Knowledge shared by our community

Improving the team members relationship in a new team with conflicting environment

When a new team is formed with new joiners to the company, the relationship between them can be poor. After talking to them individually, it was unclear who was creating the conflicting environment. To improve the situation, an off-site event was organised to get to know each other better and agree on an action plan. Follow up sessions were held to assess the team's happiness and spread knowledge. Ultimately, the team improved, but members were switched around to provide more opportunities. The key lessons learned were to start knowing each other well, share the impact of their actions, and have an off-site session for open and transparent conversation.

How to Meet Strict Deadlines In An Environment of Uncertainty

A research team had built a quick proof-of-concept application, and it was the job of a new EM to take ownership of it and form a new team to turn it into a product and deploy it in production within 6 weeks. The EM and team took ownership of the prototype, investigated its modules and created technical documents, and assessed its production readiness. Through collaboration with the product and security teams, they were able to identify gaps and make reasonable compromises to meet the deadline. Lessons learned included working closely with stakeholders, putting uncertainty on paper, and challenging what might seem obvious.

Why Rearchitecting Might Not Always Be the Best Idea

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

Turning Around an Underperforming Team

When tasked with turning around a team that had not delivered much business value, the Engineering Manager took a step back to observe and collect evidence before jumping into solutions. After identifying the team dynamics, lack of understanding of the project, and lack of technical leadership, the manager coached one team member to take charge and the team was able to deliver exceeding expectations. The manager learned to take the time to identify and understand the team's problems before proposing solutions, and to delegate work to others to help them grow and become more autonomous.

Being Given a Team: What Does an Inspiring Leader Can Do

The author has experienced leading teams in various forms and has been successful in turning them into functioning units. He has a unique set of skills that allow him to understand the technical side of projects and communicate it accurately with people across different teams. He also has a realistic approach to planning and takes full responsibility for adjusting the scope to fit what resources are available. His main strength is his ability to merge his technical skill set with his people skills, which has helped him be successful in leading teams and enjoy his job.

Leading a UI Overhaul With a Tight Deadline

This article discusses the challenges of leading a cross-team overhaul project with a tight deadline. The author outlines the actions taken to ensure successful completion of the project, such as detailed planning, communication, and feedback loops. The project was a success and the author learned lessons such as the importance of communication and planning, staying focused, and being confident as a leader.

Keeping an Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive

After being inspired by her sister to make a difference in the community, a woman in IT decided to start a home care business. She researched what was needed to open a care home, visited other care homes, shadowed a director at a retirement facility, and obtained a certification and license. After eight months of trying to get her first client, she was able to open her business and eventually made a profit by selling it to someone who was also passionate about helping elderly people. This experience helped her build her confidence, communication skills, and people skills, which she was able to apply to her IT career.

Managing Tech Debt: A Success Story

This article discusses the problem of technical debt and the steps taken to address it. It emphasizes the need for a top-down strategy to ensure alignment of stakeholders and a bottom-up approach for day-to-day execution. It also suggests creating a tech debt backlog and discarding unimportant issues to focus on what matters most. Finally, it suggests measuring success by tracking engineering velocity and the number of tickets.

Diverse Teams Have Greater Customer Empathy

This article outlines the steps taken to build a better mass-market product for an audience of older users. These steps included using personas, advocating for inclusive design principles, and implementing diverse friendly hiring practices. Ultimately, these changes resulted in a more accessible product and helped attract great talent to the team. The article emphasizes the importance of diverse teams in empathizing with diverse audiences and building better products.

Consolidating Your Learnings Through Reflection and Journaling

This article discusses the challenges of learning during the pandemic and the actions taken to overcome them. These include asking for help, being kind to oneself, blocking the calendar for in-depth work sessions, taking 1-2 hour walks to listen to music, and keeping a diary of product craft learnings. The article also emphasizes the importance of understanding that everyone has unique needs and battles during this time, and that journaling can be a helpful tool for tracking progress and growth.

Simpler Product Visions and Strategy, Create Clarity to Empower Teams

A product leader found themselves in a difficult situation with teams disagreeing on the proactive path forward. To solve this, they simplified the product vision into a sound byte, presented it through PowerPoint, and refined the product strategy from 10 pages to 1 page. This helped the teams unite and focus on the product vision and strategy, and empowered them to better serve customers and the business. The lesson learned was that less is more when it comes to strategies.

Data-Driven Product Teams Are Easier to Empower and Earn Autonomy Faster

A company was struggling to empower its teams to respond to customer needs, due to a lack of shared goals and success metrics. After researching the business challenges, the PM proposed new goals and metrics to leadership, which were accepted. To support this, data engineering and infrastructure was set up, and analytics training was provided. As a result, the teams were able to make data-driven product decisions and move the North Star metric by 200%.

Scaling Teams to Make Better Decentralised Decisions via Documents and Tenets

A PM for a machine learning product was tasked with scaling the product, but encountered issues with quality. To address this, the PM took over the product and held talks with the original team, the newly scaled team, and the stakeholders. This led to the PM being looped in to do more scaling reviews, and the team and stakeholders expanding to 21 countries. To help with this, the PM created FAQs and open office hours, and held a Tenets workshop to document decision making. This helped decentralize decision making, build trust, and structure conversations.

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome, There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Perfect PM’

A junior PM was struggling with imposter syndrome, causing them to make slower decisions and avoid hard trade-off calls. To help, their manager encouraged them to see skill gaps as learning opportunities, opened up about their own weaknesses, and encouraged them to seek mentors and track their progress. With patience and kindness, the PM was able to build their confidence and eventually take on new challenges.

Influencing Without Authority (Servant leadership)

A Senior Engineering Manager faced a unique challenge when joining a new company in the Midwest: the system architecture was based on decisions made several years before, causing a number of issues. After challenging the status quo and establishing trust with the team, the manager was able to identify the bottleneck and revamp the architecture, reducing the number of resources 18x times and increasing the app's performance 2x times. The manager learned that it is important to understand regional, company- and team-specific culture, and to encourage the team to think and come up with their own solutions.

