Knowledge shared by our community

Everyone Is a Potential Leader

Leadership is a quality that should be distributed across the organization, not just among executives and managers. This distorted view of leadership can lead to problems such as difficulty promoting people into leadership roles and employees not taking ownership. To address this, it is important to identify people who are more inclined to develop leadership skills, pay attention to leadership skills during hiring, and coach juniors in soft skills, including leadership.

Outcome vs. Output-Driven Organizations

Organizations tend to focus on solutions rather than the problem, which can lead to ineffective solutions. To shift the focus to an outcome-driven approach, OKRs, Five Whys, and measuring can be used. This approach encourages critical thinking and can have a positive impact on the team dynamic. Changing to an outcome-driven approach is not easy and requires coaching the team to change their behavior and way of thinking.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

As an organization grows, new processes are often introduced that erode the agility and flexibility of the organization. To prevent this, it is important to reflect on why and if a new process is needed and what value it will add. Value-stream mapping can be used to visualize the new process and data analysis can be used to spot weaknesses and opportunities. Existing processes should also be questioned to ensure they are still relevant. When setting up a new process, it should be built for two times the size of the organization and the purpose of the process should be clear. Finally, the value of the process should be tracked and the context should be provided to those who will be impacted by the change.

How to Align Various Internal Stakeholders and Their Requests

At my previous company, I created a template in Jira to help manage requests from internal stakeholders. The template included requirements for each request, listed stakeholders, and a due date. This allowed us to be more proactive and plan our resources accordingly. I also learned that documenting requests and frequent communication can help with aligning expectations.

When to Build New Features

This article discusses how a team leader was able to transition their team from a delivery team to a product team. The leader focused on building a strong relationship with the PM and UX designer, conducting weekly meetings to discuss technical aspects, defining a vision, measuring features, and keeping things agile. The leader also stopped building a long-term roadmap and instead created a shorter, strategic roadmap with major milestones and steps needed to reach a goal. The lessons learned from this experience were to make sure the team understands the goals and to create a shorter, strategic roadmap in a fast-paced company environment.

The Ability to Inspire People Towards a Common Goal

As a product manager, the author faced the challenge of working with different teams to achieve common goals. To ensure that the team was on the right track, the author took action by sending briefs about objectives and goals, drafting non-goals, and using collaborative tools. The author also learned that it is important to ensure alignment from the beginning and to have the team understand the context and suggest their own solutions.

How to Advance When There Is No Career Ladder

This article discusses the problem of not knowing one's job direction and how to overcome it. It suggests investing in oneself by seeking learning opportunities, attending conferences and webinars, subscribing to newsletters and online courses, and finding a career coach. It also suggests welcoming change at work and taking on new responsibilities to advance one's career. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of having a vision and roadmap for one's career and prioritizing the skills that will help one reach their goals.

Building a Next-Gen Product

This article discusses a company in the insurance industry that needed to automate their processes in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Through data collection, surveys, workshops, and design sessions, the company was able to create a new product that had a life-changing impact on agents and achieved over 50% increase in efficiency and over 40% in cost reduction. The article also highlights the importance of challenging the status quo and understanding when to innovate and when not to. Finally, it stresses the importance of working with customers to understand their needs and helping them get out of their comfort zone.

What Failures Can Teach Us: Migrating to Cloud-Native Microservices

In this article, the author reflects on their experience of moving a monolith product to a microservices infrastructure. They lacked the experience and knowledge to do it correctly, so they split the product into 14 different services, which added complexity and lagging response time. The author learned that they should have taken more time to consider the whole picture and plan for the future, as well as utilize existing tools and infrastructure instead of reinventing the wheel. They also learned not to over-engineer and to only use microservices if needed.

Handling Ambiguity in the Workspace

This article discusses the importance of being able to work in an ambiguous environment, and how to do so. It uses an example of an ambiguous project assigned to an engineer, where the engineer had to convert the proposal into a well-defined engineering problem. The engineer then asked two questions to help stakeholders reflect on the problem and better understand the needs of insurance agents. The engineer then proposed a solution and set up a monitoring process with a dashboard to display the progress. The article concludes with three lessons learned: embrace ambiguity, put yourself in other people's shoes, and define project requirements as clearly as possible.

From Building Features to Leading Product Development

This article discusses the problem of a successful B2B product becoming stuck in a cycle of customers asking for more features that can be one-off and hard to reuse. To address this, the organization had to change the narrative of how they worked with customers, gain direct access to users, and run continuous customer research. They also had to educate people in engineering, product, and UX on how to approach customers and build successful customer research programs. Additionally, they had to update the architecture of the software and build proper extension points. The key lesson learned was that success should be measured by customer satisfaction, not timely delivery of features.

How to Break Down Team Silos

This article discusses the problem of lack of transparency in engineering operations and the actions taken to address it. To increase transparency, a mandatory guidance was introduced, which included a Request for Comments (RFC) process, regular meetings, and an innovation week. The lessons learned from this experience were that documentation of engineering work is key, engineering managers should focus on teamwork marketing, and engineering should not operate as a black box.

Identifying the Real Problem

When the author arrived at the company, engineering operations were not optimal, leading to poor product quality and delayed software delivery. To bring about change, the author performed a SWOT analysis to identify weak points and root causes, and then implemented an agile transformation of engineering and a new product portfolio. To ensure success, the author had to convince stakeholders of the benefits of the transformation, and also had to introduce regular touchpoints with customers and track their actions. KPI's and customer satisfaction were used to measure success.

Reducing Tech Debt: Roll Up Your Sleeves

This article outlines the steps taken to address a product with a lot of tech debt. The author created common systems and libraries, shifted technologies, and did a major refactoring to get rid of legacy code. This enabled the team to focus on larger problems such as data and system architecture, and the metrics indicated significant progress. The author also learned lessons such as the importance of making engineering as boring as possible, rolling up your sleeves, communicating changes, and expecting pushbacks.

Introducing the Agile Mindset

A company experienced rapid growth and hired a new engineering leader to help the team transition. The engineering team had a rigid mindset and a lack of identity, leading to animosity between the product and engineering teams. The engineering leader took steps to create an engineering identity, foster an agile mindset, and emphasize values of continuous improvement and adaptability. This led to a 300-400% increase in product development speed and a 40% reduction in costs, despite losing 30-40% of the engineering team. The leader also learned the importance of clarity and expectations, and the need for distinct identities between product and engineering.

