Knowledge shared by our community

When AI Features Are Market-Ready

AI and deep learning are new fields that present unique challenges when determining if a feature is ready to go to market. Validation and verification of models are difficult, and require dedicated staff to understand the nuances of the field. It also takes a lot of effort and infrastructure to transition features from research to production. Companies need to measure themselves against the speed of light in terms of performance, use image quality metrics, and identify reliable partners in order to ensure their features are market-ready.

Building a Practical Career Ladder for Engineers

This article discusses the importance of engineering teams having career ladders. It explains how the author's team identified the need for a ladder to ensure fair compensation and to help engineers improve themselves. They built a two-ladder system to reward technical contributions and to distinguish between technical leaders and people managers. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as the importance of transparency and public titles to foster a culture of empowerment.

Optimizing for Results Instead of Velocity

This article outlines the strategies used by a start-up to successfully launch a new product. These strategies included tracking time allocation, introducing OKRs, and using vertical iterations to measure viability. These strategies allowed the team to have candid conversations about their goals and measure their progress on a weekly basis. As a result, the team was able to launch the most successful product they had ever built.

Learning What It Means to Become a Servant Leader

This article discusses the concept of servant leadership and how it can be used to scale up as a tech lead and manager. It emphasizes the importance of being present for direct reports in tough times, coaching and inspiring them, and connecting them with mentors and leaders suited to the task. It also highlights the need to be transparent and to create a culture of humility in the organization.

The Parking Lot Method of Team Development

Managers need to constantly reinvent their teams in order to keep up with the changing industry. The Parking Lot Technique is a method to understand the team and make them a living, dynamic organism. It involves removing biases, visualizing the roles and responsibilities needed in the future, and placing people in positions where they have something to aspire to. Doing this frequently will bring clarity to the manager and help them make decisions free of bias. It also allows them to convert attrition into a moment of opportunity.

Avoiding the Trap of “The Perfect Candidate”

When hiring for a new position, managers should look for a candidate who has the potential to grow and learn, rather than one who already has all the skills and qualifications needed. This will provide an incentive for the candidate to join the team and for the manager to help coach and develop them. Asking questions during the interview to get a sense of the candidate's journey and their ability to think independently can help managers make the best hire.

When Many Employees Leave the Company Simultaneously

As a leader, it can be difficult to accept when people leave the company. To turn the situation around, it is important to understand why people are leaving and to focus on those who are still considering leaving. It is also important to accept that people will leave, and to embrace those who remain. Additionally, it is important to avoid giving people ultimatums and to understand that the journey is a rollercoaster.

Leaving Your Company as a Manager

Leaving a company as a leader can be difficult, and it can have negative implications for the company and the people you were leading. To mitigate these effects, it is important to prepare for the transition before leaving. This includes promoting an internal candidate to replace you, communicating your decision rationally, and offering guidance during the recruitment and onboarding process. It is also important to understand what motivates those who decide to leave after you, and to remind them that they are not part of the company just because you were managing them. Finally, it is important to delegate your biggest responsibilities to the most worthy team members before leaving.

Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

When a team member was underperforming, the IC decided to investigate further to understand the cause. After speaking to the team member and their coworkers, it was revealed that the team member was suffering from a cultural gap and a toxic environment. To help the team member, the IC moved them to another project and opened up a line of feedback. This allowed the team member to regain their confidence and their performance improved. The IC learned that it is important to understand the cause of underperformance and to provide both negative and positive feedback.

Collaborating With a Cross-Functional Expert

At my previous job, my team was having trouble cooperating with the security team due to multiple engineers reporting their findings and lack of context. To solve this, we suggested assigning one security expert to our team and investing time and energy into training them. This solution was applied company-wide and allowed both teams to acquire a better understanding of each other's domains and build relationships.

Finding Common Ground With Those of Different Backgrounds

A person from Eastern Europe was having difficulty communicating with their team due to cultural differences. After taking time to observe the person, the root cause of the problem was identified and a book on intercultural communication was used to bridge the gap. New expectations were set and the person eventually became one of the top performers. The lessons learned were to never make assumptions, be clear about expectations, and to provide positive feedback.

Musings of a Former Start-Up Founder

This article discusses the challenges of starting a company and the lessons learned from the experience. It emphasizes the importance of having a trusted team, maintaining a good support system, and staying focused on the company's goals. It also highlights the need to be realistic and to be prepared for setbacks.

Working From Home Can Be Fun and Productive When Done Right

The pandemic has caused a shift to working from home, which has added complexity to the work-life balance of employees. To mitigate the stress of deadlines, the team leader changed their management style to be more empathetic and flexible with deadlines, switched to a longer-term roadmap, and optimized the usage of tools. Additionally, the team held informal coffee chats to regain social interaction. The leader learned that trust and understanding team members triggers their strengths and helps to improve communication.

Why Leaders Should Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

When a manager took responsibility for a team, they made the mistake of focusing on team members' weaknesses during performance evaluations. This caused stress and decreased team productivity. To remedy this, the manager used positive language to focus on team members' strengths and assigned projects that aligned with their skill sets. The manager also worked to understand each team member's motivation and offered resources to help them grow. Through these actions, the team was able to increase performance and productivity.

How to Create a Tailored Growth Plan For Your Teams

When joining a company with an unclear career ladder, the manager took action to ensure that their engineers had clarity on what constituted progress in their career. This included analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, setting clear goals, and identifying areas where their interests and the manager's goals could overlap. The outcome was that engineers had clarity on their goals and felt engaged and involved with the organization. The manager learned that it is important to be clear about goals at the start of a performance cycle, ask questions to team members, and build a specialized plan for engineers to help with retention.