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Managing a Report With Communication Issues

This article discusses the experience of managing a stellar engineer who needed help with communication skills. The manager used a coaching model to help the engineer, focusing on asking questions and guiding them towards self-transformation. Over time, the engineer became more responsive and trusting, and eventually began to value the relationship. The article concludes with the lessons learned, including the importance of being open and vulnerable when mentoring someone.

Making Some Tough Roadmap Decisions

A head of product had to make tough decisions to deploy a product in 80 new markets. The main problem was that 70 percent of revenue came from the US and five historical accounts located there, leaving only 35 percent of the roadmap to develop and deploy other functionalities. To solve this problem, the head of product used data to demonstrate the cost of lost opportunities from investing too much in current customers, and proposed to reduce investment in them and double on product investments. After a year of aligning stakeholders, the board and C-level executives verified the final decision and the product was successfully deployed in Europe, allowing them to go back to the US and win the US market back. The head of product learned that understanding the market and managing expectations are key to success.

Approaching Predictive Analytics Problems

This article discusses the challenge of communicating predictive analytics results in the healthcare industry. To address this, surveys and focus groups were conducted to understand the type of message to convey to consumers. The algorithm was changed to compare populations instead of giving scores, and the message was changed to focus on biomarkers instead of risk. Additionally, the communication to consumers and physicians was separated, with physicians being the ones to communicate any uncertain results. The lesson learned is that communication in the health industry needs to be done carefully and with consideration of the implications.

The Key to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration

As an entrepreneur, the author had to manage multiple teams with different skillsets. To do this, they aligned and supported the teams while they worked towards their goals, monitored their progress, and removed any obstacles that blocked them from reaching their goals. They also hired the right people with the right skills and gave them the freedom and autonomy to optimize their tasks. This experience taught them to take on tasks even if they are not an expert, to hire the right people, and to pay close attention to their work.

Improving the team members relationship in a new team with conflicting environment

When a new team is formed with new joiners to the company, the relationship between them can be poor. After talking to them individually, it was unclear who was creating the conflicting environment. To improve the situation, an off-site event was organised to get to know each other better and agree on an action plan. Follow up sessions were held to assess the team's happiness and spread knowledge. Ultimately, the team improved, but members were switched around to provide more opportunities. The key lessons learned were to start knowing each other well, share the impact of their actions, and have an off-site session for open and transparent conversation.

How to Meet Strict Deadlines In An Environment of Uncertainty

A research team had built a quick proof-of-concept application, and it was the job of a new EM to take ownership of it and form a new team to turn it into a product and deploy it in production within 6 weeks. The EM and team took ownership of the prototype, investigated its modules and created technical documents, and assessed its production readiness. Through collaboration with the product and security teams, they were able to identify gaps and make reasonable compromises to meet the deadline. Lessons learned included working closely with stakeholders, putting uncertainty on paper, and challenging what might seem obvious.

Why Rearchitecting Might Not Always Be the Best Idea

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

Turning Around an Underperforming Team

When tasked with turning around a team that had not delivered much business value, the Engineering Manager took a step back to observe and collect evidence before jumping into solutions. After identifying the team dynamics, lack of understanding of the project, and lack of technical leadership, the manager coached one team member to take charge and the team was able to deliver exceeding expectations. The manager learned to take the time to identify and understand the team's problems before proposing solutions, and to delegate work to others to help them grow and become more autonomous.

Being Given a Team: What Does an Inspiring Leader Can Do

The author has experienced leading teams in various forms and has been successful in turning them into functioning units. He has a unique set of skills that allow him to understand the technical side of projects and communicate it accurately with people across different teams. He also has a realistic approach to planning and takes full responsibility for adjusting the scope to fit what resources are available. His main strength is his ability to merge his technical skill set with his people skills, which has helped him be successful in leading teams and enjoy his job.

Leading a UI Overhaul With a Tight Deadline

This article discusses the challenges of leading a cross-team overhaul project with a tight deadline. The author outlines the actions taken to ensure successful completion of the project, such as detailed planning, communication, and feedback loops. The project was a success and the author learned lessons such as the importance of communication and planning, staying focused, and being confident as a leader.

Keeping an Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive

After being inspired by her sister to make a difference in the community, a woman in IT decided to start a home care business. She researched what was needed to open a care home, visited other care homes, shadowed a director at a retirement facility, and obtained a certification and license. After eight months of trying to get her first client, she was able to open her business and eventually made a profit by selling it to someone who was also passionate about helping elderly people. This experience helped her build her confidence, communication skills, and people skills, which she was able to apply to her IT career.

Managing Tech Debt: A Success Story

This article discusses the problem of technical debt and the steps taken to address it. It emphasizes the need for a top-down strategy to ensure alignment of stakeholders and a bottom-up approach for day-to-day execution. It also suggests creating a tech debt backlog and discarding unimportant issues to focus on what matters most. Finally, it suggests measuring success by tracking engineering velocity and the number of tickets.

Diverse Teams Have Greater Customer Empathy

This article outlines the steps taken to build a better mass-market product for an audience of older users. These steps included using personas, advocating for inclusive design principles, and implementing diverse friendly hiring practices. Ultimately, these changes resulted in a more accessible product and helped attract great talent to the team. The article emphasizes the importance of diverse teams in empathizing with diverse audiences and building better products.

Consolidating Your Learnings Through Reflection and Journaling

This article discusses the challenges of learning during the pandemic and the actions taken to overcome them. These include asking for help, being kind to oneself, blocking the calendar for in-depth work sessions, taking 1-2 hour walks to listen to music, and keeping a diary of product craft learnings. The article also emphasizes the importance of understanding that everyone has unique needs and battles during this time, and that journaling can be a helpful tool for tracking progress and growth.