Transforming a Waterfall Team Into a High-Performing Agile Team

A startup was developing products that weren't meeting the market's expectations due to their long development cycles. To change this, the team had to introduce new processes, undergo a mindset shift, and collect metrics to provide visibility into current performance and trends. To improve their lead time, cycle time, change failure rate, and deployment frequency, the team implemented new tooling, improved their CI, and created blameless incident post-mortems. As a result, their deployment frequency went up and their change failure rate went down, allowing them to deliver faster and more effectively. The team learned that having the right processes in place is important, but they also need to create accountability and prove that the new thing is more effective.

How to Run Horizontal Teams At Scale

When I took over a horizontal front-end team, I implemented a process to guardrail how vertical teams should approach us with their dependencies. I also created a bug triaging process, an SLA, and an on-call process to shield the team from numerous requests. Additionally, I made open source repositories self-serve and conducted training for Sales and Solutions. The lessons learned were to build trust, ensure alignment of stakeholders, identify pain points, and be proactive.

How to Encourage Innovation in a Large Organization

This article discusses the experience of introducing a company-wide, five-day hackathon to motivate engineers and unleash innovation. The hackathon was organized virtually and included 200 people. Themes were chosen to ensure accountability and guardrails were put in place to allow people to operate freely. Mentors were assigned to teams and side events were organized to keep the mood light. In the end, 60% of the ideas were shipped into production. The article also outlines lessons learned from the experience, such as the importance of having boundaries and success criteria for hackathons, and the need for collaboration and delegation.

Developing a Rewards and Recognition Program

This article discusses a problem faced by many engineering organizations: lack of appreciation for engineers. To address this, a Rewards and Recognition Core Committee was formed to identify criteria for rewards and recognition and to introduce programs such as the Thank You Award and Spot Awards. It was found that connecting rewards and recognition to organizational values was key to success, and that adoption of the program was essential. The article also provides lessons learned from the experience.

From Zero From the First 20 Customers

A small cross-functional team was tasked with finding a solution to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of educational technology used in the classroom. To do this, the team used a streamlined process that included interviews with school districts, weekly brainstorming sessions, and daily discussions to estimate how confident they were in achieving their goals. Through this process, they were able to create a solution that allowed school districts to roll out a piece of technology to all of their devices. The team learned that trust in the team to own outcomes instead of tasks, getting close to customers, focusing on a few objectives, and planning for the transition from iterative to specialized projects are all important for success.

Everyone Is a Potential Leader

Leadership is a quality that should be distributed across the organization, not just among executives and managers. This distorted view of leadership can lead to problems such as difficulty promoting people into leadership roles and employees not taking ownership. To address this, it is important to identify people who are more inclined to develop leadership skills, pay attention to leadership skills during hiring, and coach juniors in soft skills, including leadership.

Outcome vs. Output-Driven Organizations

Organizations tend to focus on solutions rather than the problem, which can lead to ineffective solutions. To shift the focus to an outcome-driven approach, OKRs, Five Whys, and measuring can be used. This approach encourages critical thinking and can have a positive impact on the team dynamic. Changing to an outcome-driven approach is not easy and requires coaching the team to change their behavior and way of thinking.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

As an organization grows, new processes are often introduced that erode the agility and flexibility of the organization. To prevent this, it is important to reflect on why and if a new process is needed and what value it will add. Value-stream mapping can be used to visualize the new process and data analysis can be used to spot weaknesses and opportunities. Existing processes should also be questioned to ensure they are still relevant. When setting up a new process, it should be built for two times the size of the organization and the purpose of the process should be clear. Finally, the value of the process should be tracked and the context should be provided to those who will be impacted by the change.

How to Align Various Internal Stakeholders and Their Requests

At my previous company, I created a template in Jira to help manage requests from internal stakeholders. The template included requirements for each request, listed stakeholders, and a due date. This allowed us to be more proactive and plan our resources accordingly. I also learned that documenting requests and frequent communication can help with aligning expectations.

When to Build New Features

This article discusses how a team leader was able to transition their team from a delivery team to a product team. The leader focused on building a strong relationship with the PM and UX designer, conducting weekly meetings to discuss technical aspects, defining a vision, measuring features, and keeping things agile. The leader also stopped building a long-term roadmap and instead created a shorter, strategic roadmap with major milestones and steps needed to reach a goal. The lessons learned from this experience were to make sure the team understands the goals and to create a shorter, strategic roadmap in a fast-paced company environment.

The Ability to Inspire People Towards a Common Goal

As a product manager, the author faced the challenge of working with different teams to achieve common goals. To ensure that the team was on the right track, the author took action by sending briefs about objectives and goals, drafting non-goals, and using collaborative tools. The author also learned that it is important to ensure alignment from the beginning and to have the team understand the context and suggest their own solutions.

How to Advance When There Is No Career Ladder

This article discusses the problem of not knowing one's job direction and how to overcome it. It suggests investing in oneself by seeking learning opportunities, attending conferences and webinars, subscribing to newsletters and online courses, and finding a career coach. It also suggests welcoming change at work and taking on new responsibilities to advance one's career. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of having a vision and roadmap for one's career and prioritizing the skills that will help one reach their goals.

Building a Next-Gen Product

This article discusses a company in the insurance industry that needed to automate their processes in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Through data collection, surveys, workshops, and design sessions, the company was able to create a new product that had a life-changing impact on agents and achieved over 50% increase in efficiency and over 40% in cost reduction. The article also highlights the importance of challenging the status quo and understanding when to innovate and when not to. Finally, it stresses the importance of working with customers to understand their needs and helping them get out of their comfort zone.

What Failures Can Teach Us: Migrating to Cloud-Native Microservices

In this article, the author reflects on their experience of moving a monolith product to a microservices infrastructure. They lacked the experience and knowledge to do it correctly, so they split the product into 14 different services, which added complexity and lagging response time. The author learned that they should have taken more time to consider the whole picture and plan for the future, as well as utilize existing tools and infrastructure instead of reinventing the wheel. They also learned not to over-engineer and to only use microservices if needed.

Handling Ambiguity in the Workspace

This article discusses the importance of being able to work in an ambiguous environment, and how to do so. It uses an example of an ambiguous project assigned to an engineer, where the engineer had to convert the proposal into a well-defined engineering problem. The engineer then asked two questions to help stakeholders reflect on the problem and better understand the needs of insurance agents. The engineer then proposed a solution and set up a monitoring process with a dashboard to display the progress. The article concludes with three lessons learned: embrace ambiguity, put yourself in other people's shoes, and define project requirements as clearly as possible.