Managing Tight Deadlines While Building a New Team

An Engineering Manager was tasked with managing a brand new team with a tight deadline to deliver a complex distributed orchestration platform. The EM took the time to build trust and relationships with the team, explain the utility of the system, prioritize needs, and conduct a build vs. buy analysis. The team was given ownership of the system, and the EM made sure to recognize and reward the team for their efforts.

How to Creatively Juggle Technical Debt and Product Priorities

A team faced a challenge of working in a fast-paced delivery environment with a clunky codebase that needed refactoring. To address this, the Engineering Manager and Product Manager discussed the importance of tackling technical debt and agreed to allocate more time and effort to it. A system was created to prioritize tech debt and refactors were included in the scope of new product development. The team learned the importance of having a trust-based relationship with the Product Manager and the need to surface the most problematic areas early in order to get the most out of time spent.

Promoting With a Career Ladder

This article discusses the challenge of providing tangible feedback to product managers in order to help them progress in their career. The author outlines the process of creating a career ladder with explicit criteria for each step, and how to use this ladder to provide feedback and structure growth sessions. The article also emphasizes the importance of shifting the mindset away from promotion as an incentive, and instead focusing on trust and personal development plans.

Investing in Improvement Vs. Investing in a Potentially High-Yielding Bet

This article discusses the importance of understanding how much of a company's resources should be invested in improvements versus new products that may fail. It is important to consider the company's current position in the market, the level of risk acceptance, and the overall resource investment in the product. In a start-up, all resources are invested in bets, but as the company matures, more resources should be invested in improvements. However, it is important to not become too risk-averse and to still invest in new projects.

How Context Evolves as You Advance as a Manager

This article discusses the challenges of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager of other project managers. It outlines the key tasks of a manager, such as providing context for team members and pushing them to take risks. The article emphasizes the importance of communication and providing a shared context for decision-making. It also highlights the need to repeat and enrich the vision of the company to ensure everyone is in alignment.

When AI Features Are Market-Ready

AI and deep learning are new fields that present unique challenges when determining if a feature is ready to go to market. Validation and verification of models are difficult, and require dedicated staff to understand the nuances of the field. It also takes a lot of effort and infrastructure to transition features from research to production. Companies need to measure themselves against the speed of light in terms of performance, use image quality metrics, and identify reliable partners in order to ensure their features are market-ready.

Building a Practical Career Ladder for Engineers

This article discusses the importance of engineering teams having career ladders. It explains how the author's team identified the need for a ladder to ensure fair compensation and to help engineers improve themselves. They built a two-ladder system to reward technical contributions and to distinguish between technical leaders and people managers. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as the importance of transparency and public titles to foster a culture of empowerment.

Optimizing for Results Instead of Velocity

This article outlines the strategies used by a start-up to successfully launch a new product. These strategies included tracking time allocation, introducing OKRs, and using vertical iterations to measure viability. These strategies allowed the team to have candid conversations about their goals and measure their progress on a weekly basis. As a result, the team was able to launch the most successful product they had ever built.

Learning What It Means to Become a Servant Leader

This article discusses the concept of servant leadership and how it can be used to scale up as a tech lead and manager. It emphasizes the importance of being present for direct reports in tough times, coaching and inspiring them, and connecting them with mentors and leaders suited to the task. It also highlights the need to be transparent and to create a culture of humility in the organization.

The Parking Lot Method of Team Development

Managers need to constantly reinvent their teams in order to keep up with the changing industry. The Parking Lot Technique is a method to understand the team and make them a living, dynamic organism. It involves removing biases, visualizing the roles and responsibilities needed in the future, and placing people in positions where they have something to aspire to. Doing this frequently will bring clarity to the manager and help them make decisions free of bias. It also allows them to convert attrition into a moment of opportunity.

Avoiding the Trap of “The Perfect Candidate”

When hiring for a new position, managers should look for a candidate who has the potential to grow and learn, rather than one who already has all the skills and qualifications needed. This will provide an incentive for the candidate to join the team and for the manager to help coach and develop them. Asking questions during the interview to get a sense of the candidate's journey and their ability to think independently can help managers make the best hire.

When Many Employees Leave the Company Simultaneously

As a leader, it can be difficult to accept when people leave the company. To turn the situation around, it is important to understand why people are leaving and to focus on those who are still considering leaving. It is also important to accept that people will leave, and to embrace those who remain. Additionally, it is important to avoid giving people ultimatums and to understand that the journey is a rollercoaster.

Leaving Your Company as a Manager

Leaving a company as a leader can be difficult, and it can have negative implications for the company and the people you were leading. To mitigate these effects, it is important to prepare for the transition before leaving. This includes promoting an internal candidate to replace you, communicating your decision rationally, and offering guidance during the recruitment and onboarding process. It is also important to understand what motivates those who decide to leave after you, and to remind them that they are not part of the company just because you were managing them. Finally, it is important to delegate your biggest responsibilities to the most worthy team members before leaving.

Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

When a team member was underperforming, the IC decided to investigate further to understand the cause. After speaking to the team member and their coworkers, it was revealed that the team member was suffering from a cultural gap and a toxic environment. To help the team member, the IC moved them to another project and opened up a line of feedback. This allowed the team member to regain their confidence and their performance improved. The IC learned that it is important to understand the cause of underperformance and to provide both negative and positive feedback.

Collaborating With a Cross-Functional Expert

At my previous job, my team was having trouble cooperating with the security team due to multiple engineers reporting their findings and lack of context. To solve this, we suggested assigning one security expert to our team and investing time and energy into training them. This solution was applied company-wide and allowed both teams to acquire a better understanding of each other's domains and build relationships.