Simpler Product Visions and Strategy, Create Clarity to Empower Teams

A product leader found themselves in a difficult situation with teams disagreeing on the proactive path forward. To solve this, they simplified the product vision into a sound byte, presented it through PowerPoint, and refined the product strategy from 10 pages to 1 page. This helped the teams unite and focus on the product vision and strategy, and empowered them to better serve customers and the business. The lesson learned was that less is more when it comes to strategies.

Data-Driven Product Teams Are Easier to Empower and Earn Autonomy Faster

A company was struggling to empower its teams to respond to customer needs, due to a lack of shared goals and success metrics. After researching the business challenges, the PM proposed new goals and metrics to leadership, which were accepted. To support this, data engineering and infrastructure was set up, and analytics training was provided. As a result, the teams were able to make data-driven product decisions and move the North Star metric by 200%.

Scaling Teams to Make Better Decentralised Decisions via Documents and Tenets

A PM for a machine learning product was tasked with scaling the product, but encountered issues with quality. To address this, the PM took over the product and held talks with the original team, the newly scaled team, and the stakeholders. This led to the PM being looped in to do more scaling reviews, and the team and stakeholders expanding to 21 countries. To help with this, the PM created FAQs and open office hours, and held a Tenets workshop to document decision making. This helped decentralize decision making, build trust, and structure conversations.

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome, There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Perfect PM’

A junior PM was struggling with imposter syndrome, causing them to make slower decisions and avoid hard trade-off calls. To help, their manager encouraged them to see skill gaps as learning opportunities, opened up about their own weaknesses, and encouraged them to seek mentors and track their progress. With patience and kindness, the PM was able to build their confidence and eventually take on new challenges.

Influencing Without Authority (Servant leadership)

A Senior Engineering Manager faced a unique challenge when joining a new company in the Midwest: the system architecture was based on decisions made several years before, causing a number of issues. After challenging the status quo and establishing trust with the team, the manager was able to identify the bottleneck and revamp the architecture, reducing the number of resources 18x times and increasing the app's performance 2x times. The manager learned that it is important to understand regional, company- and team-specific culture, and to encourage the team to think and come up with their own solutions.

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Managing a Report With Communication Issues

This article discusses the experience of managing a stellar engineer who needed help with communication skills. The manager used a coaching model to help the engineer, focusing on asking questions and guiding them towards self-transformation. Over time, the engineer became more responsive and trusting, and eventually began to value the relationship. The article concludes with the lessons learned, including the importance of being open and vulnerable when mentoring someone.

Making Some Tough Roadmap Decisions

A head of product had to make tough decisions to deploy a product in 80 new markets. The main problem was that 70 percent of revenue came from the US and five historical accounts located there, leaving only 35 percent of the roadmap to develop and deploy other functionalities. To solve this problem, the head of product used data to demonstrate the cost of lost opportunities from investing too much in current customers, and proposed to reduce investment in them and double on product investments. After a year of aligning stakeholders, the board and C-level executives verified the final decision and the product was successfully deployed in Europe, allowing them to go back to the US and win the US market back. The head of product learned that understanding the market and managing expectations are key to success.

Approaching Predictive Analytics Problems

This article discusses the challenge of communicating predictive analytics results in the healthcare industry. To address this, surveys and focus groups were conducted to understand the type of message to convey to consumers. The algorithm was changed to compare populations instead of giving scores, and the message was changed to focus on biomarkers instead of risk. Additionally, the communication to consumers and physicians was separated, with physicians being the ones to communicate any uncertain results. The lesson learned is that communication in the health industry needs to be done carefully and with consideration of the implications.

The Key to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration

As an entrepreneur, the author had to manage multiple teams with different skillsets. To do this, they aligned and supported the teams while they worked towards their goals, monitored their progress, and removed any obstacles that blocked them from reaching their goals. They also hired the right people with the right skills and gave them the freedom and autonomy to optimize their tasks. This experience taught them to take on tasks even if they are not an expert, to hire the right people, and to pay close attention to their work.

Improving the team members relationship in a new team with conflicting environment

When a new team is formed with new joiners to the company, the relationship between them can be poor. After talking to them individually, it was unclear who was creating the conflicting environment. To improve the situation, an off-site event was organised to get to know each other better and agree on an action plan. Follow up sessions were held to assess the team's happiness and spread knowledge. Ultimately, the team improved, but members were switched around to provide more opportunities. The key lessons learned were to start knowing each other well, share the impact of their actions, and have an off-site session for open and transparent conversation.

How to Meet Strict Deadlines In An Environment of Uncertainty

A research team had built a quick proof-of-concept application, and it was the job of a new EM to take ownership of it and form a new team to turn it into a product and deploy it in production within 6 weeks. The EM and team took ownership of the prototype, investigated its modules and created technical documents, and assessed its production readiness. Through collaboration with the product and security teams, they were able to identify gaps and make reasonable compromises to meet the deadline. Lessons learned included working closely with stakeholders, putting uncertainty on paper, and challenging what might seem obvious.

Why Rearchitecting Might Not Always Be the Best Idea

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

Turning Around an Underperforming Team

When tasked with turning around a team that had not delivered much business value, the Engineering Manager took a step back to observe and collect evidence before jumping into solutions. After identifying the team dynamics, lack of understanding of the project, and lack of technical leadership, the manager coached one team member to take charge and the team was able to deliver exceeding expectations. The manager learned to take the time to identify and understand the team's problems before proposing solutions, and to delegate work to others to help them grow and become more autonomous.

Being Given a Team: What Does an Inspiring Leader Can Do

The author has experienced leading teams in various forms and has been successful in turning them into functioning units. He has a unique set of skills that allow him to understand the technical side of projects and communicate it accurately with people across different teams. He also has a realistic approach to planning and takes full responsibility for adjusting the scope to fit what resources are available. His main strength is his ability to merge his technical skill set with his people skills, which has helped him be successful in leading teams and enjoy his job.