From Building Features to Leading Product Development

This article discusses the problem of a successful B2B product becoming stuck in a cycle of customers asking for more features that can be one-off and hard to reuse. To address this, the organization had to change the narrative of how they worked with customers, gain direct access to users, and run continuous customer research. They also had to educate people in engineering, product, and UX on how to approach customers and build successful customer research programs. Additionally, they had to update the architecture of the software and build proper extension points. The key lesson learned was that success should be measured by customer satisfaction, not timely delivery of features.

How to Break Down Team Silos

This article discusses the problem of lack of transparency in engineering operations and the actions taken to address it. To increase transparency, a mandatory guidance was introduced, which included a Request for Comments (RFC) process, regular meetings, and an innovation week. The lessons learned from this experience were that documentation of engineering work is key, engineering managers should focus on teamwork marketing, and engineering should not operate as a black box.

Identifying the Real Problem

When the author arrived at the company, engineering operations were not optimal, leading to poor product quality and delayed software delivery. To bring about change, the author performed a SWOT analysis to identify weak points and root causes, and then implemented an agile transformation of engineering and a new product portfolio. To ensure success, the author had to convince stakeholders of the benefits of the transformation, and also had to introduce regular touchpoints with customers and track their actions. KPI's and customer satisfaction were used to measure success.

Reducing Tech Debt: Roll Up Your Sleeves

This article outlines the steps taken to address a product with a lot of tech debt. The author created common systems and libraries, shifted technologies, and did a major refactoring to get rid of legacy code. This enabled the team to focus on larger problems such as data and system architecture, and the metrics indicated significant progress. The author also learned lessons such as the importance of making engineering as boring as possible, rolling up your sleeves, communicating changes, and expecting pushbacks.

Introducing the Agile Mindset

A company experienced rapid growth and hired a new engineering leader to help the team transition. The engineering team had a rigid mindset and a lack of identity, leading to animosity between the product and engineering teams. The engineering leader took steps to create an engineering identity, foster an agile mindset, and emphasize values of continuous improvement and adaptability. This led to a 300-400% increase in product development speed and a 40% reduction in costs, despite losing 30-40% of the engineering team. The leader also learned the importance of clarity and expectations, and the need for distinct identities between product and engineering.

Transforming a Waterfall Team Into a High-Performing Agile Team

A startup was developing products that weren't meeting the market's expectations due to their long development cycles. To change this, the team had to introduce new processes, undergo a mindset shift, and collect metrics to provide visibility into current performance and trends. To improve their lead time, cycle time, change failure rate, and deployment frequency, the team implemented new tooling, improved their CI, and created blameless incident post-mortems. As a result, their deployment frequency went up and their change failure rate went down, allowing them to deliver faster and more effectively. The team learned that having the right processes in place is important, but they also need to create accountability and prove that the new thing is more effective.

How to Run Horizontal Teams At Scale

When I took over a horizontal front-end team, I implemented a process to guardrail how vertical teams should approach us with their dependencies. I also created a bug triaging process, an SLA, and an on-call process to shield the team from numerous requests. Additionally, I made open source repositories self-serve and conducted training for Sales and Solutions. The lessons learned were to build trust, ensure alignment of stakeholders, identify pain points, and be proactive.

How to Encourage Innovation in a Large Organization

This article discusses the experience of introducing a company-wide, five-day hackathon to motivate engineers and unleash innovation. The hackathon was organized virtually and included 200 people. Themes were chosen to ensure accountability and guardrails were put in place to allow people to operate freely. Mentors were assigned to teams and side events were organized to keep the mood light. In the end, 60% of the ideas were shipped into production. The article also outlines lessons learned from the experience, such as the importance of having boundaries and success criteria for hackathons, and the need for collaboration and delegation.

Developing a Rewards and Recognition Program

This article discusses a problem faced by many engineering organizations: lack of appreciation for engineers. To address this, a Rewards and Recognition Core Committee was formed to identify criteria for rewards and recognition and to introduce programs such as the Thank You Award and Spot Awards. It was found that connecting rewards and recognition to organizational values was key to success, and that adoption of the program was essential. The article also provides lessons learned from the experience.

From Zero From the First 20 Customers

A small cross-functional team was tasked with finding a solution to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of educational technology used in the classroom. To do this, the team used a streamlined process that included interviews with school districts, weekly brainstorming sessions, and daily discussions to estimate how confident they were in achieving their goals. Through this process, they were able to create a solution that allowed school districts to roll out a piece of technology to all of their devices. The team learned that trust in the team to own outcomes instead of tasks, getting close to customers, focusing on a few objectives, and planning for the transition from iterative to specialized projects are all important for success.

Everyone Is a Potential Leader

Leadership is a quality that should be distributed across the organization, not just among executives and managers. This distorted view of leadership can lead to problems such as difficulty promoting people into leadership roles and employees not taking ownership. To address this, it is important to identify people who are more inclined to develop leadership skills, pay attention to leadership skills during hiring, and coach juniors in soft skills, including leadership.

Outcome vs. Output-Driven Organizations

Organizations tend to focus on solutions rather than the problem, which can lead to ineffective solutions. To shift the focus to an outcome-driven approach, OKRs, Five Whys, and measuring can be used. This approach encourages critical thinking and can have a positive impact on the team dynamic. Changing to an outcome-driven approach is not easy and requires coaching the team to change their behavior and way of thinking.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

As an organization grows, new processes are often introduced that erode the agility and flexibility of the organization. To prevent this, it is important to reflect on why and if a new process is needed and what value it will add. Value-stream mapping can be used to visualize the new process and data analysis can be used to spot weaknesses and opportunities. Existing processes should also be questioned to ensure they are still relevant. When setting up a new process, it should be built for two times the size of the organization and the purpose of the process should be clear. Finally, the value of the process should be tracked and the context should be provided to those who will be impacted by the change.

How to Align Various Internal Stakeholders and Their Requests

At my previous company, I created a template in Jira to help manage requests from internal stakeholders. The template included requirements for each request, listed stakeholders, and a due date. This allowed us to be more proactive and plan our resources accordingly. I also learned that documenting requests and frequent communication can help with aligning expectations.

When to Build New Features

This article discusses how a team leader was able to transition their team from a delivery team to a product team. The leader focused on building a strong relationship with the PM and UX designer, conducting weekly meetings to discuss technical aspects, defining a vision, measuring features, and keeping things agile. The leader also stopped building a long-term roadmap and instead created a shorter, strategic roadmap with major milestones and steps needed to reach a goal. The lessons learned from this experience were to make sure the team understands the goals and to create a shorter, strategic roadmap in a fast-paced company environment.

The Ability to Inspire People Towards a Common Goal

As a product manager, the author faced the challenge of working with different teams to achieve common goals. To ensure that the team was on the right track, the author took action by sending briefs about objectives and goals, drafting non-goals, and using collaborative tools. The author also learned that it is important to ensure alignment from the beginning and to have the team understand the context and suggest their own solutions.