Finding Common Ground With Those of Different Backgrounds

A person from Eastern Europe was having difficulty communicating with their team due to cultural differences. After taking time to observe the person, the root cause of the problem was identified and a book on intercultural communication was used to bridge the gap. New expectations were set and the person eventually became one of the top performers. The lessons learned were to never make assumptions, be clear about expectations, and to provide positive feedback.

Musings of a Former Start-Up Founder

This article discusses the challenges of starting a company and the lessons learned from the experience. It emphasizes the importance of having a trusted team, maintaining a good support system, and staying focused on the company's goals. It also highlights the need to be realistic and to be prepared for setbacks.

Working From Home Can Be Fun and Productive When Done Right

The pandemic has caused a shift to working from home, which has added complexity to the work-life balance of employees. To mitigate the stress of deadlines, the team leader changed their management style to be more empathetic and flexible with deadlines, switched to a longer-term roadmap, and optimized the usage of tools. Additionally, the team held informal coffee chats to regain social interaction. The leader learned that trust and understanding team members triggers their strengths and helps to improve communication.

Why Leaders Should Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

When a manager took responsibility for a team, they made the mistake of focusing on team members' weaknesses during performance evaluations. This caused stress and decreased team productivity. To remedy this, the manager used positive language to focus on team members' strengths and assigned projects that aligned with their skill sets. The manager also worked to understand each team member's motivation and offered resources to help them grow. Through these actions, the team was able to increase performance and productivity.

How to Create a Tailored Growth Plan For Your Teams

When joining a company with an unclear career ladder, the manager took action to ensure that their engineers had clarity on what constituted progress in their career. This included analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, setting clear goals, and identifying areas where their interests and the manager's goals could overlap. The outcome was that engineers had clarity on their goals and felt engaged and involved with the organization. The manager learned that it is important to be clear about goals at the start of a performance cycle, ask questions to team members, and build a specialized plan for engineers to help with retention.

Managing Tight Deadlines While Building a New Team

An Engineering Manager was tasked with managing a brand new team with a tight deadline to deliver a complex distributed orchestration platform. The EM took the time to build trust and relationships with the team, explain the utility of the system, prioritize needs, and conduct a build vs. buy analysis. The team was given ownership of the system, and the EM made sure to recognize and reward the team for their efforts.

How to Creatively Juggle Technical Debt and Product Priorities

A team faced a challenge of working in a fast-paced delivery environment with a clunky codebase that needed refactoring. To address this, the Engineering Manager and Product Manager discussed the importance of tackling technical debt and agreed to allocate more time and effort to it. A system was created to prioritize tech debt and refactors were included in the scope of new product development. The team learned the importance of having a trust-based relationship with the Product Manager and the need to surface the most problematic areas early in order to get the most out of time spent.

Promoting With a Career Ladder

This article discusses the challenge of providing tangible feedback to product managers in order to help them progress in their career. The author outlines the process of creating a career ladder with explicit criteria for each step, and how to use this ladder to provide feedback and structure growth sessions. The article also emphasizes the importance of shifting the mindset away from promotion as an incentive, and instead focusing on trust and personal development plans.

Investing in Improvement Vs. Investing in a Potentially High-Yielding Bet

This article discusses the importance of understanding how much of a company's resources should be invested in improvements versus new products that may fail. It is important to consider the company's current position in the market, the level of risk acceptance, and the overall resource investment in the product. In a start-up, all resources are invested in bets, but as the company matures, more resources should be invested in improvements. However, it is important to not become too risk-averse and to still invest in new projects.

How Context Evolves as You Advance as a Manager

This article discusses the challenges of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager of other project managers. It outlines the key tasks of a manager, such as providing context for team members and pushing them to take risks. The article emphasizes the importance of communication and providing a shared context for decision-making. It also highlights the need to repeat and enrich the vision of the company to ensure everyone is in alignment.

When AI Features Are Market-Ready

AI and deep learning are new fields that present unique challenges when determining if a feature is ready to go to market. Validation and verification of models are difficult, and require dedicated staff to understand the nuances of the field. It also takes a lot of effort and infrastructure to transition features from research to production. Companies need to measure themselves against the speed of light in terms of performance, use image quality metrics, and identify reliable partners in order to ensure their features are market-ready.

Building a Practical Career Ladder for Engineers

This article discusses the importance of engineering teams having career ladders. It explains how the author's team identified the need for a ladder to ensure fair compensation and to help engineers improve themselves. They built a two-ladder system to reward technical contributions and to distinguish between technical leaders and people managers. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as the importance of transparency and public titles to foster a culture of empowerment.

Optimizing for Results Instead of Velocity

This article outlines the strategies used by a start-up to successfully launch a new product. These strategies included tracking time allocation, introducing OKRs, and using vertical iterations to measure viability. These strategies allowed the team to have candid conversations about their goals and measure their progress on a weekly basis. As a result, the team was able to launch the most successful product they had ever built.

Learning What It Means to Become a Servant Leader

This article discusses the concept of servant leadership and how it can be used to scale up as a tech lead and manager. It emphasizes the importance of being present for direct reports in tough times, coaching and inspiring them, and connecting them with mentors and leaders suited to the task. It also highlights the need to be transparent and to create a culture of humility in the organization.

The Parking Lot Method of Team Development

Managers need to constantly reinvent their teams in order to keep up with the changing industry. The Parking Lot Technique is a method to understand the team and make them a living, dynamic organism. It involves removing biases, visualizing the roles and responsibilities needed in the future, and placing people in positions where they have something to aspire to. Doing this frequently will bring clarity to the manager and help them make decisions free of bias. It also allows them to convert attrition into a moment of opportunity.