Leading a UI Overhaul With a Tight Deadline

This article discusses the challenges of leading a cross-team overhaul project with a tight deadline. The author outlines the actions taken to ensure successful completion of the project, such as detailed planning, communication, and feedback loops. The project was a success and the author learned lessons such as the importance of communication and planning, staying focused, and being confident as a leader.

Keeping an Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive

After being inspired by her sister to make a difference in the community, a woman in IT decided to start a home care business. She researched what was needed to open a care home, visited other care homes, shadowed a director at a retirement facility, and obtained a certification and license. After eight months of trying to get her first client, she was able to open her business and eventually made a profit by selling it to someone who was also passionate about helping elderly people. This experience helped her build her confidence, communication skills, and people skills, which she was able to apply to her IT career.

Managing Tech Debt: A Success Story

This article discusses the problem of technical debt and the steps taken to address it. It emphasizes the need for a top-down strategy to ensure alignment of stakeholders and a bottom-up approach for day-to-day execution. It also suggests creating a tech debt backlog and discarding unimportant issues to focus on what matters most. Finally, it suggests measuring success by tracking engineering velocity and the number of tickets.

Diverse Teams Have Greater Customer Empathy

This article outlines the steps taken to build a better mass-market product for an audience of older users. These steps included using personas, advocating for inclusive design principles, and implementing diverse friendly hiring practices. Ultimately, these changes resulted in a more accessible product and helped attract great talent to the team. The article emphasizes the importance of diverse teams in empathizing with diverse audiences and building better products.

Consolidating Your Learnings Through Reflection and Journaling

This article discusses the challenges of learning during the pandemic and the actions taken to overcome them. These include asking for help, being kind to oneself, blocking the calendar for in-depth work sessions, taking 1-2 hour walks to listen to music, and keeping a diary of product craft learnings. The article also emphasizes the importance of understanding that everyone has unique needs and battles during this time, and that journaling can be a helpful tool for tracking progress and growth.

Simpler Product Visions and Strategy, Create Clarity to Empower Teams

A product leader found themselves in a difficult situation with teams disagreeing on the proactive path forward. To solve this, they simplified the product vision into a sound byte, presented it through PowerPoint, and refined the product strategy from 10 pages to 1 page. This helped the teams unite and focus on the product vision and strategy, and empowered them to better serve customers and the business. The lesson learned was that less is more when it comes to strategies.

Data-Driven Product Teams Are Easier to Empower and Earn Autonomy Faster

A company was struggling to empower its teams to respond to customer needs, due to a lack of shared goals and success metrics. After researching the business challenges, the PM proposed new goals and metrics to leadership, which were accepted. To support this, data engineering and infrastructure was set up, and analytics training was provided. As a result, the teams were able to make data-driven product decisions and move the North Star metric by 200%.

Scaling Teams to Make Better Decentralised Decisions via Documents and Tenets

A PM for a machine learning product was tasked with scaling the product, but encountered issues with quality. To address this, the PM took over the product and held talks with the original team, the newly scaled team, and the stakeholders. This led to the PM being looped in to do more scaling reviews, and the team and stakeholders expanding to 21 countries. To help with this, the PM created FAQs and open office hours, and held a Tenets workshop to document decision making. This helped decentralize decision making, build trust, and structure conversations.

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome, There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Perfect PM’

A junior PM was struggling with imposter syndrome, causing them to make slower decisions and avoid hard trade-off calls. To help, their manager encouraged them to see skill gaps as learning opportunities, opened up about their own weaknesses, and encouraged them to seek mentors and track their progress. With patience and kindness, the PM was able to build their confidence and eventually take on new challenges.

Influencing Without Authority (Servant leadership)

A Senior Engineering Manager faced a unique challenge when joining a new company in the Midwest: the system architecture was based on decisions made several years before, causing a number of issues. After challenging the status quo and establishing trust with the team, the manager was able to identify the bottleneck and revamp the architecture, reducing the number of resources 18x times and increasing the app's performance 2x times. The manager learned that it is important to understand regional, company- and team-specific culture, and to encourage the team to think and come up with their own solutions.

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Managing a Report With Communication Issues

This article discusses the experience of managing a stellar engineer who needed help with communication skills. The manager used a coaching model to help the engineer, focusing on asking questions and guiding them towards self-transformation. Over time, the engineer became more responsive and trusting, and eventually began to value the relationship. The article concludes with the lessons learned, including the importance of being open and vulnerable when mentoring someone.

Making Some Tough Roadmap Decisions

A head of product had to make tough decisions to deploy a product in 80 new markets. The main problem was that 70 percent of revenue came from the US and five historical accounts located there, leaving only 35 percent of the roadmap to develop and deploy other functionalities. To solve this problem, the head of product used data to demonstrate the cost of lost opportunities from investing too much in current customers, and proposed to reduce investment in them and double on product investments. After a year of aligning stakeholders, the board and C-level executives verified the final decision and the product was successfully deployed in Europe, allowing them to go back to the US and win the US market back. The head of product learned that understanding the market and managing expectations are key to success.

Approaching Predictive Analytics Problems

This article discusses the challenge of communicating predictive analytics results in the healthcare industry. To address this, surveys and focus groups were conducted to understand the type of message to convey to consumers. The algorithm was changed to compare populations instead of giving scores, and the message was changed to focus on biomarkers instead of risk. Additionally, the communication to consumers and physicians was separated, with physicians being the ones to communicate any uncertain results. The lesson learned is that communication in the health industry needs to be done carefully and with consideration of the implications.

The Key to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration

As an entrepreneur, the author had to manage multiple teams with different skillsets. To do this, they aligned and supported the teams while they worked towards their goals, monitored their progress, and removed any obstacles that blocked them from reaching their goals. They also hired the right people with the right skills and gave them the freedom and autonomy to optimize their tasks. This experience taught them to take on tasks even if they are not an expert, to hire the right people, and to pay close attention to their work.

