Knowledge shared by our community

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

Constant collaboration between Product Management & Engineering

This article discusses a problem faced by one company where Product Management and Engineering were in constant conflict due to misalignment of deliverables. The author, a Director of Engineering, implemented rules of engagement, chunking down and chunking up models, and invited Product Managers to Engineering meetings to help resolve disagreements. The article also highlights the importance of building trust between Project Management and Engineering to ensure smoother delivery and more effective negotiation.

Building From The Ground Up

At Insightly, the engineering team needed to incorporate the right processes and adjust the product architecture to build a great commercial software. Agile processes were implemented to streamline development and feedback, and the team was encouraged to work on projects they were passionate about. As the team grew, the focus was on hiring people with good cultural fit and strong technical skills. Through a feedback loop and clearly defined team culture, the team was able to make the necessary changes and build a process that they bought into.

Bootcamp Graduate to Engineering Manager

A company was struggling to find an Engineering Manager, so they hired a relatively junior developer who had managerial experience from non-tech related fields. She was able to craft a successful team by creating a strong team identity, protecting them from external issues, and creating tutorials for onboarding. This was a huge success and taught the lesson that leadership skills can be learned from outside of a technology field.

How to Make Evaluations a Level Playing Field

A small startup hired a developer who had been overlooked for promotion in the past. To ensure fairness, the team created a structured system of evaluation based on the Radford levels of IC contributions. This system was designed to be clear and objective, and the woman who had asked for assurance of fairness was happy with it. This system cut down on the workload of the team leader and made it clear what team members needed to do to be promoted.

Don’t Hire One Woman. Hire Three.

When the author was leading an all-male DevOps team at Square, they were trying to close a female candidate. To ensure she would thrive in the team, the author decided to hire three women - the candidate, an intern, and a bootcamp graduate. This changed the team's culture dramatically, making it more enjoyable to work in and more open and less defensive. The author learned that inclusion and diversity can help everyone, not just certain minorities.

Knowing When To Say Stop

A friend recommended a senior engineer to join the team, and the team was impressed with him. Despite HR's warnings, he was hired and assigned to the most important feature. He caused drama in the office and made excuses for why he couldn't write any code, so he was eventually let go. A woman on a school field trip was then hired and delivered the solution in three months. The lesson learned was to listen to HR and not keep people who cause drama and can't get things done.

Choosing Between Native And Hybrid Approaches To Mobile Development

As a Mobile Engineering Manager, it is important to consider the end state, data needs, complexity, and customer base when deciding between a native or hybrid approach for a project. React is the best framework for hybrid, but native will provide a better customer experience. It is important to set up guidelines to easily decide between native and hybrid to avoid time and money spent on switching.

How To Change A Culture Using Company Practices

When Bank of America wanted to move to an Agile approach, I suggested taking an incremental approach by changing the development and testing process in the middle of the software development cycle. This allowed for small changes to be made and accepted, rather than a large, sudden change which would have resulted in pushback. Leadership support was also necessary for the transformation to be successful.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

Constant collaboration between Product Management & Engineering

This article discusses a problem faced by one company where Product Management and Engineering were in constant conflict due to misalignment of deliverables. The author, a Director of Engineering, implemented rules of engagement, chunking down and chunking up models, and invited Product Managers to Engineering meetings to help resolve disagreements. The article also highlights the importance of building trust between Project Management and Engineering to ensure smoother delivery and more effective negotiation.

Building From The Ground Up

At Insightly, the engineering team needed to incorporate the right processes and adjust the product architecture to build a great commercial software. Agile processes were implemented to streamline development and feedback, and the team was encouraged to work on projects they were passionate about. As the team grew, the focus was on hiring people with good cultural fit and strong technical skills. Through a feedback loop and clearly defined team culture, the team was able to make the necessary changes and build a process that they bought into.

Bootcamp Graduate to Engineering Manager

A company was struggling to find an Engineering Manager, so they hired a relatively junior developer who had managerial experience from non-tech related fields. She was able to craft a successful team by creating a strong team identity, protecting them from external issues, and creating tutorials for onboarding. This was a huge success and taught the lesson that leadership skills can be learned from outside of a technology field.

How to Make Evaluations a Level Playing Field

A small startup hired a developer who had been overlooked for promotion in the past. To ensure fairness, the team created a structured system of evaluation based on the Radford levels of IC contributions. This system was designed to be clear and objective, and the woman who had asked for assurance of fairness was happy with it. This system cut down on the workload of the team leader and made it clear what team members needed to do to be promoted.