How to Advance When There Is No Career Ladder

This article discusses the problem of not knowing one's job direction and how to overcome it. It suggests investing in oneself by seeking learning opportunities, attending conferences and webinars, subscribing to newsletters and online courses, and finding a career coach. It also suggests welcoming change at work and taking on new responsibilities to advance one's career. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of having a vision and roadmap for one's career and prioritizing the skills that will help one reach their goals.

Building a Next-Gen Product

This article discusses a company in the insurance industry that needed to automate their processes in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Through data collection, surveys, workshops, and design sessions, the company was able to create a new product that had a life-changing impact on agents and achieved over 50% increase in efficiency and over 40% in cost reduction. The article also highlights the importance of challenging the status quo and understanding when to innovate and when not to. Finally, it stresses the importance of working with customers to understand their needs and helping them get out of their comfort zone.

What Failures Can Teach Us: Migrating to Cloud-Native Microservices

In this article, the author reflects on their experience of moving a monolith product to a microservices infrastructure. They lacked the experience and knowledge to do it correctly, so they split the product into 14 different services, which added complexity and lagging response time. The author learned that they should have taken more time to consider the whole picture and plan for the future, as well as utilize existing tools and infrastructure instead of reinventing the wheel. They also learned not to over-engineer and to only use microservices if needed.

Handling Ambiguity in the Workspace

This article discusses the importance of being able to work in an ambiguous environment, and how to do so. It uses an example of an ambiguous project assigned to an engineer, where the engineer had to convert the proposal into a well-defined engineering problem. The engineer then asked two questions to help stakeholders reflect on the problem and better understand the needs of insurance agents. The engineer then proposed a solution and set up a monitoring process with a dashboard to display the progress. The article concludes with three lessons learned: embrace ambiguity, put yourself in other people's shoes, and define project requirements as clearly as possible.

From Building Features to Leading Product Development

This article discusses the problem of a successful B2B product becoming stuck in a cycle of customers asking for more features that can be one-off and hard to reuse. To address this, the organization had to change the narrative of how they worked with customers, gain direct access to users, and run continuous customer research. They also had to educate people in engineering, product, and UX on how to approach customers and build successful customer research programs. Additionally, they had to update the architecture of the software and build proper extension points. The key lesson learned was that success should be measured by customer satisfaction, not timely delivery of features.

How to Break Down Team Silos

This article discusses the problem of lack of transparency in engineering operations and the actions taken to address it. To increase transparency, a mandatory guidance was introduced, which included a Request for Comments (RFC) process, regular meetings, and an innovation week. The lessons learned from this experience were that documentation of engineering work is key, engineering managers should focus on teamwork marketing, and engineering should not operate as a black box.

Identifying the Real Problem

When the author arrived at the company, engineering operations were not optimal, leading to poor product quality and delayed software delivery. To bring about change, the author performed a SWOT analysis to identify weak points and root causes, and then implemented an agile transformation of engineering and a new product portfolio. To ensure success, the author had to convince stakeholders of the benefits of the transformation, and also had to introduce regular touchpoints with customers and track their actions. KPI's and customer satisfaction were used to measure success.

Reducing Tech Debt: Roll Up Your Sleeves

This article outlines the steps taken to address a product with a lot of tech debt. The author created common systems and libraries, shifted technologies, and did a major refactoring to get rid of legacy code. This enabled the team to focus on larger problems such as data and system architecture, and the metrics indicated significant progress. The author also learned lessons such as the importance of making engineering as boring as possible, rolling up your sleeves, communicating changes, and expecting pushbacks.

Introducing the Agile Mindset

A company experienced rapid growth and hired a new engineering leader to help the team transition. The engineering team had a rigid mindset and a lack of identity, leading to animosity between the product and engineering teams. The engineering leader took steps to create an engineering identity, foster an agile mindset, and emphasize values of continuous improvement and adaptability. This led to a 300-400% increase in product development speed and a 40% reduction in costs, despite losing 30-40% of the engineering team. The leader also learned the importance of clarity and expectations, and the need for distinct identities between product and engineering.

Transforming a Waterfall Team Into a High-Performing Agile Team

A startup was developing products that weren't meeting the market's expectations due to their long development cycles. To change this, the team had to introduce new processes, undergo a mindset shift, and collect metrics to provide visibility into current performance and trends. To improve their lead time, cycle time, change failure rate, and deployment frequency, the team implemented new tooling, improved their CI, and created blameless incident post-mortems. As a result, their deployment frequency went up and their change failure rate went down, allowing them to deliver faster and more effectively. The team learned that having the right processes in place is important, but they also need to create accountability and prove that the new thing is more effective.

How to Run Horizontal Teams At Scale

When I took over a horizontal front-end team, I implemented a process to guardrail how vertical teams should approach us with their dependencies. I also created a bug triaging process, an SLA, and an on-call process to shield the team from numerous requests. Additionally, I made open source repositories self-serve and conducted training for Sales and Solutions. The lessons learned were to build trust, ensure alignment of stakeholders, identify pain points, and be proactive.

How to Encourage Innovation in a Large Organization

This article discusses the experience of introducing a company-wide, five-day hackathon to motivate engineers and unleash innovation. The hackathon was organized virtually and included 200 people. Themes were chosen to ensure accountability and guardrails were put in place to allow people to operate freely. Mentors were assigned to teams and side events were organized to keep the mood light. In the end, 60% of the ideas were shipped into production. The article also outlines lessons learned from the experience, such as the importance of having boundaries and success criteria for hackathons, and the need for collaboration and delegation.

Developing a Rewards and Recognition Program

This article discusses a problem faced by many engineering organizations: lack of appreciation for engineers. To address this, a Rewards and Recognition Core Committee was formed to identify criteria for rewards and recognition and to introduce programs such as the Thank You Award and Spot Awards. It was found that connecting rewards and recognition to organizational values was key to success, and that adoption of the program was essential. The article also provides lessons learned from the experience.

From Zero From the First 20 Customers

A small cross-functional team was tasked with finding a solution to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of educational technology used in the classroom. To do this, the team used a streamlined process that included interviews with school districts, weekly brainstorming sessions, and daily discussions to estimate how confident they were in achieving their goals. Through this process, they were able to create a solution that allowed school districts to roll out a piece of technology to all of their devices. The team learned that trust in the team to own outcomes instead of tasks, getting close to customers, focusing on a few objectives, and planning for the transition from iterative to specialized projects are all important for success.