Improving the team members relationship in a new team with conflicting environment

When a new team is formed with new joiners to the company, the relationship between them can be poor. After talking to them individually, it was unclear who was creating the conflicting environment. To improve the situation, an off-site event was organised to get to know each other better and agree on an action plan. Follow up sessions were held to assess the team's happiness and spread knowledge. Ultimately, the team improved, but members were switched around to provide more opportunities. The key lessons learned were to start knowing each other well, share the impact of their actions, and have an off-site session for open and transparent conversation.

How to Meet Strict Deadlines In An Environment of Uncertainty

A research team had built a quick proof-of-concept application, and it was the job of a new EM to take ownership of it and form a new team to turn it into a product and deploy it in production within 6 weeks. The EM and team took ownership of the prototype, investigated its modules and created technical documents, and assessed its production readiness. Through collaboration with the product and security teams, they were able to identify gaps and make reasonable compromises to meet the deadline. Lessons learned included working closely with stakeholders, putting uncertainty on paper, and challenging what might seem obvious.

Why Rearchitecting Might Not Always Be the Best Idea

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

Turning Around an Underperforming Team

When tasked with turning around a team that had not delivered much business value, the Engineering Manager took a step back to observe and collect evidence before jumping into solutions. After identifying the team dynamics, lack of understanding of the project, and lack of technical leadership, the manager coached one team member to take charge and the team was able to deliver exceeding expectations. The manager learned to take the time to identify and understand the team's problems before proposing solutions, and to delegate work to others to help them grow and become more autonomous.

Being Given a Team: What Does an Inspiring Leader Can Do

The author has experienced leading teams in various forms and has been successful in turning them into functioning units. He has a unique set of skills that allow him to understand the technical side of projects and communicate it accurately with people across different teams. He also has a realistic approach to planning and takes full responsibility for adjusting the scope to fit what resources are available. His main strength is his ability to merge his technical skill set with his people skills, which has helped him be successful in leading teams and enjoy his job.

Leading a UI Overhaul With a Tight Deadline

This article discusses the challenges of leading a cross-team overhaul project with a tight deadline. The author outlines the actions taken to ensure successful completion of the project, such as detailed planning, communication, and feedback loops. The project was a success and the author learned lessons such as the importance of communication and planning, staying focused, and being confident as a leader.

Keeping an Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive

After being inspired by her sister to make a difference in the community, a woman in IT decided to start a home care business. She researched what was needed to open a care home, visited other care homes, shadowed a director at a retirement facility, and obtained a certification and license. After eight months of trying to get her first client, she was able to open her business and eventually made a profit by selling it to someone who was also passionate about helping elderly people. This experience helped her build her confidence, communication skills, and people skills, which she was able to apply to her IT career.

Managing Tech Debt: A Success Story

This article discusses the problem of technical debt and the steps taken to address it. It emphasizes the need for a top-down strategy to ensure alignment of stakeholders and a bottom-up approach for day-to-day execution. It also suggests creating a tech debt backlog and discarding unimportant issues to focus on what matters most. Finally, it suggests measuring success by tracking engineering velocity and the number of tickets.

Diverse Teams Have Greater Customer Empathy

This article outlines the steps taken to build a better mass-market product for an audience of older users. These steps included using personas, advocating for inclusive design principles, and implementing diverse friendly hiring practices. Ultimately, these changes resulted in a more accessible product and helped attract great talent to the team. The article emphasizes the importance of diverse teams in empathizing with diverse audiences and building better products.

Consolidating Your Learnings Through Reflection and Journaling

This article discusses the challenges of learning during the pandemic and the actions taken to overcome them. These include asking for help, being kind to oneself, blocking the calendar for in-depth work sessions, taking 1-2 hour walks to listen to music, and keeping a diary of product craft learnings. The article also emphasizes the importance of understanding that everyone has unique needs and battles during this time, and that journaling can be a helpful tool for tracking progress and growth.

Simpler Product Visions and Strategy, Create Clarity to Empower Teams

A product leader found themselves in a difficult situation with teams disagreeing on the proactive path forward. To solve this, they simplified the product vision into a sound byte, presented it through PowerPoint, and refined the product strategy from 10 pages to 1 page. This helped the teams unite and focus on the product vision and strategy, and empowered them to better serve customers and the business. The lesson learned was that less is more when it comes to strategies.

Data-Driven Product Teams Are Easier to Empower and Earn Autonomy Faster

A company was struggling to empower its teams to respond to customer needs, due to a lack of shared goals and success metrics. After researching the business challenges, the PM proposed new goals and metrics to leadership, which were accepted. To support this, data engineering and infrastructure was set up, and analytics training was provided. As a result, the teams were able to make data-driven product decisions and move the North Star metric by 200%.

Scaling Teams to Make Better Decentralised Decisions via Documents and Tenets

A PM for a machine learning product was tasked with scaling the product, but encountered issues with quality. To address this, the PM took over the product and held talks with the original team, the newly scaled team, and the stakeholders. This led to the PM being looped in to do more scaling reviews, and the team and stakeholders expanding to 21 countries. To help with this, the PM created FAQs and open office hours, and held a Tenets workshop to document decision making. This helped decentralize decision making, build trust, and structure conversations.

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome, There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Perfect PM’

A junior PM was struggling with imposter syndrome, causing them to make slower decisions and avoid hard trade-off calls. To help, their manager encouraged them to see skill gaps as learning opportunities, opened up about their own weaknesses, and encouraged them to seek mentors and track their progress. With patience and kindness, the PM was able to build their confidence and eventually take on new challenges.

Influencing Without Authority (Servant leadership)

A Senior Engineering Manager faced a unique challenge when joining a new company in the Midwest: the system architecture was based on decisions made several years before, causing a number of issues. After challenging the status quo and establishing trust with the team, the manager was able to identify the bottleneck and revamp the architecture, reducing the number of resources 18x times and increasing the app's performance 2x times. The manager learned that it is important to understand regional, company- and team-specific culture, and to encourage the team to think and come up with their own solutions.