Don’t Hire One Woman. Hire Three.

When the author was leading an all-male DevOps team at Square, they were trying to close a female candidate. To ensure she would thrive in the team, the author decided to hire three women - the candidate, an intern, and a bootcamp graduate. This changed the team's culture dramatically, making it more enjoyable to work in and more open and less defensive. The author learned that inclusion and diversity can help everyone, not just certain minorities.

Knowing When To Say Stop

A friend recommended a senior engineer to join the team, and the team was impressed with him. Despite HR's warnings, he was hired and assigned to the most important feature. He caused drama in the office and made excuses for why he couldn't write any code, so he was eventually let go. A woman on a school field trip was then hired and delivered the solution in three months. The lesson learned was to listen to HR and not keep people who cause drama and can't get things done.

Choosing Between Native And Hybrid Approaches To Mobile Development

As a Mobile Engineering Manager, it is important to consider the end state, data needs, complexity, and customer base when deciding between a native or hybrid approach for a project. React is the best framework for hybrid, but native will provide a better customer experience. It is important to set up guidelines to easily decide between native and hybrid to avoid time and money spent on switching.

How To Change A Culture Using Company Practices

When Bank of America wanted to move to an Agile approach, I suggested taking an incremental approach by changing the development and testing process in the middle of the software development cycle. This allowed for small changes to be made and accepted, rather than a large, sudden change which would have resulted in pushback. Leadership support was also necessary for the transformation to be successful.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

Constant collaboration between Product Management & Engineering

This article discusses a problem faced by one company where Product Management and Engineering were in constant conflict due to misalignment of deliverables. The author, a Director of Engineering, implemented rules of engagement, chunking down and chunking up models, and invited Product Managers to Engineering meetings to help resolve disagreements. The article also highlights the importance of building trust between Project Management and Engineering to ensure smoother delivery and more effective negotiation.

Building From The Ground Up

At Insightly, the engineering team needed to incorporate the right processes and adjust the product architecture to build a great commercial software. Agile processes were implemented to streamline development and feedback, and the team was encouraged to work on projects they were passionate about. As the team grew, the focus was on hiring people with good cultural fit and strong technical skills. Through a feedback loop and clearly defined team culture, the team was able to make the necessary changes and build a process that they bought into.

Bootcamp Graduate to Engineering Manager

A company was struggling to find an Engineering Manager, so they hired a relatively junior developer who had managerial experience from non-tech related fields. She was able to craft a successful team by creating a strong team identity, protecting them from external issues, and creating tutorials for onboarding. This was a huge success and taught the lesson that leadership skills can be learned from outside of a technology field.

How to Make Evaluations a Level Playing Field

A small startup hired a developer who had been overlooked for promotion in the past. To ensure fairness, the team created a structured system of evaluation based on the Radford levels of IC contributions. This system was designed to be clear and objective, and the woman who had asked for assurance of fairness was happy with it. This system cut down on the workload of the team leader and made it clear what team members needed to do to be promoted.

Don’t Hire One Woman. Hire Three.

When the author was leading an all-male DevOps team at Square, they were trying to close a female candidate. To ensure she would thrive in the team, the author decided to hire three women - the candidate, an intern, and a bootcamp graduate. This changed the team's culture dramatically, making it more enjoyable to work in and more open and less defensive. The author learned that inclusion and diversity can help everyone, not just certain minorities.

Knowing When To Say Stop

A friend recommended a senior engineer to join the team, and the team was impressed with him. Despite HR's warnings, he was hired and assigned to the most important feature. He caused drama in the office and made excuses for why he couldn't write any code, so he was eventually let go. A woman on a school field trip was then hired and delivered the solution in three months. The lesson learned was to listen to HR and not keep people who cause drama and can't get things done.

Choosing Between Native And Hybrid Approaches To Mobile Development

As a Mobile Engineering Manager, it is important to consider the end state, data needs, complexity, and customer base when deciding between a native or hybrid approach for a project. React is the best framework for hybrid, but native will provide a better customer experience. It is important to set up guidelines to easily decide between native and hybrid to avoid time and money spent on switching.