Avoiding the Trap of “The Perfect Candidate”

When hiring for a new position, managers should look for a candidate who has the potential to grow and learn, rather than one who already has all the skills and qualifications needed. This will provide an incentive for the candidate to join the team and for the manager to help coach and develop them. Asking questions during the interview to get a sense of the candidate's journey and their ability to think independently can help managers make the best hire.

When Many Employees Leave the Company Simultaneously

As a leader, it can be difficult to accept when people leave the company. To turn the situation around, it is important to understand why people are leaving and to focus on those who are still considering leaving. It is also important to accept that people will leave, and to embrace those who remain. Additionally, it is important to avoid giving people ultimatums and to understand that the journey is a rollercoaster.

Leaving Your Company as a Manager

Leaving a company as a leader can be difficult, and it can have negative implications for the company and the people you were leading. To mitigate these effects, it is important to prepare for the transition before leaving. This includes promoting an internal candidate to replace you, communicating your decision rationally, and offering guidance during the recruitment and onboarding process. It is also important to understand what motivates those who decide to leave after you, and to remind them that they are not part of the company just because you were managing them. Finally, it is important to delegate your biggest responsibilities to the most worthy team members before leaving.

Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

When a team member was underperforming, the IC decided to investigate further to understand the cause. After speaking to the team member and their coworkers, it was revealed that the team member was suffering from a cultural gap and a toxic environment. To help the team member, the IC moved them to another project and opened up a line of feedback. This allowed the team member to regain their confidence and their performance improved. The IC learned that it is important to understand the cause of underperformance and to provide both negative and positive feedback.

Collaborating With a Cross-Functional Expert

At my previous job, my team was having trouble cooperating with the security team due to multiple engineers reporting their findings and lack of context. To solve this, we suggested assigning one security expert to our team and investing time and energy into training them. This solution was applied company-wide and allowed both teams to acquire a better understanding of each other's domains and build relationships.

Finding Common Ground With Those of Different Backgrounds

A person from Eastern Europe was having difficulty communicating with their team due to cultural differences. After taking time to observe the person, the root cause of the problem was identified and a book on intercultural communication was used to bridge the gap. New expectations were set and the person eventually became one of the top performers. The lessons learned were to never make assumptions, be clear about expectations, and to provide positive feedback.

Musings of a Former Start-Up Founder

This article discusses the challenges of starting a company and the lessons learned from the experience. It emphasizes the importance of having a trusted team, maintaining a good support system, and staying focused on the company's goals. It also highlights the need to be realistic and to be prepared for setbacks.

Working From Home Can Be Fun and Productive When Done Right

The pandemic has caused a shift to working from home, which has added complexity to the work-life balance of employees. To mitigate the stress of deadlines, the team leader changed their management style to be more empathetic and flexible with deadlines, switched to a longer-term roadmap, and optimized the usage of tools. Additionally, the team held informal coffee chats to regain social interaction. The leader learned that trust and understanding team members triggers their strengths and helps to improve communication.

Why Leaders Should Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

When a manager took responsibility for a team, they made the mistake of focusing on team members' weaknesses during performance evaluations. This caused stress and decreased team productivity. To remedy this, the manager used positive language to focus on team members' strengths and assigned projects that aligned with their skill sets. The manager also worked to understand each team member's motivation and offered resources to help them grow. Through these actions, the team was able to increase performance and productivity.

How to Create a Tailored Growth Plan For Your Teams

When joining a company with an unclear career ladder, the manager took action to ensure that their engineers had clarity on what constituted progress in their career. This included analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, setting clear goals, and identifying areas where their interests and the manager's goals could overlap. The outcome was that engineers had clarity on their goals and felt engaged and involved with the organization. The manager learned that it is important to be clear about goals at the start of a performance cycle, ask questions to team members, and build a specialized plan for engineers to help with retention.

Managing Tight Deadlines While Building a New Team

An Engineering Manager was tasked with managing a brand new team with a tight deadline to deliver a complex distributed orchestration platform. The EM took the time to build trust and relationships with the team, explain the utility of the system, prioritize needs, and conduct a build vs. buy analysis. The team was given ownership of the system, and the EM made sure to recognize and reward the team for their efforts.

How to Creatively Juggle Technical Debt and Product Priorities

A team faced a challenge of working in a fast-paced delivery environment with a clunky codebase that needed refactoring. To address this, the Engineering Manager and Product Manager discussed the importance of tackling technical debt and agreed to allocate more time and effort to it. A system was created to prioritize tech debt and refactors were included in the scope of new product development. The team learned the importance of having a trust-based relationship with the Product Manager and the need to surface the most problematic areas early in order to get the most out of time spent.

Promoting With a Career Ladder

This article discusses the challenge of providing tangible feedback to product managers in order to help them progress in their career. The author outlines the process of creating a career ladder with explicit criteria for each step, and how to use this ladder to provide feedback and structure growth sessions. The article also emphasizes the importance of shifting the mindset away from promotion as an incentive, and instead focusing on trust and personal development plans.

Investing in Improvement Vs. Investing in a Potentially High-Yielding Bet

This article discusses the importance of understanding how much of a company's resources should be invested in improvements versus new products that may fail. It is important to consider the company's current position in the market, the level of risk acceptance, and the overall resource investment in the product. In a start-up, all resources are invested in bets, but as the company matures, more resources should be invested in improvements. However, it is important to not become too risk-averse and to still invest in new projects.

How Context Evolves as You Advance as a Manager

This article discusses the challenges of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager of other project managers. It outlines the key tasks of a manager, such as providing context for team members and pushing them to take risks. The article emphasizes the importance of communication and providing a shared context for decision-making. It also highlights the need to repeat and enrich the vision of the company to ensure everyone is in alignment.