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Managing a Report With Communication Issues

This article discusses the experience of managing a stellar engineer who needed help with communication skills. The manager used a coaching model to help the engineer, focusing on asking questions and guiding them towards self-transformation. Over time, the engineer became more responsive and trusting, and eventually began to value the relationship. The article concludes with the lessons learned, including the importance of being open and vulnerable when mentoring someone.

Making Some Tough Roadmap Decisions

A head of product had to make tough decisions to deploy a product in 80 new markets. The main problem was that 70 percent of revenue came from the US and five historical accounts located there, leaving only 35 percent of the roadmap to develop and deploy other functionalities. To solve this problem, the head of product used data to demonstrate the cost of lost opportunities from investing too much in current customers, and proposed to reduce investment in them and double on product investments. After a year of aligning stakeholders, the board and C-level executives verified the final decision and the product was successfully deployed in Europe, allowing them to go back to the US and win the US market back. The head of product learned that understanding the market and managing expectations are key to success.

Approaching Predictive Analytics Problems

This article discusses the challenge of communicating predictive analytics results in the healthcare industry. To address this, surveys and focus groups were conducted to understand the type of message to convey to consumers. The algorithm was changed to compare populations instead of giving scores, and the message was changed to focus on biomarkers instead of risk. Additionally, the communication to consumers and physicians was separated, with physicians being the ones to communicate any uncertain results. The lesson learned is that communication in the health industry needs to be done carefully and with consideration of the implications.

The Key to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration

As an entrepreneur, the author had to manage multiple teams with different skillsets. To do this, they aligned and supported the teams while they worked towards their goals, monitored their progress, and removed any obstacles that blocked them from reaching their goals. They also hired the right people with the right skills and gave them the freedom and autonomy to optimize their tasks. This experience taught them to take on tasks even if they are not an expert, to hire the right people, and to pay close attention to their work.

Improving the team members relationship in a new team with conflicting environment

When a new team is formed with new joiners to the company, the relationship between them can be poor. After talking to them individually, it was unclear who was creating the conflicting environment. To improve the situation, an off-site event was organised to get to know each other better and agree on an action plan. Follow up sessions were held to assess the team's happiness and spread knowledge. Ultimately, the team improved, but members were switched around to provide more opportunities. The key lessons learned were to start knowing each other well, share the impact of their actions, and have an off-site session for open and transparent conversation.

How to Meet Strict Deadlines In An Environment of Uncertainty

A research team had built a quick proof-of-concept application, and it was the job of a new EM to take ownership of it and form a new team to turn it into a product and deploy it in production within 6 weeks. The EM and team took ownership of the prototype, investigated its modules and created technical documents, and assessed its production readiness. Through collaboration with the product and security teams, they were able to identify gaps and make reasonable compromises to meet the deadline. Lessons learned included working closely with stakeholders, putting uncertainty on paper, and challenging what might seem obvious.

Why Rearchitecting Might Not Always Be the Best Idea

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

Turning Around an Underperforming Team

When tasked with turning around a team that had not delivered much business value, the Engineering Manager took a step back to observe and collect evidence before jumping into solutions. After identifying the team dynamics, lack of understanding of the project, and lack of technical leadership, the manager coached one team member to take charge and the team was able to deliver exceeding expectations. The manager learned to take the time to identify and understand the team's problems before proposing solutions, and to delegate work to others to help them grow and become more autonomous.

Being Given a Team: What Does an Inspiring Leader Can Do

The author has experienced leading teams in various forms and has been successful in turning them into functioning units. He has a unique set of skills that allow him to understand the technical side of projects and communicate it accurately with people across different teams. He also has a realistic approach to planning and takes full responsibility for adjusting the scope to fit what resources are available. His main strength is his ability to merge his technical skill set with his people skills, which has helped him be successful in leading teams and enjoy his job.

Leading a UI Overhaul With a Tight Deadline

This article discusses the challenges of leading a cross-team overhaul project with a tight deadline. The author outlines the actions taken to ensure successful completion of the project, such as detailed planning, communication, and feedback loops. The project was a success and the author learned lessons such as the importance of communication and planning, staying focused, and being confident as a leader.

Keeping an Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive

After being inspired by her sister to make a difference in the community, a woman in IT decided to start a home care business. She researched what was needed to open a care home, visited other care homes, shadowed a director at a retirement facility, and obtained a certification and license. After eight months of trying to get her first client, she was able to open her business and eventually made a profit by selling it to someone who was also passionate about helping elderly people. This experience helped her build her confidence, communication skills, and people skills, which she was able to apply to her IT career.

Managing Tech Debt: A Success Story

This article discusses the problem of technical debt and the steps taken to address it. It emphasizes the need for a top-down strategy to ensure alignment of stakeholders and a bottom-up approach for day-to-day execution. It also suggests creating a tech debt backlog and discarding unimportant issues to focus on what matters most. Finally, it suggests measuring success by tracking engineering velocity and the number of tickets.

Diverse Teams Have Greater Customer Empathy

This article outlines the steps taken to build a better mass-market product for an audience of older users. These steps included using personas, advocating for inclusive design principles, and implementing diverse friendly hiring practices. Ultimately, these changes resulted in a more accessible product and helped attract great talent to the team. The article emphasizes the importance of diverse teams in empathizing with diverse audiences and building better products.

Consolidating Your Learnings Through Reflection and Journaling

This article discusses the challenges of learning during the pandemic and the actions taken to overcome them. These include asking for help, being kind to oneself, blocking the calendar for in-depth work sessions, taking 1-2 hour walks to listen to music, and keeping a diary of product craft learnings. The article also emphasizes the importance of understanding that everyone has unique needs and battles during this time, and that journaling can be a helpful tool for tracking progress and growth.