Everyone Is a Potential Leader

Leadership is a quality that should be distributed across the organization, not just among executives and managers. This distorted view of leadership can lead to problems such as difficulty promoting people into leadership roles and employees not taking ownership. To address this, it is important to identify people who are more inclined to develop leadership skills, pay attention to leadership skills during hiring, and coach juniors in soft skills, including leadership.

Outcome vs. Output-Driven Organizations

Organizations tend to focus on solutions rather than the problem, which can lead to ineffective solutions. To shift the focus to an outcome-driven approach, OKRs, Five Whys, and measuring can be used. This approach encourages critical thinking and can have a positive impact on the team dynamic. Changing to an outcome-driven approach is not easy and requires coaching the team to change their behavior and way of thinking.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

As an organization grows, new processes are often introduced that erode the agility and flexibility of the organization. To prevent this, it is important to reflect on why and if a new process is needed and what value it will add. Value-stream mapping can be used to visualize the new process and data analysis can be used to spot weaknesses and opportunities. Existing processes should also be questioned to ensure they are still relevant. When setting up a new process, it should be built for two times the size of the organization and the purpose of the process should be clear. Finally, the value of the process should be tracked and the context should be provided to those who will be impacted by the change.

How to Align Various Internal Stakeholders and Their Requests

At my previous company, I created a template in Jira to help manage requests from internal stakeholders. The template included requirements for each request, listed stakeholders, and a due date. This allowed us to be more proactive and plan our resources accordingly. I also learned that documenting requests and frequent communication can help with aligning expectations.

When to Build New Features

This article discusses how a team leader was able to transition their team from a delivery team to a product team. The leader focused on building a strong relationship with the PM and UX designer, conducting weekly meetings to discuss technical aspects, defining a vision, measuring features, and keeping things agile. The leader also stopped building a long-term roadmap and instead created a shorter, strategic roadmap with major milestones and steps needed to reach a goal. The lessons learned from this experience were to make sure the team understands the goals and to create a shorter, strategic roadmap in a fast-paced company environment.

The Ability to Inspire People Towards a Common Goal

As a product manager, the author faced the challenge of working with different teams to achieve common goals. To ensure that the team was on the right track, the author took action by sending briefs about objectives and goals, drafting non-goals, and using collaborative tools. The author also learned that it is important to ensure alignment from the beginning and to have the team understand the context and suggest their own solutions.

How to Advance When There Is No Career Ladder

This article discusses the problem of not knowing one's job direction and how to overcome it. It suggests investing in oneself by seeking learning opportunities, attending conferences and webinars, subscribing to newsletters and online courses, and finding a career coach. It also suggests welcoming change at work and taking on new responsibilities to advance one's career. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of having a vision and roadmap for one's career and prioritizing the skills that will help one reach their goals.

Building a Next-Gen Product

This article discusses a company in the insurance industry that needed to automate their processes in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Through data collection, surveys, workshops, and design sessions, the company was able to create a new product that had a life-changing impact on agents and achieved over 50% increase in efficiency and over 40% in cost reduction. The article also highlights the importance of challenging the status quo and understanding when to innovate and when not to. Finally, it stresses the importance of working with customers to understand their needs and helping them get out of their comfort zone.

What Failures Can Teach Us: Migrating to Cloud-Native Microservices

In this article, the author reflects on their experience of moving a monolith product to a microservices infrastructure. They lacked the experience and knowledge to do it correctly, so they split the product into 14 different services, which added complexity and lagging response time. The author learned that they should have taken more time to consider the whole picture and plan for the future, as well as utilize existing tools and infrastructure instead of reinventing the wheel. They also learned not to over-engineer and to only use microservices if needed.

Handling Ambiguity in the Workspace

This article discusses the importance of being able to work in an ambiguous environment, and how to do so. It uses an example of an ambiguous project assigned to an engineer, where the engineer had to convert the proposal into a well-defined engineering problem. The engineer then asked two questions to help stakeholders reflect on the problem and better understand the needs of insurance agents. The engineer then proposed a solution and set up a monitoring process with a dashboard to display the progress. The article concludes with three lessons learned: embrace ambiguity, put yourself in other people's shoes, and define project requirements as clearly as possible.

From Building Features to Leading Product Development

This article discusses the problem of a successful B2B product becoming stuck in a cycle of customers asking for more features that can be one-off and hard to reuse. To address this, the organization had to change the narrative of how they worked with customers, gain direct access to users, and run continuous customer research. They also had to educate people in engineering, product, and UX on how to approach customers and build successful customer research programs. Additionally, they had to update the architecture of the software and build proper extension points. The key lesson learned was that success should be measured by customer satisfaction, not timely delivery of features.

How to Break Down Team Silos

This article discusses the problem of lack of transparency in engineering operations and the actions taken to address it. To increase transparency, a mandatory guidance was introduced, which included a Request for Comments (RFC) process, regular meetings, and an innovation week. The lessons learned from this experience were that documentation of engineering work is key, engineering managers should focus on teamwork marketing, and engineering should not operate as a black box.

Identifying the Real Problem

When the author arrived at the company, engineering operations were not optimal, leading to poor product quality and delayed software delivery. To bring about change, the author performed a SWOT analysis to identify weak points and root causes, and then implemented an agile transformation of engineering and a new product portfolio. To ensure success, the author had to convince stakeholders of the benefits of the transformation, and also had to introduce regular touchpoints with customers and track their actions. KPI's and customer satisfaction were used to measure success.

Reducing Tech Debt: Roll Up Your Sleeves

This article outlines the steps taken to address a product with a lot of tech debt. The author created common systems and libraries, shifted technologies, and did a major refactoring to get rid of legacy code. This enabled the team to focus on larger problems such as data and system architecture, and the metrics indicated significant progress. The author also learned lessons such as the importance of making engineering as boring as possible, rolling up your sleeves, communicating changes, and expecting pushbacks.

Introducing the Agile Mindset

A company experienced rapid growth and hired a new engineering leader to help the team transition. The engineering team had a rigid mindset and a lack of identity, leading to animosity between the product and engineering teams. The engineering leader took steps to create an engineering identity, foster an agile mindset, and emphasize values of continuous improvement and adaptability. This led to a 300-400% increase in product development speed and a 40% reduction in costs, despite losing 30-40% of the engineering team. The leader also learned the importance of clarity and expectations, and the need for distinct identities between product and engineering.