When AI Features Are Market-Ready

AI and deep learning are new fields that present unique challenges when determining if a feature is ready to go to market. Validation and verification of models are difficult, and require dedicated staff to understand the nuances of the field. It also takes a lot of effort and infrastructure to transition features from research to production. Companies need to measure themselves against the speed of light in terms of performance, use image quality metrics, and identify reliable partners in order to ensure their features are market-ready.

Building a Practical Career Ladder for Engineers

This article discusses the importance of engineering teams having career ladders. It explains how the author's team identified the need for a ladder to ensure fair compensation and to help engineers improve themselves. They built a two-ladder system to reward technical contributions and to distinguish between technical leaders and people managers. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as the importance of transparency and public titles to foster a culture of empowerment.

Optimizing for Results Instead of Velocity

This article outlines the strategies used by a start-up to successfully launch a new product. These strategies included tracking time allocation, introducing OKRs, and using vertical iterations to measure viability. These strategies allowed the team to have candid conversations about their goals and measure their progress on a weekly basis. As a result, the team was able to launch the most successful product they had ever built.

Learning What It Means to Become a Servant Leader

This article discusses the concept of servant leadership and how it can be used to scale up as a tech lead and manager. It emphasizes the importance of being present for direct reports in tough times, coaching and inspiring them, and connecting them with mentors and leaders suited to the task. It also highlights the need to be transparent and to create a culture of humility in the organization.

The Parking Lot Method of Team Development

Managers need to constantly reinvent their teams in order to keep up with the changing industry. The Parking Lot Technique is a method to understand the team and make them a living, dynamic organism. It involves removing biases, visualizing the roles and responsibilities needed in the future, and placing people in positions where they have something to aspire to. Doing this frequently will bring clarity to the manager and help them make decisions free of bias. It also allows them to convert attrition into a moment of opportunity.

Avoiding the Trap of “The Perfect Candidate”

When hiring for a new position, managers should look for a candidate who has the potential to grow and learn, rather than one who already has all the skills and qualifications needed. This will provide an incentive for the candidate to join the team and for the manager to help coach and develop them. Asking questions during the interview to get a sense of the candidate's journey and their ability to think independently can help managers make the best hire.

When Many Employees Leave the Company Simultaneously

As a leader, it can be difficult to accept when people leave the company. To turn the situation around, it is important to understand why people are leaving and to focus on those who are still considering leaving. It is also important to accept that people will leave, and to embrace those who remain. Additionally, it is important to avoid giving people ultimatums and to understand that the journey is a rollercoaster.

Leaving Your Company as a Manager

Leaving a company as a leader can be difficult, and it can have negative implications for the company and the people you were leading. To mitigate these effects, it is important to prepare for the transition before leaving. This includes promoting an internal candidate to replace you, communicating your decision rationally, and offering guidance during the recruitment and onboarding process. It is also important to understand what motivates those who decide to leave after you, and to remind them that they are not part of the company just because you were managing them. Finally, it is important to delegate your biggest responsibilities to the most worthy team members before leaving.

Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

When a team member was underperforming, the IC decided to investigate further to understand the cause. After speaking to the team member and their coworkers, it was revealed that the team member was suffering from a cultural gap and a toxic environment. To help the team member, the IC moved them to another project and opened up a line of feedback. This allowed the team member to regain their confidence and their performance improved. The IC learned that it is important to understand the cause of underperformance and to provide both negative and positive feedback.

Collaborating With a Cross-Functional Expert

At my previous job, my team was having trouble cooperating with the security team due to multiple engineers reporting their findings and lack of context. To solve this, we suggested assigning one security expert to our team and investing time and energy into training them. This solution was applied company-wide and allowed both teams to acquire a better understanding of each other's domains and build relationships.

Finding Common Ground With Those of Different Backgrounds

A person from Eastern Europe was having difficulty communicating with their team due to cultural differences. After taking time to observe the person, the root cause of the problem was identified and a book on intercultural communication was used to bridge the gap. New expectations were set and the person eventually became one of the top performers. The lessons learned were to never make assumptions, be clear about expectations, and to provide positive feedback.

Musings of a Former Start-Up Founder

This article discusses the challenges of starting a company and the lessons learned from the experience. It emphasizes the importance of having a trusted team, maintaining a good support system, and staying focused on the company's goals. It also highlights the need to be realistic and to be prepared for setbacks.

Working From Home Can Be Fun and Productive When Done Right

The pandemic has caused a shift to working from home, which has added complexity to the work-life balance of employees. To mitigate the stress of deadlines, the team leader changed their management style to be more empathetic and flexible with deadlines, switched to a longer-term roadmap, and optimized the usage of tools. Additionally, the team held informal coffee chats to regain social interaction. The leader learned that trust and understanding team members triggers their strengths and helps to improve communication.

Why Leaders Should Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

When a manager took responsibility for a team, they made the mistake of focusing on team members' weaknesses during performance evaluations. This caused stress and decreased team productivity. To remedy this, the manager used positive language to focus on team members' strengths and assigned projects that aligned with their skill sets. The manager also worked to understand each team member's motivation and offered resources to help them grow. Through these actions, the team was able to increase performance and productivity.

How to Create a Tailored Growth Plan For Your Teams

When joining a company with an unclear career ladder, the manager took action to ensure that their engineers had clarity on what constituted progress in their career. This included analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, setting clear goals, and identifying areas where their interests and the manager's goals could overlap. The outcome was that engineers had clarity on their goals and felt engaged and involved with the organization. The manager learned that it is important to be clear about goals at the start of a performance cycle, ask questions to team members, and build a specialized plan for engineers to help with retention.