Simpler Product Visions and Strategy, Create Clarity to Empower Teams

A product leader found themselves in a difficult situation with teams disagreeing on the proactive path forward. To solve this, they simplified the product vision into a sound byte, presented it through PowerPoint, and refined the product strategy from 10 pages to 1 page. This helped the teams unite and focus on the product vision and strategy, and empowered them to better serve customers and the business. The lesson learned was that less is more when it comes to strategies.

Data-Driven Product Teams Are Easier to Empower and Earn Autonomy Faster

A company was struggling to empower its teams to respond to customer needs, due to a lack of shared goals and success metrics. After researching the business challenges, the PM proposed new goals and metrics to leadership, which were accepted. To support this, data engineering and infrastructure was set up, and analytics training was provided. As a result, the teams were able to make data-driven product decisions and move the North Star metric by 200%.

Scaling Teams to Make Better Decentralised Decisions via Documents and Tenets

A PM for a machine learning product was tasked with scaling the product, but encountered issues with quality. To address this, the PM took over the product and held talks with the original team, the newly scaled team, and the stakeholders. This led to the PM being looped in to do more scaling reviews, and the team and stakeholders expanding to 21 countries. To help with this, the PM created FAQs and open office hours, and held a Tenets workshop to document decision making. This helped decentralize decision making, build trust, and structure conversations.

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome, There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Perfect PM’

A junior PM was struggling with imposter syndrome, causing them to make slower decisions and avoid hard trade-off calls. To help, their manager encouraged them to see skill gaps as learning opportunities, opened up about their own weaknesses, and encouraged them to seek mentors and track their progress. With patience and kindness, the PM was able to build their confidence and eventually take on new challenges.

Influencing Without Authority (Servant leadership)

A Senior Engineering Manager faced a unique challenge when joining a new company in the Midwest: the system architecture was based on decisions made several years before, causing a number of issues. After challenging the status quo and establishing trust with the team, the manager was able to identify the bottleneck and revamp the architecture, reducing the number of resources 18x times and increasing the app's performance 2x times. The manager learned that it is important to understand regional, company- and team-specific culture, and to encourage the team to think and come up with their own solutions.

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Managing a Report With Communication Issues

This article discusses the experience of managing a stellar engineer who needed help with communication skills. The manager used a coaching model to help the engineer, focusing on asking questions and guiding them towards self-transformation. Over time, the engineer became more responsive and trusting, and eventually began to value the relationship. The article concludes with the lessons learned, including the importance of being open and vulnerable when mentoring someone.

Making Some Tough Roadmap Decisions

A head of product had to make tough decisions to deploy a product in 80 new markets. The main problem was that 70 percent of revenue came from the US and five historical accounts located there, leaving only 35 percent of the roadmap to develop and deploy other functionalities. To solve this problem, the head of product used data to demonstrate the cost of lost opportunities from investing too much in current customers, and proposed to reduce investment in them and double on product investments. After a year of aligning stakeholders, the board and C-level executives verified the final decision and the product was successfully deployed in Europe, allowing them to go back to the US and win the US market back. The head of product learned that understanding the market and managing expectations are key to success.

Approaching Predictive Analytics Problems

This article discusses the challenge of communicating predictive analytics results in the healthcare industry. To address this, surveys and focus groups were conducted to understand the type of message to convey to consumers. The algorithm was changed to compare populations instead of giving scores, and the message was changed to focus on biomarkers instead of risk. Additionally, the communication to consumers and physicians was separated, with physicians being the ones to communicate any uncertain results. The lesson learned is that communication in the health industry needs to be done carefully and with consideration of the implications.

The Key to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration

As an entrepreneur, the author had to manage multiple teams with different skillsets. To do this, they aligned and supported the teams while they worked towards their goals, monitored their progress, and removed any obstacles that blocked them from reaching their goals. They also hired the right people with the right skills and gave them the freedom and autonomy to optimize their tasks. This experience taught them to take on tasks even if they are not an expert, to hire the right people, and to pay close attention to their work.

Improving the team members relationship in a new team with conflicting environment

When a new team is formed with new joiners to the company, the relationship between them can be poor. After talking to them individually, it was unclear who was creating the conflicting environment. To improve the situation, an off-site event was organised to get to know each other better and agree on an action plan. Follow up sessions were held to assess the team's happiness and spread knowledge. Ultimately, the team improved, but members were switched around to provide more opportunities. The key lessons learned were to start knowing each other well, share the impact of their actions, and have an off-site session for open and transparent conversation.

How to Meet Strict Deadlines In An Environment of Uncertainty

A research team had built a quick proof-of-concept application, and it was the job of a new EM to take ownership of it and form a new team to turn it into a product and deploy it in production within 6 weeks. The EM and team took ownership of the prototype, investigated its modules and created technical documents, and assessed its production readiness. Through collaboration with the product and security teams, they were able to identify gaps and make reasonable compromises to meet the deadline. Lessons learned included working closely with stakeholders, putting uncertainty on paper, and challenging what might seem obvious.

Why Rearchitecting Might Not Always Be the Best Idea

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

Turning Around an Underperforming Team

When tasked with turning around a team that had not delivered much business value, the Engineering Manager took a step back to observe and collect evidence before jumping into solutions. After identifying the team dynamics, lack of understanding of the project, and lack of technical leadership, the manager coached one team member to take charge and the team was able to deliver exceeding expectations. The manager learned to take the time to identify and understand the team's problems before proposing solutions, and to delegate work to others to help them grow and become more autonomous.

Being Given a Team: What Does an Inspiring Leader Can Do

The author has experienced leading teams in various forms and has been successful in turning them into functioning units. He has a unique set of skills that allow him to understand the technical side of projects and communicate it accurately with people across different teams. He also has a realistic approach to planning and takes full responsibility for adjusting the scope to fit what resources are available. His main strength is his ability to merge his technical skill set with his people skills, which has helped him be successful in leading teams and enjoy his job.