Transforming a Waterfall Team Into a High-Performing Agile Team

A startup was developing products that weren't meeting the market's expectations due to their long development cycles. To change this, the team had to introduce new processes, undergo a mindset shift, and collect metrics to provide visibility into current performance and trends. To improve their lead time, cycle time, change failure rate, and deployment frequency, the team implemented new tooling, improved their CI, and created blameless incident post-mortems. As a result, their deployment frequency went up and their change failure rate went down, allowing them to deliver faster and more effectively. The team learned that having the right processes in place is important, but they also need to create accountability and prove that the new thing is more effective.

How to Run Horizontal Teams At Scale

When I took over a horizontal front-end team, I implemented a process to guardrail how vertical teams should approach us with their dependencies. I also created a bug triaging process, an SLA, and an on-call process to shield the team from numerous requests. Additionally, I made open source repositories self-serve and conducted training for Sales and Solutions. The lessons learned were to build trust, ensure alignment of stakeholders, identify pain points, and be proactive.

How to Encourage Innovation in a Large Organization

This article discusses the experience of introducing a company-wide, five-day hackathon to motivate engineers and unleash innovation. The hackathon was organized virtually and included 200 people. Themes were chosen to ensure accountability and guardrails were put in place to allow people to operate freely. Mentors were assigned to teams and side events were organized to keep the mood light. In the end, 60% of the ideas were shipped into production. The article also outlines lessons learned from the experience, such as the importance of having boundaries and success criteria for hackathons, and the need for collaboration and delegation.

Developing a Rewards and Recognition Program

This article discusses a problem faced by many engineering organizations: lack of appreciation for engineers. To address this, a Rewards and Recognition Core Committee was formed to identify criteria for rewards and recognition and to introduce programs such as the Thank You Award and Spot Awards. It was found that connecting rewards and recognition to organizational values was key to success, and that adoption of the program was essential. The article also provides lessons learned from the experience.

From Zero From the First 20 Customers

A small cross-functional team was tasked with finding a solution to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of educational technology used in the classroom. To do this, the team used a streamlined process that included interviews with school districts, weekly brainstorming sessions, and daily discussions to estimate how confident they were in achieving their goals. Through this process, they were able to create a solution that allowed school districts to roll out a piece of technology to all of their devices. The team learned that trust in the team to own outcomes instead of tasks, getting close to customers, focusing on a few objectives, and planning for the transition from iterative to specialized projects are all important for success.

Everyone Is a Potential Leader

Leadership is a quality that should be distributed across the organization, not just among executives and managers. This distorted view of leadership can lead to problems such as difficulty promoting people into leadership roles and employees not taking ownership. To address this, it is important to identify people who are more inclined to develop leadership skills, pay attention to leadership skills during hiring, and coach juniors in soft skills, including leadership.

Outcome vs. Output-Driven Organizations

Organizations tend to focus on solutions rather than the problem, which can lead to ineffective solutions. To shift the focus to an outcome-driven approach, OKRs, Five Whys, and measuring can be used. This approach encourages critical thinking and can have a positive impact on the team dynamic. Changing to an outcome-driven approach is not easy and requires coaching the team to change their behavior and way of thinking.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

As an organization grows, new processes are often introduced that erode the agility and flexibility of the organization. To prevent this, it is important to reflect on why and if a new process is needed and what value it will add. Value-stream mapping can be used to visualize the new process and data analysis can be used to spot weaknesses and opportunities. Existing processes should also be questioned to ensure they are still relevant. When setting up a new process, it should be built for two times the size of the organization and the purpose of the process should be clear. Finally, the value of the process should be tracked and the context should be provided to those who will be impacted by the change.

How to Align Various Internal Stakeholders and Their Requests

At my previous company, I created a template in Jira to help manage requests from internal stakeholders. The template included requirements for each request, listed stakeholders, and a due date. This allowed us to be more proactive and plan our resources accordingly. I also learned that documenting requests and frequent communication can help with aligning expectations.

When to Build New Features

This article discusses how a team leader was able to transition their team from a delivery team to a product team. The leader focused on building a strong relationship with the PM and UX designer, conducting weekly meetings to discuss technical aspects, defining a vision, measuring features, and keeping things agile. The leader also stopped building a long-term roadmap and instead created a shorter, strategic roadmap with major milestones and steps needed to reach a goal. The lessons learned from this experience were to make sure the team understands the goals and to create a shorter, strategic roadmap in a fast-paced company environment.

The Ability to Inspire People Towards a Common Goal

As a product manager, the author faced the challenge of working with different teams to achieve common goals. To ensure that the team was on the right track, the author took action by sending briefs about objectives and goals, drafting non-goals, and using collaborative tools. The author also learned that it is important to ensure alignment from the beginning and to have the team understand the context and suggest their own solutions.

How to Advance When There Is No Career Ladder

This article discusses the problem of not knowing one's job direction and how to overcome it. It suggests investing in oneself by seeking learning opportunities, attending conferences and webinars, subscribing to newsletters and online courses, and finding a career coach. It also suggests welcoming change at work and taking on new responsibilities to advance one's career. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of having a vision and roadmap for one's career and prioritizing the skills that will help one reach their goals.

Building a Next-Gen Product

This article discusses a company in the insurance industry that needed to automate their processes in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Through data collection, surveys, workshops, and design sessions, the company was able to create a new product that had a life-changing impact on agents and achieved over 50% increase in efficiency and over 40% in cost reduction. The article also highlights the importance of challenging the status quo and understanding when to innovate and when not to. Finally, it stresses the importance of working with customers to understand their needs and helping them get out of their comfort zone.

What Failures Can Teach Us: Migrating to Cloud-Native Microservices

In this article, the author reflects on their experience of moving a monolith product to a microservices infrastructure. They lacked the experience and knowledge to do it correctly, so they split the product into 14 different services, which added complexity and lagging response time. The author learned that they should have taken more time to consider the whole picture and plan for the future, as well as utilize existing tools and infrastructure instead of reinventing the wheel. They also learned not to over-engineer and to only use microservices if needed.

Handling Ambiguity in the Workspace

This article discusses the importance of being able to work in an ambiguous environment, and how to do so. It uses an example of an ambiguous project assigned to an engineer, where the engineer had to convert the proposal into a well-defined engineering problem. The engineer then asked two questions to help stakeholders reflect on the problem and better understand the needs of insurance agents. The engineer then proposed a solution and set up a monitoring process with a dashboard to display the progress. The article concludes with three lessons learned: embrace ambiguity, put yourself in other people's shoes, and define project requirements as clearly as possible.

From Building Features to Leading Product Development

This article discusses the problem of a successful B2B product becoming stuck in a cycle of customers asking for more features that can be one-off and hard to reuse. To address this, the organization had to change the narrative of how they worked with customers, gain direct access to users, and run continuous customer research. They also had to educate people in engineering, product, and UX on how to approach customers and build successful customer research programs. Additionally, they had to update the architecture of the software and build proper extension points. The key lesson learned was that success should be measured by customer satisfaction, not timely delivery of features.