Managing Tight Deadlines While Building a New Team

An Engineering Manager was tasked with managing a brand new team with a tight deadline to deliver a complex distributed orchestration platform. The EM took the time to build trust and relationships with the team, explain the utility of the system, prioritize needs, and conduct a build vs. buy analysis. The team was given ownership of the system, and the EM made sure to recognize and reward the team for their efforts.

How to Creatively Juggle Technical Debt and Product Priorities

A team faced a challenge of working in a fast-paced delivery environment with a clunky codebase that needed refactoring. To address this, the Engineering Manager and Product Manager discussed the importance of tackling technical debt and agreed to allocate more time and effort to it. A system was created to prioritize tech debt and refactors were included in the scope of new product development. The team learned the importance of having a trust-based relationship with the Product Manager and the need to surface the most problematic areas early in order to get the most out of time spent.

Promoting With a Career Ladder

This article discusses the challenge of providing tangible feedback to product managers in order to help them progress in their career. The author outlines the process of creating a career ladder with explicit criteria for each step, and how to use this ladder to provide feedback and structure growth sessions. The article also emphasizes the importance of shifting the mindset away from promotion as an incentive, and instead focusing on trust and personal development plans.

Investing in Improvement Vs. Investing in a Potentially High-Yielding Bet

This article discusses the importance of understanding how much of a company's resources should be invested in improvements versus new products that may fail. It is important to consider the company's current position in the market, the level of risk acceptance, and the overall resource investment in the product. In a start-up, all resources are invested in bets, but as the company matures, more resources should be invested in improvements. However, it is important to not become too risk-averse and to still invest in new projects.

How Context Evolves as You Advance as a Manager

This article discusses the challenges of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager of other project managers. It outlines the key tasks of a manager, such as providing context for team members and pushing them to take risks. The article emphasizes the importance of communication and providing a shared context for decision-making. It also highlights the need to repeat and enrich the vision of the company to ensure everyone is in alignment.

When AI Features Are Market-Ready

AI and deep learning are new fields that present unique challenges when determining if a feature is ready to go to market. Validation and verification of models are difficult, and require dedicated staff to understand the nuances of the field. It also takes a lot of effort and infrastructure to transition features from research to production. Companies need to measure themselves against the speed of light in terms of performance, use image quality metrics, and identify reliable partners in order to ensure their features are market-ready.

Building a Practical Career Ladder for Engineers

This article discusses the importance of engineering teams having career ladders. It explains how the author's team identified the need for a ladder to ensure fair compensation and to help engineers improve themselves. They built a two-ladder system to reward technical contributions and to distinguish between technical leaders and people managers. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as the importance of transparency and public titles to foster a culture of empowerment.

Optimizing for Results Instead of Velocity

This article outlines the strategies used by a start-up to successfully launch a new product. These strategies included tracking time allocation, introducing OKRs, and using vertical iterations to measure viability. These strategies allowed the team to have candid conversations about their goals and measure their progress on a weekly basis. As a result, the team was able to launch the most successful product they had ever built.

Learning What It Means to Become a Servant Leader

This article discusses the concept of servant leadership and how it can be used to scale up as a tech lead and manager. It emphasizes the importance of being present for direct reports in tough times, coaching and inspiring them, and connecting them with mentors and leaders suited to the task. It also highlights the need to be transparent and to create a culture of humility in the organization.

The Parking Lot Method of Team Development

Managers need to constantly reinvent their teams in order to keep up with the changing industry. The Parking Lot Technique is a method to understand the team and make them a living, dynamic organism. It involves removing biases, visualizing the roles and responsibilities needed in the future, and placing people in positions where they have something to aspire to. Doing this frequently will bring clarity to the manager and help them make decisions free of bias. It also allows them to convert attrition into a moment of opportunity.

Avoiding the Trap of “The Perfect Candidate”

When hiring for a new position, managers should look for a candidate who has the potential to grow and learn, rather than one who already has all the skills and qualifications needed. This will provide an incentive for the candidate to join the team and for the manager to help coach and develop them. Asking questions during the interview to get a sense of the candidate's journey and their ability to think independently can help managers make the best hire.

When Many Employees Leave the Company Simultaneously

As a leader, it can be difficult to accept when people leave the company. To turn the situation around, it is important to understand why people are leaving and to focus on those who are still considering leaving. It is also important to accept that people will leave, and to embrace those who remain. Additionally, it is important to avoid giving people ultimatums and to understand that the journey is a rollercoaster.

Leaving Your Company as a Manager

Leaving a company as a leader can be difficult, and it can have negative implications for the company and the people you were leading. To mitigate these effects, it is important to prepare for the transition before leaving. This includes promoting an internal candidate to replace you, communicating your decision rationally, and offering guidance during the recruitment and onboarding process. It is also important to understand what motivates those who decide to leave after you, and to remind them that they are not part of the company just because you were managing them. Finally, it is important to delegate your biggest responsibilities to the most worthy team members before leaving.

Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

When a team member was underperforming, the IC decided to investigate further to understand the cause. After speaking to the team member and their coworkers, it was revealed that the team member was suffering from a cultural gap and a toxic environment. To help the team member, the IC moved them to another project and opened up a line of feedback. This allowed the team member to regain their confidence and their performance improved. The IC learned that it is important to understand the cause of underperformance and to provide both negative and positive feedback.

Collaborating With a Cross-Functional Expert

At my previous job, my team was having trouble cooperating with the security team due to multiple engineers reporting their findings and lack of context. To solve this, we suggested assigning one security expert to our team and investing time and energy into training them. This solution was applied company-wide and allowed both teams to acquire a better understanding of each other's domains and build relationships.

