that sending whole teams across and having them co-locate in each location for a week or two worked best. It was also found that people enjoyed traveling and that trust was built when people saw each other face-to-face.

An Onboarding How-To

When the VP of Engineering at Operam started, there were no onboarding materials. To solve this, they created a simple onboarding checklist and handbook, and assigned onboarding buddies to new engineers. It was important to choose the right projects for new engineers and to focus on onboarding, as it makes a huge difference to the company's productivity.

Integrating Remote Teams Post-Acquisition

After Plixi was acquired by Lockerz, the two software teams had to integrate, but were in two different cities. Conflict and jealousy grew between the teams, so the company invested in travel and rented a beach house for the teams to get to know each other. This improved communication and collaboration, and the teams were able to work together more effectively. The lesson learned is that when remote workers are involved, it is important to budget for travel so that teams can collaborate effectively.

Scaling To The Extreme

Plixi, a company that allowed people to put photos on Twitter, experienced outages on their web servers due to high traffic. After a period of investigation, they discovered the problem was due to disk reads locking up. With the help of Rackspace and Fusion-io, they were able to install four servers with the fastest hard-drives in the world, which solved the problem. The lesson learned was that it was important for the CTO to understand the whole stack and collaborate with vendors to find a solution.

The First Step Into Management

The author took a role as a team lead, but found that it was not what they wanted to do for the rest of their career. Through this experience, they learned that the role was 80% management and 20% coding, and that if they wanted to focus on coding, they would need to step back. They recommend that everyone try working as a team lead, as it can be a great learning experience.

Communicate Through Trial And Error

A team leader at Datadog was tasked with leading a large project, but the team grew too large and had to be split. Poor communication between the teams resulted in a mess, so the leader decided to schedule a meeting with everyone involved. After experimenting with various approaches, the team found that having a daily half-hour cross-team meeting was the most effective solution. The lesson learned was that managing multiple teams is difficult and sometimes requires trial and error to find the right solution.

How To Use Values For Structured Hiring

At Datadog, the hiring manager interviews were initially unstructured. To ensure that the right people were hired, the company decided to focus on their values and craft questions that would allow them to decide if the candidate would be a good fit. By using the same questions in multiple interviews, they were able to get a benchmark of what a good answer looks like.

How To Develop Managers Through An Internship Program

This article discusses an approach taken by a company to develop managers internally. They created an internship program that gives engineers bitesize pieces of management experience to help them decide if it is something they enjoy. Through this program, engineers learn how to interview, onboard, and mentor interns, as well as how to give and receive feedback. This has been a successful way to develop managers internally, and has also helped engineers learn what they really enjoy.

Training For Delegation

This article outlines the importance of delegating tasks to train staff up, even when there is no urgency. The author learned that it can take two to three times longer to train someone else up than to do the task themselves, and that it is important to start training them up before it becomes urgent. This lesson was learned through the author's experience of taking too long to delegate in the early stages of their career as a manager.

Encourage Female Developers’ Confidence

A CTO at a previous startup was interviewing a software engineer who had been in a male-dominated environment where her ideas were not taken seriously. The CTO decided to give her an offer and a senior developer position, and with some training and encouragement, she was able to gain confidence and become an excellent senior developer. This story highlights the importance of taking a diverse approach to hiring and managing a team.

How to Structure Performance Improvement Plans

Performance improvement plans are essential for teams of five or more, and should be tailored to each individual employee. When setting up a plan, managers should ask employees which areas they can improve on, and encourage them to think about their career goals. For employees who are not performing, plans should be structured and milestone-based. For those wanting to be promoted, managers should be transparent to make it easier for them to achieve their goals.

When Company Growth Work Visibility

As a manager, it is important to stay informed about what other teams are doing and to communicate this to your team. This helps to provide context and prevent rumors from circulating. To stay informed, managers should talk to other managers, encourage cross-team mixing, and keep their team up to date in one-on-ones and team meetings. Transparency is key, even if the manager doesn't know much.

Making Remote Work, Work

Datadog has a distributed team across multiple time zones and cultures, and has implemented strategies such as Slack, Google Docs, Pull Requests, video conferences, and phone booths to facilitate communication. Additionally, they have team members travel to each other's offices to ensure that remote workers are seen as people, rather than just resources. It is important to have enough remote workers to make the system work, and to have someone in the same time zone as you.

The Importance of A Clear Company Culture

Drawboard had not taken their culture seriously from the start, leading to a number of problems. Six months ago, mission and vision statements were introduced, which changed the interview process and allowed for more passionate and energetic hires. Values were also created, which can be used to determine whether a candidate is a good fit. The lesson learned is that mission, vision and value statements are fundamental to the health of an organization.

Managing Negative Employee Behaviors

The VP of Engineering hired someone who was great technically but had negative behaviors towards the team. Initially, the team's complaints were ignored, but this resulted in a drop in productivity and morale. When a similar situation happened again, the VP took action and addressed the issues with the engineer. The engineer acknowledged the unacceptable behavior and the VP is now working with him to look at the company's values. The lesson learned is that even if someone is great technically, if they are not aligned with the team, they need to go. However, it is important to be candid and upfront when there is a problem and to provide training and mentorship to help them improve.