How to Break Down Team Silos

This article discusses the problem of lack of transparency in engineering operations and the actions taken to address it. To increase transparency, a mandatory guidance was introduced, which included a Request for Comments (RFC) process, regular meetings, and an innovation week. The lessons learned from this experience were that documentation of engineering work is key, engineering managers should focus on teamwork marketing, and engineering should not operate as a black box.

Identifying the Real Problem

When the author arrived at the company, engineering operations were not optimal, leading to poor product quality and delayed software delivery. To bring about change, the author performed a SWOT analysis to identify weak points and root causes, and then implemented an agile transformation of engineering and a new product portfolio. To ensure success, the author had to convince stakeholders of the benefits of the transformation, and also had to introduce regular touchpoints with customers and track their actions. KPI's and customer satisfaction were used to measure success.

Reducing Tech Debt: Roll Up Your Sleeves

This article outlines the steps taken to address a product with a lot of tech debt. The author created common systems and libraries, shifted technologies, and did a major refactoring to get rid of legacy code. This enabled the team to focus on larger problems such as data and system architecture, and the metrics indicated significant progress. The author also learned lessons such as the importance of making engineering as boring as possible, rolling up your sleeves, communicating changes, and expecting pushbacks.

Introducing the Agile Mindset

A company experienced rapid growth and hired a new engineering leader to help the team transition. The engineering team had a rigid mindset and a lack of identity, leading to animosity between the product and engineering teams. The engineering leader took steps to create an engineering identity, foster an agile mindset, and emphasize values of continuous improvement and adaptability. This led to a 300-400% increase in product development speed and a 40% reduction in costs, despite losing 30-40% of the engineering team. The leader also learned the importance of clarity and expectations, and the need for distinct identities between product and engineering.

Transforming a Waterfall Team Into a High-Performing Agile Team

A startup was developing products that weren't meeting the market's expectations due to their long development cycles. To change this, the team had to introduce new processes, undergo a mindset shift, and collect metrics to provide visibility into current performance and trends. To improve their lead time, cycle time, change failure rate, and deployment frequency, the team implemented new tooling, improved their CI, and created blameless incident post-mortems. As a result, their deployment frequency went up and their change failure rate went down, allowing them to deliver faster and more effectively. The team learned that having the right processes in place is important, but they also need to create accountability and prove that the new thing is more effective.

How to Run Horizontal Teams At Scale

When I took over a horizontal front-end team, I implemented a process to guardrail how vertical teams should approach us with their dependencies. I also created a bug triaging process, an SLA, and an on-call process to shield the team from numerous requests. Additionally, I made open source repositories self-serve and conducted training for Sales and Solutions. The lessons learned were to build trust, ensure alignment of stakeholders, identify pain points, and be proactive.

How to Encourage Innovation in a Large Organization

This article discusses the experience of introducing a company-wide, five-day hackathon to motivate engineers and unleash innovation. The hackathon was organized virtually and included 200 people. Themes were chosen to ensure accountability and guardrails were put in place to allow people to operate freely. Mentors were assigned to teams and side events were organized to keep the mood light. In the end, 60% of the ideas were shipped into production. The article also outlines lessons learned from the experience, such as the importance of having boundaries and success criteria for hackathons, and the need for collaboration and delegation.

Developing a Rewards and Recognition Program

This article discusses a problem faced by many engineering organizations: lack of appreciation for engineers. To address this, a Rewards and Recognition Core Committee was formed to identify criteria for rewards and recognition and to introduce programs such as the Thank You Award and Spot Awards. It was found that connecting rewards and recognition to organizational values was key to success, and that adoption of the program was essential. The article also provides lessons learned from the experience.

From Zero From the First 20 Customers

A small cross-functional team was tasked with finding a solution to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of educational technology used in the classroom. To do this, the team used a streamlined process that included interviews with school districts, weekly brainstorming sessions, and daily discussions to estimate how confident they were in achieving their goals. Through this process, they were able to create a solution that allowed school districts to roll out a piece of technology to all of their devices. The team learned that trust in the team to own outcomes instead of tasks, getting close to customers, focusing on a few objectives, and planning for the transition from iterative to specialized projects are all important for success.

Everyone Is a Potential Leader

Leadership is a quality that should be distributed across the organization, not just among executives and managers. This distorted view of leadership can lead to problems such as difficulty promoting people into leadership roles and employees not taking ownership. To address this, it is important to identify people who are more inclined to develop leadership skills, pay attention to leadership skills during hiring, and coach juniors in soft skills, including leadership.

Outcome vs. Output-Driven Organizations

Organizations tend to focus on solutions rather than the problem, which can lead to ineffective solutions. To shift the focus to an outcome-driven approach, OKRs, Five Whys, and measuring can be used. This approach encourages critical thinking and can have a positive impact on the team dynamic. Changing to an outcome-driven approach is not easy and requires coaching the team to change their behavior and way of thinking.

How to Maintain a Startup Mentality

As an organization grows, new processes are often introduced that erode the agility and flexibility of the organization. To prevent this, it is important to reflect on why and if a new process is needed and what value it will add. Value-stream mapping can be used to visualize the new process and data analysis can be used to spot weaknesses and opportunities. Existing processes should also be questioned to ensure they are still relevant. When setting up a new process, it should be built for two times the size of the organization and the purpose of the process should be clear. Finally, the value of the process should be tracked and the context should be provided to those who will be impacted by the change.

How to Align Various Internal Stakeholders and Their Requests

At my previous company, I created a template in Jira to help manage requests from internal stakeholders. The template included requirements for each request, listed stakeholders, and a due date. This allowed us to be more proactive and plan our resources accordingly. I also learned that documenting requests and frequent communication can help with aligning expectations.

When to Build New Features

This article discusses how a team leader was able to transition their team from a delivery team to a product team. The leader focused on building a strong relationship with the PM and UX designer, conducting weekly meetings to discuss technical aspects, defining a vision, measuring features, and keeping things agile. The leader also stopped building a long-term roadmap and instead created a shorter, strategic roadmap with major milestones and steps needed to reach a goal. The lessons learned from this experience were to make sure the team understands the goals and to create a shorter, strategic roadmap in a fast-paced company environment.

The Ability to Inspire People Towards a Common Goal

As a product manager, the author faced the challenge of working with different teams to achieve common goals. To ensure that the team was on the right track, the author took action by sending briefs about objectives and goals, drafting non-goals, and using collaborative tools. The author also learned that it is important to ensure alignment from the beginning and to have the team understand the context and suggest their own solutions.