Finding Common Ground With Those of Different Backgrounds

A person from Eastern Europe was having difficulty communicating with their team due to cultural differences. After taking time to observe the person, the root cause of the problem was identified and a book on intercultural communication was used to bridge the gap. New expectations were set and the person eventually became one of the top performers. The lessons learned were to never make assumptions, be clear about expectations, and to provide positive feedback.

Musings of a Former Start-Up Founder

This article discusses the challenges of starting a company and the lessons learned from the experience. It emphasizes the importance of having a trusted team, maintaining a good support system, and staying focused on the company's goals. It also highlights the need to be realistic and to be prepared for setbacks.

Working From Home Can Be Fun and Productive When Done Right

The pandemic has caused a shift to working from home, which has added complexity to the work-life balance of employees. To mitigate the stress of deadlines, the team leader changed their management style to be more empathetic and flexible with deadlines, switched to a longer-term roadmap, and optimized the usage of tools. Additionally, the team held informal coffee chats to regain social interaction. The leader learned that trust and understanding team members triggers their strengths and helps to improve communication.

Why Leaders Should Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

When a manager took responsibility for a team, they made the mistake of focusing on team members' weaknesses during performance evaluations. This caused stress and decreased team productivity. To remedy this, the manager used positive language to focus on team members' strengths and assigned projects that aligned with their skill sets. The manager also worked to understand each team member's motivation and offered resources to help them grow. Through these actions, the team was able to increase performance and productivity.

How to Create a Tailored Growth Plan For Your Teams

When joining a company with an unclear career ladder, the manager took action to ensure that their engineers had clarity on what constituted progress in their career. This included analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, setting clear goals, and identifying areas where their interests and the manager's goals could overlap. The outcome was that engineers had clarity on their goals and felt engaged and involved with the organization. The manager learned that it is important to be clear about goals at the start of a performance cycle, ask questions to team members, and build a specialized plan for engineers to help with retention.

Managing Tight Deadlines While Building a New Team

An Engineering Manager was tasked with managing a brand new team with a tight deadline to deliver a complex distributed orchestration platform. The EM took the time to build trust and relationships with the team, explain the utility of the system, prioritize needs, and conduct a build vs. buy analysis. The team was given ownership of the system, and the EM made sure to recognize and reward the team for their efforts.

How to Creatively Juggle Technical Debt and Product Priorities

A team faced a challenge of working in a fast-paced delivery environment with a clunky codebase that needed refactoring. To address this, the Engineering Manager and Product Manager discussed the importance of tackling technical debt and agreed to allocate more time and effort to it. A system was created to prioritize tech debt and refactors were included in the scope of new product development. The team learned the importance of having a trust-based relationship with the Product Manager and the need to surface the most problematic areas early in order to get the most out of time spent.

Promoting With a Career Ladder

This article discusses the challenge of providing tangible feedback to product managers in order to help them progress in their career. The author outlines the process of creating a career ladder with explicit criteria for each step, and how to use this ladder to provide feedback and structure growth sessions. The article also emphasizes the importance of shifting the mindset away from promotion as an incentive, and instead focusing on trust and personal development plans.

Investing in Improvement Vs. Investing in a Potentially High-Yielding Bet

This article discusses the importance of understanding how much of a company's resources should be invested in improvements versus new products that may fail. It is important to consider the company's current position in the market, the level of risk acceptance, and the overall resource investment in the product. In a start-up, all resources are invested in bets, but as the company matures, more resources should be invested in improvements. However, it is important to not become too risk-averse and to still invest in new projects.

How Context Evolves as You Advance as a Manager

This article discusses the challenges of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager of other project managers. It outlines the key tasks of a manager, such as providing context for team members and pushing them to take risks. The article emphasizes the importance of communication and providing a shared context for decision-making. It also highlights the need to repeat and enrich the vision of the company to ensure everyone is in alignment.

When AI Features Are Market-Ready

AI and deep learning are new fields that present unique challenges when determining if a feature is ready to go to market. Validation and verification of models are difficult, and require dedicated staff to understand the nuances of the field. It also takes a lot of effort and infrastructure to transition features from research to production. Companies need to measure themselves against the speed of light in terms of performance, use image quality metrics, and identify reliable partners in order to ensure their features are market-ready.

Building a Practical Career Ladder for Engineers

This article discusses the importance of engineering teams having career ladders. It explains how the author's team identified the need for a ladder to ensure fair compensation and to help engineers improve themselves. They built a two-ladder system to reward technical contributions and to distinguish between technical leaders and people managers. The article also highlights the lessons learned, such as the importance of transparency and public titles to foster a culture of empowerment.

Optimizing for Results Instead of Velocity

This article outlines the strategies used by a start-up to successfully launch a new product. These strategies included tracking time allocation, introducing OKRs, and using vertical iterations to measure viability. These strategies allowed the team to have candid conversations about their goals and measure their progress on a weekly basis. As a result, the team was able to launch the most successful product they had ever built.

Learning What It Means to Become a Servant Leader

This article discusses the concept of servant leadership and how it can be used to scale up as a tech lead and manager. It emphasizes the importance of being present for direct reports in tough times, coaching and inspiring them, and connecting them with mentors and leaders suited to the task. It also highlights the need to be transparent and to create a culture of humility in the organization.

The Parking Lot Method of Team Development

Managers need to constantly reinvent their teams in order to keep up with the changing industry. The Parking Lot Technique is a method to understand the team and make them a living, dynamic organism. It involves removing biases, visualizing the roles and responsibilities needed in the future, and placing people in positions where they have something to aspire to. Doing this frequently will bring clarity to the manager and help them make decisions free of bias. It also allows them to convert attrition into a moment of opportunity.