How To Change A Culture Using Company Practices

When Bank of America wanted to move to an Agile approach, I suggested taking an incremental approach by changing the development and testing process in the middle of the software development cycle. This allowed for small changes to be made and accepted, rather than a large, sudden change which would have resulted in pushback. Leadership support was also necessary for the transformation to be successful.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

Constant collaboration between Product Management & Engineering

This article discusses a problem faced by one company where Product Management and Engineering were in constant conflict due to misalignment of deliverables. The author, a Director of Engineering, implemented rules of engagement, chunking down and chunking up models, and invited Product Managers to Engineering meetings to help resolve disagreements. The article also highlights the importance of building trust between Project Management and Engineering to ensure smoother delivery and more effective negotiation.

Building From The Ground Up

At Insightly, the engineering team needed to incorporate the right processes and adjust the product architecture to build a great commercial software. Agile processes were implemented to streamline development and feedback, and the team was encouraged to work on projects they were passionate about. As the team grew, the focus was on hiring people with good cultural fit and strong technical skills. Through a feedback loop and clearly defined team culture, the team was able to make the necessary changes and build a process that they bought into.

Bootcamp Graduate to Engineering Manager

A company was struggling to find an Engineering Manager, so they hired a relatively junior developer who had managerial experience from non-tech related fields. She was able to craft a successful team by creating a strong team identity, protecting them from external issues, and creating tutorials for onboarding. This was a huge success and taught the lesson that leadership skills can be learned from outside of a technology field.

How to Make Evaluations a Level Playing Field

A small startup hired a developer who had been overlooked for promotion in the past. To ensure fairness, the team created a structured system of evaluation based on the Radford levels of IC contributions. This system was designed to be clear and objective, and the woman who had asked for assurance of fairness was happy with it. This system cut down on the workload of the team leader and made it clear what team members needed to do to be promoted.

Don’t Hire One Woman. Hire Three.

When the author was leading an all-male DevOps team at Square, they were trying to close a female candidate. To ensure she would thrive in the team, the author decided to hire three women - the candidate, an intern, and a bootcamp graduate. This changed the team's culture dramatically, making it more enjoyable to work in and more open and less defensive. The author learned that inclusion and diversity can help everyone, not just certain minorities.

Knowing When To Say Stop

A friend recommended a senior engineer to join the team, and the team was impressed with him. Despite HR's warnings, he was hired and assigned to the most important feature. He caused drama in the office and made excuses for why he couldn't write any code, so he was eventually let go. A woman on a school field trip was then hired and delivered the solution in three months. The lesson learned was to listen to HR and not keep people who cause drama and can't get things done.

Choosing Between Native And Hybrid Approaches To Mobile Development

As a Mobile Engineering Manager, it is important to consider the end state, data needs, complexity, and customer base when deciding between a native or hybrid approach for a project. React is the best framework for hybrid, but native will provide a better customer experience. It is important to set up guidelines to easily decide between native and hybrid to avoid time and money spent on switching.

How To Change A Culture Using Company Practices

When Bank of America wanted to move to an Agile approach, I suggested taking an incremental approach by changing the development and testing process in the middle of the software development cycle. This allowed for small changes to be made and accepted, rather than a large, sudden change which would have resulted in pushback. Leadership support was also necessary for the transformation to be successful.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

Constant collaboration between Product Management & Engineering

This article discusses a problem faced by one company where Product Management and Engineering were in constant conflict due to misalignment of deliverables. The author, a Director of Engineering, implemented rules of engagement, chunking down and chunking up models, and invited Product Managers to Engineering meetings to help resolve disagreements. The article also highlights the importance of building trust between Project Management and Engineering to ensure smoother delivery and more effective negotiation.

Building From The Ground Up

At Insightly, the engineering team needed to incorporate the right processes and adjust the product architecture to build a great commercial software. Agile processes were implemented to streamline development and feedback, and the team was encouraged to work on projects they were passionate about. As the team grew, the focus was on hiring people with good cultural fit and strong technical skills. Through a feedback loop and clearly defined team culture, the team was able to make the necessary changes and build a process that they bought into.

Bootcamp Graduate to Engineering Manager

A company was struggling to find an Engineering Manager, so they hired a relatively junior developer who had managerial experience from non-tech related fields. She was able to craft a successful team by creating a strong team identity, protecting them from external issues, and creating tutorials for onboarding. This was a huge success and taught the lesson that leadership skills can be learned from outside of a technology field.

How to Make Evaluations a Level Playing Field

A small startup hired a developer who had been overlooked for promotion in the past. To ensure fairness, the team created a structured system of evaluation based on the Radford levels of IC contributions. This system was designed to be clear and objective, and the woman who had asked for assurance of fairness was happy with it. This system cut down on the workload of the team leader and made it clear what team members needed to do to be promoted.