Leading a UI Overhaul With a Tight Deadline

This article discusses the challenges of leading a cross-team overhaul project with a tight deadline. The author outlines the actions taken to ensure successful completion of the project, such as detailed planning, communication, and feedback loops. The project was a success and the author learned lessons such as the importance of communication and planning, staying focused, and being confident as a leader.

Keeping an Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive

After being inspired by her sister to make a difference in the community, a woman in IT decided to start a home care business. She researched what was needed to open a care home, visited other care homes, shadowed a director at a retirement facility, and obtained a certification and license. After eight months of trying to get her first client, she was able to open her business and eventually made a profit by selling it to someone who was also passionate about helping elderly people. This experience helped her build her confidence, communication skills, and people skills, which she was able to apply to her IT career.

Managing Tech Debt: A Success Story

This article discusses the problem of technical debt and the steps taken to address it. It emphasizes the need for a top-down strategy to ensure alignment of stakeholders and a bottom-up approach for day-to-day execution. It also suggests creating a tech debt backlog and discarding unimportant issues to focus on what matters most. Finally, it suggests measuring success by tracking engineering velocity and the number of tickets.

Diverse Teams Have Greater Customer Empathy

This article outlines the steps taken to build a better mass-market product for an audience of older users. These steps included using personas, advocating for inclusive design principles, and implementing diverse friendly hiring practices. Ultimately, these changes resulted in a more accessible product and helped attract great talent to the team. The article emphasizes the importance of diverse teams in empathizing with diverse audiences and building better products.

Consolidating Your Learnings Through Reflection and Journaling

This article discusses the challenges of learning during the pandemic and the actions taken to overcome them. These include asking for help, being kind to oneself, blocking the calendar for in-depth work sessions, taking 1-2 hour walks to listen to music, and keeping a diary of product craft learnings. The article also emphasizes the importance of understanding that everyone has unique needs and battles during this time, and that journaling can be a helpful tool for tracking progress and growth.

Simpler Product Visions and Strategy, Create Clarity to Empower Teams

A product leader found themselves in a difficult situation with teams disagreeing on the proactive path forward. To solve this, they simplified the product vision into a sound byte, presented it through PowerPoint, and refined the product strategy from 10 pages to 1 page. This helped the teams unite and focus on the product vision and strategy, and empowered them to better serve customers and the business. The lesson learned was that less is more when it comes to strategies.

Data-Driven Product Teams Are Easier to Empower and Earn Autonomy Faster

A company was struggling to empower its teams to respond to customer needs, due to a lack of shared goals and success metrics. After researching the business challenges, the PM proposed new goals and metrics to leadership, which were accepted. To support this, data engineering and infrastructure was set up, and analytics training was provided. As a result, the teams were able to make data-driven product decisions and move the North Star metric by 200%.

Scaling Teams to Make Better Decentralised Decisions via Documents and Tenets

A PM for a machine learning product was tasked with scaling the product, but encountered issues with quality. To address this, the PM took over the product and held talks with the original team, the newly scaled team, and the stakeholders. This led to the PM being looped in to do more scaling reviews, and the team and stakeholders expanding to 21 countries. To help with this, the PM created FAQs and open office hours, and held a Tenets workshop to document decision making. This helped decentralize decision making, build trust, and structure conversations.

Dealing With Imposter Syndrome, There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Perfect PM’

A junior PM was struggling with imposter syndrome, causing them to make slower decisions and avoid hard trade-off calls. To help, their manager encouraged them to see skill gaps as learning opportunities, opened up about their own weaknesses, and encouraged them to seek mentors and track their progress. With patience and kindness, the PM was able to build their confidence and eventually take on new challenges.

Influencing Without Authority (Servant leadership)

A Senior Engineering Manager faced a unique challenge when joining a new company in the Midwest: the system architecture was based on decisions made several years before, causing a number of issues. After challenging the status quo and establishing trust with the team, the manager was able to identify the bottleneck and revamp the architecture, reducing the number of resources 18x times and increasing the app's performance 2x times. The manager learned that it is important to understand regional, company- and team-specific culture, and to encourage the team to think and come up with their own solutions.

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Managing a Report With Communication Issues

This article discusses the experience of managing a stellar engineer who needed help with communication skills. The manager used a coaching model to help the engineer, focusing on asking questions and guiding them towards self-transformation. Over time, the engineer became more responsive and trusting, and eventually began to value the relationship. The article concludes with the lessons learned, including the importance of being open and vulnerable when mentoring someone.

Making Some Tough Roadmap Decisions

A head of product had to make tough decisions to deploy a product in 80 new markets. The main problem was that 70 percent of revenue came from the US and five historical accounts located there, leaving only 35 percent of the roadmap to develop and deploy other functionalities. To solve this problem, the head of product used data to demonstrate the cost of lost opportunities from investing too much in current customers, and proposed to reduce investment in them and double on product investments. After a year of aligning stakeholders, the board and C-level executives verified the final decision and the product was successfully deployed in Europe, allowing them to go back to the US and win the US market back. The head of product learned that understanding the market and managing expectations are key to success.

Approaching Predictive Analytics Problems

This article discusses the challenge of communicating predictive analytics results in the healthcare industry. To address this, surveys and focus groups were conducted to understand the type of message to convey to consumers. The algorithm was changed to compare populations instead of giving scores, and the message was changed to focus on biomarkers instead of risk. Additionally, the communication to consumers and physicians was separated, with physicians being the ones to communicate any uncertain results. The lesson learned is that communication in the health industry needs to be done carefully and with consideration of the implications.

The Key to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration

As an entrepreneur, the author had to manage multiple teams with different skillsets. To do this, they aligned and supported the teams while they worked towards their goals, monitored their progress, and removed any obstacles that blocked them from reaching their goals. They also hired the right people with the right skills and gave them the freedom and autonomy to optimize their tasks. This experience taught them to take on tasks even if they are not an expert, to hire the right people, and to pay close attention to their work.