Avoiding the Trap of “The Perfect Candidate”

When hiring for a new position, managers should look for a candidate who has the potential to grow and learn, rather than one who already has all the skills and qualifications needed. This will provide an incentive for the candidate to join the team and for the manager to help coach and develop them. Asking questions during the interview to get a sense of the candidate's journey and their ability to think independently can help managers make the best hire.

When Many Employees Leave the Company Simultaneously

As a leader, it can be difficult to accept when people leave the company. To turn the situation around, it is important to understand why people are leaving and to focus on those who are still considering leaving. It is also important to accept that people will leave, and to embrace those who remain. Additionally, it is important to avoid giving people ultimatums and to understand that the journey is a rollercoaster.

Leaving Your Company as a Manager

Leaving a company as a leader can be difficult, and it can have negative implications for the company and the people you were leading. To mitigate these effects, it is important to prepare for the transition before leaving. This includes promoting an internal candidate to replace you, communicating your decision rationally, and offering guidance during the recruitment and onboarding process. It is also important to understand what motivates those who decide to leave after you, and to remind them that they are not part of the company just because you were managing them. Finally, it is important to delegate your biggest responsibilities to the most worthy team members before leaving.

Being in the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

When a team member was underperforming, the IC decided to investigate further to understand the cause. After speaking to the team member and their coworkers, it was revealed that the team member was suffering from a cultural gap and a toxic environment. To help the team member, the IC moved them to another project and opened up a line of feedback. This allowed the team member to regain their confidence and their performance improved. The IC learned that it is important to understand the cause of underperformance and to provide both negative and positive feedback.

Collaborating With a Cross-Functional Expert

At my previous job, my team was having trouble cooperating with the security team due to multiple engineers reporting their findings and lack of context. To solve this, we suggested assigning one security expert to our team and investing time and energy into training them. This solution was applied company-wide and allowed both teams to acquire a better understanding of each other's domains and build relationships.

Finding Common Ground With Those of Different Backgrounds

A person from Eastern Europe was having difficulty communicating with their team due to cultural differences. After taking time to observe the person, the root cause of the problem was identified and a book on intercultural communication was used to bridge the gap. New expectations were set and the person eventually became one of the top performers. The lessons learned were to never make assumptions, be clear about expectations, and to provide positive feedback.

Musings of a Former Start-Up Founder

This article discusses the challenges of starting a company and the lessons learned from the experience. It emphasizes the importance of having a trusted team, maintaining a good support system, and staying focused on the company's goals. It also highlights the need to be realistic and to be prepared for setbacks.

Working From Home Can Be Fun and Productive When Done Right

The pandemic has caused a shift to working from home, which has added complexity to the work-life balance of employees. To mitigate the stress of deadlines, the team leader changed their management style to be more empathetic and flexible with deadlines, switched to a longer-term roadmap, and optimized the usage of tools. Additionally, the team held informal coffee chats to regain social interaction. The leader learned that trust and understanding team members triggers their strengths and helps to improve communication.

Why Leaders Should Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses

When a manager took responsibility for a team, they made the mistake of focusing on team members' weaknesses during performance evaluations. This caused stress and decreased team productivity. To remedy this, the manager used positive language to focus on team members' strengths and assigned projects that aligned with their skill sets. The manager also worked to understand each team member's motivation and offered resources to help them grow. Through these actions, the team was able to increase performance and productivity.

How to Create a Tailored Growth Plan For Your Teams

When joining a company with an unclear career ladder, the manager took action to ensure that their engineers had clarity on what constituted progress in their career. This included analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, setting clear goals, and identifying areas where their interests and the manager's goals could overlap. The outcome was that engineers had clarity on their goals and felt engaged and involved with the organization. The manager learned that it is important to be clear about goals at the start of a performance cycle, ask questions to team members, and build a specialized plan for engineers to help with retention.

Managing Tight Deadlines While Building a New Team

An Engineering Manager was tasked with managing a brand new team with a tight deadline to deliver a complex distributed orchestration platform. The EM took the time to build trust and relationships with the team, explain the utility of the system, prioritize needs, and conduct a build vs. buy analysis. The team was given ownership of the system, and the EM made sure to recognize and reward the team for their efforts.

How to Creatively Juggle Technical Debt and Product Priorities

A team faced a challenge of working in a fast-paced delivery environment with a clunky codebase that needed refactoring. To address this, the Engineering Manager and Product Manager discussed the importance of tackling technical debt and agreed to allocate more time and effort to it. A system was created to prioritize tech debt and refactors were included in the scope of new product development. The team learned the importance of having a trust-based relationship with the Product Manager and the need to surface the most problematic areas early in order to get the most out of time spent.

Promoting With a Career Ladder

This article discusses the challenge of providing tangible feedback to product managers in order to help them progress in their career. The author outlines the process of creating a career ladder with explicit criteria for each step, and how to use this ladder to provide feedback and structure growth sessions. The article also emphasizes the importance of shifting the mindset away from promotion as an incentive, and instead focusing on trust and personal development plans.

Investing in Improvement Vs. Investing in a Potentially High-Yielding Bet

This article discusses the importance of understanding how much of a company's resources should be invested in improvements versus new products that may fail. It is important to consider the company's current position in the market, the level of risk acceptance, and the overall resource investment in the product. In a start-up, all resources are invested in bets, but as the company matures, more resources should be invested in improvements. However, it is important to not become too risk-averse and to still invest in new projects.

How Context Evolves as You Advance as a Manager

This article discusses the challenges of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager of other project managers. It outlines the key tasks of a manager, such as providing context for team members and pushing them to take risks. The article emphasizes the importance of communication and providing a shared context for decision-making. It also highlights the need to repeat and enrich the vision of the company to ensure everyone is in alignment.