Don’t Hire One Woman. Hire Three.

When the author was leading an all-male DevOps team at Square, they were trying to close a female candidate. To ensure she would thrive in the team, the author decided to hire three women - the candidate, an intern, and a bootcamp graduate. This changed the team's culture dramatically, making it more enjoyable to work in and more open and less defensive. The author learned that inclusion and diversity can help everyone, not just certain minorities.

Knowing When To Say Stop

A friend recommended a senior engineer to join the team, and the team was impressed with him. Despite HR's warnings, he was hired and assigned to the most important feature. He caused drama in the office and made excuses for why he couldn't write any code, so he was eventually let go. A woman on a school field trip was then hired and delivered the solution in three months. The lesson learned was to listen to HR and not keep people who cause drama and can't get things done.

Choosing Between Native And Hybrid Approaches To Mobile Development

As a Mobile Engineering Manager, it is important to consider the end state, data needs, complexity, and customer base when deciding between a native or hybrid approach for a project. React is the best framework for hybrid, but native will provide a better customer experience. It is important to set up guidelines to easily decide between native and hybrid to avoid time and money spent on switching.

How To Change A Culture Using Company Practices

When Bank of America wanted to move to an Agile approach, I suggested taking an incremental approach by changing the development and testing process in the middle of the software development cycle. This allowed for small changes to be made and accepted, rather than a large, sudden change which would have resulted in pushback. Leadership support was also necessary for the transformation to be successful.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

Constant collaboration between Product Management & Engineering

This article discusses a problem faced by one company where Product Management and Engineering were in constant conflict due to misalignment of deliverables. The author, a Director of Engineering, implemented rules of engagement, chunking down and chunking up models, and invited Product Managers to Engineering meetings to help resolve disagreements. The article also highlights the importance of building trust between Project Management and Engineering to ensure smoother delivery and more effective negotiation.

Building From The Ground Up

At Insightly, the engineering team needed to incorporate the right processes and adjust the product architecture to build a great commercial software. Agile processes were implemented to streamline development and feedback, and the team was encouraged to work on projects they were passionate about. As the team grew, the focus was on hiring people with good cultural fit and strong technical skills. Through a feedback loop and clearly defined team culture, the team was able to make the necessary changes and build a process that they bought into.

Bootcamp Graduate to Engineering Manager

A company was struggling to find an Engineering Manager, so they hired a relatively junior developer who had managerial experience from non-tech related fields. She was able to craft a successful team by creating a strong team identity, protecting them from external issues, and creating tutorials for onboarding. This was a huge success and taught the lesson that leadership skills can be learned from outside of a technology field.

How to Make Evaluations a Level Playing Field

A small startup hired a developer who had been overlooked for promotion in the past. To ensure fairness, the team created a structured system of evaluation based on the Radford levels of IC contributions. This system was designed to be clear and objective, and the woman who had asked for assurance of fairness was happy with it. This system cut down on the workload of the team leader and made it clear what team members needed to do to be promoted.

Don’t Hire One Woman. Hire Three.

When the author was leading an all-male DevOps team at Square, they were trying to close a female candidate. To ensure she would thrive in the team, the author decided to hire three women - the candidate, an intern, and a bootcamp graduate. This changed the team's culture dramatically, making it more enjoyable to work in and more open and less defensive. The author learned that inclusion and diversity can help everyone, not just certain minorities.

Knowing When To Say Stop

A friend recommended a senior engineer to join the team, and the team was impressed with him. Despite HR's warnings, he was hired and assigned to the most important feature. He caused drama in the office and made excuses for why he couldn't write any code, so he was eventually let go. A woman on a school field trip was then hired and delivered the solution in three months. The lesson learned was to listen to HR and not keep people who cause drama and can't get things done.

Choosing Between Native And Hybrid Approaches To Mobile Development

As a Mobile Engineering Manager, it is important to consider the end state, data needs, complexity, and customer base when deciding between a native or hybrid approach for a project. React is the best framework for hybrid, but native will provide a better customer experience. It is important to set up guidelines to easily decide between native and hybrid to avoid time and money spent on switching.

How To Change A Culture Using Company Practices

When Bank of America wanted to move to an Agile approach, I suggested taking an incremental approach by changing the development and testing process in the middle of the software development cycle. This allowed for small changes to be made and accepted, rather than a large, sudden change which would have resulted in pushback. Leadership support was also necessary for the transformation to be successful.