How to Advance When There Is No Career Ladder

This article discusses the problem of not knowing one's job direction and how to overcome it. It suggests investing in oneself by seeking learning opportunities, attending conferences and webinars, subscribing to newsletters and online courses, and finding a career coach. It also suggests welcoming change at work and taking on new responsibilities to advance one's career. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of having a vision and roadmap for one's career and prioritizing the skills that will help one reach their goals.

Building a Next-Gen Product

This article discusses a company in the insurance industry that needed to automate their processes in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Through data collection, surveys, workshops, and design sessions, the company was able to create a new product that had a life-changing impact on agents and achieved over 50% increase in efficiency and over 40% in cost reduction. The article also highlights the importance of challenging the status quo and understanding when to innovate and when not to. Finally, it stresses the importance of working with customers to understand their needs and helping them get out of their comfort zone.

What Failures Can Teach Us: Migrating to Cloud-Native Microservices

In this article, the author reflects on their experience of moving a monolith product to a microservices infrastructure. They lacked the experience and knowledge to do it correctly, so they split the product into 14 different services, which added complexity and lagging response time. The author learned that they should have taken more time to consider the whole picture and plan for the future, as well as utilize existing tools and infrastructure instead of reinventing the wheel. They also learned not to over-engineer and to only use microservices if needed.

Handling Ambiguity in the Workspace

This article discusses the importance of being able to work in an ambiguous environment, and how to do so. It uses an example of an ambiguous project assigned to an engineer, where the engineer had to convert the proposal into a well-defined engineering problem. The engineer then asked two questions to help stakeholders reflect on the problem and better understand the needs of insurance agents. The engineer then proposed a solution and set up a monitoring process with a dashboard to display the progress. The article concludes with three lessons learned: embrace ambiguity, put yourself in other people's shoes, and define project requirements as clearly as possible.

From Building Features to Leading Product Development

This article discusses the problem of a successful B2B product becoming stuck in a cycle of customers asking for more features that can be one-off and hard to reuse. To address this, the organization had to change the narrative of how they worked with customers, gain direct access to users, and run continuous customer research. They also had to educate people in engineering, product, and UX on how to approach customers and build successful customer research programs. Additionally, they had to update the architecture of the software and build proper extension points. The key lesson learned was that success should be measured by customer satisfaction, not timely delivery of features.

How to Break Down Team Silos

This article discusses the problem of lack of transparency in engineering operations and the actions taken to address it. To increase transparency, a mandatory guidance was introduced, which included a Request for Comments (RFC) process, regular meetings, and an innovation week. The lessons learned from this experience were that documentation of engineering work is key, engineering managers should focus on teamwork marketing, and engineering should not operate as a black box.

Identifying the Real Problem

When the author arrived at the company, engineering operations were not optimal, leading to poor product quality and delayed software delivery. To bring about change, the author performed a SWOT analysis to identify weak points and root causes, and then implemented an agile transformation of engineering and a new product portfolio. To ensure success, the author had to convince stakeholders of the benefits of the transformation, and also had to introduce regular touchpoints with customers and track their actions. KPI's and customer satisfaction were used to measure success.

Reducing Tech Debt: Roll Up Your Sleeves

This article outlines the steps taken to address a product with a lot of tech debt. The author created common systems and libraries, shifted technologies, and did a major refactoring to get rid of legacy code. This enabled the team to focus on larger problems such as data and system architecture, and the metrics indicated significant progress. The author also learned lessons such as the importance of making engineering as boring as possible, rolling up your sleeves, communicating changes, and expecting pushbacks.

Introducing the Agile Mindset

A company experienced rapid growth and hired a new engineering leader to help the team transition. The engineering team had a rigid mindset and a lack of identity, leading to animosity between the product and engineering teams. The engineering leader took steps to create an engineering identity, foster an agile mindset, and emphasize values of continuous improvement and adaptability. This led to a 300-400% increase in product development speed and a 40% reduction in costs, despite losing 30-40% of the engineering team. The leader also learned the importance of clarity and expectations, and the need for distinct identities between product and engineering.

Transforming a Waterfall Team Into a High-Performing Agile Team

A startup was developing products that weren't meeting the market's expectations due to their long development cycles. To change this, the team had to introduce new processes, undergo a mindset shift, and collect metrics to provide visibility into current performance and trends. To improve their lead time, cycle time, change failure rate, and deployment frequency, the team implemented new tooling, improved their CI, and created blameless incident post-mortems. As a result, their deployment frequency went up and their change failure rate went down, allowing them to deliver faster and more effectively. The team learned that having the right processes in place is important, but they also need to create accountability and prove that the new thing is more effective.

How to Run Horizontal Teams At Scale

When I took over a horizontal front-end team, I implemented a process to guardrail how vertical teams should approach us with their dependencies. I also created a bug triaging process, an SLA, and an on-call process to shield the team from numerous requests. Additionally, I made open source repositories self-serve and conducted training for Sales and Solutions. The lessons learned were to build trust, ensure alignment of stakeholders, identify pain points, and be proactive.

How to Encourage Innovation in a Large Organization

This article discusses the experience of introducing a company-wide, five-day hackathon to motivate engineers and unleash innovation. The hackathon was organized virtually and included 200 people. Themes were chosen to ensure accountability and guardrails were put in place to allow people to operate freely. Mentors were assigned to teams and side events were organized to keep the mood light. In the end, 60% of the ideas were shipped into production. The article also outlines lessons learned from the experience, such as the importance of having boundaries and success criteria for hackathons, and the need for collaboration and delegation.

Developing a Rewards and Recognition Program

This article discusses a problem faced by many engineering organizations: lack of appreciation for engineers. To address this, a Rewards and Recognition Core Committee was formed to identify criteria for rewards and recognition and to introduce programs such as the Thank You Award and Spot Awards. It was found that connecting rewards and recognition to organizational values was key to success, and that adoption of the program was essential. The article also provides lessons learned from the experience.

From Zero From the First 20 Customers

A small cross-functional team was tasked with finding a solution to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of educational technology used in the classroom. To do this, the team used a streamlined process that included interviews with school districts, weekly brainstorming sessions, and daily discussions to estimate how confident they were in achieving their goals. Through this process, they were able to create a solution that allowed school districts to roll out a piece of technology to all of their devices. The team learned that trust in the team to own outcomes instead of tasks, getting close to customers, focusing on a few objectives, and planning for the transition from iterative to specialized projects are all important for success.