Knowledge shared by our community

How to Develop an Engineering Working Agreement

At a previous job, the team was experiencing frustration due to lack of clarity and documentation of processes. To address this, the manager created an engineering working agreement to level set expectations and ensure everyone was on the same page. The agreement was created through a participative process, with the manager providing an outline and allowing the team to add their input. This resulted in increased engagement and ownership of the process, and the team met quarterly to review and iterate on the document. The manager learned the importance of encouraging people to take ownership and providing guidelines and context to help them make sound judgments.

Making Recruiting Everyone’s Job

In order to quickly build a team of 20 engineers in a year, Lever established a Toronto office from scratch and taught everyone how to source and promote the company. Sourcing training was introduced to the organization, and sourcing parties were held to bring in new people. As a result, six senior engineers were hired in three months, and the team of 16 engineers was built in less than nine months. Lessons learned included getting people to think beyond referrals, having people think about DE&I, understanding that experienced people don't apply, and collaborating with recruiters.

Scaling Onboarding Iteratively

This article discusses the onboarding process for a small engineering team, and the actions taken to improve it. These included leveraging the existing buddy system, recording onboarding sessions, introducing new content, and updating templates. It was found that most people didn't miss the live sessions, and that mentorship and pair/group programming was essential. The article also suggests inviting current engineers to revisit content if it could benefit them. Iterative improvements were easy to do and led to further improvements.

How To Make One-on-Ones More Exciting

This article discusses the importance of structuring and standardizing one-on-ones to make them more beneficial to different people on a team with different personality types. It outlines three parts of the conversation: planning for personal growth, preparing for performance reviews, and tracking quarterly goals. It also provides lessons learned such as delivering regular feedback, developing a personalized career ladder, and calling out people on their goals.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How to Develop an Engineering Working Agreement

At a previous job, the team was experiencing frustration due to lack of clarity and documentation of processes. To address this, the manager created an engineering working agreement to level set expectations and ensure everyone was on the same page. The agreement was created through a participative process, with the manager providing an outline and allowing the team to add their input. This resulted in increased engagement and ownership of the process, and the team met quarterly to review and iterate on the document. The manager learned the importance of encouraging people to take ownership and providing guidelines and context to help them make sound judgments.

Making Recruiting Everyone’s Job

In order to quickly build a team of 20 engineers in a year, Lever established a Toronto office from scratch and taught everyone how to source and promote the company. Sourcing training was introduced to the organization, and sourcing parties were held to bring in new people. As a result, six senior engineers were hired in three months, and the team of 16 engineers was built in less than nine months. Lessons learned included getting people to think beyond referrals, having people think about DE&I, understanding that experienced people don't apply, and collaborating with recruiters.

Scaling Onboarding Iteratively

This article discusses the onboarding process for a small engineering team, and the actions taken to improve it. These included leveraging the existing buddy system, recording onboarding sessions, introducing new content, and updating templates. It was found that most people didn't miss the live sessions, and that mentorship and pair/group programming was essential. The article also suggests inviting current engineers to revisit content if it could benefit them. Iterative improvements were easy to do and led to further improvements.

How To Make One-on-Ones More Exciting

This article discusses the importance of structuring and standardizing one-on-ones to make them more beneficial to different people on a team with different personality types. It outlines three parts of the conversation: planning for personal growth, preparing for performance reviews, and tracking quarterly goals. It also provides lessons learned such as delivering regular feedback, developing a personalized career ladder, and calling out people on their goals.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How to Develop an Engineering Working Agreement

At a previous job, the team was experiencing frustration due to lack of clarity and documentation of processes. To address this, the manager created an engineering working agreement to level set expectations and ensure everyone was on the same page. The agreement was created through a participative process, with the manager providing an outline and allowing the team to add their input. This resulted in increased engagement and ownership of the process, and the team met quarterly to review and iterate on the document. The manager learned the importance of encouraging people to take ownership and providing guidelines and context to help them make sound judgments.

Making Recruiting Everyone’s Job

In order to quickly build a team of 20 engineers in a year, Lever established a Toronto office from scratch and taught everyone how to source and promote the company. Sourcing training was introduced to the organization, and sourcing parties were held to bring in new people. As a result, six senior engineers were hired in three months, and the team of 16 engineers was built in less than nine months. Lessons learned included getting people to think beyond referrals, having people think about DE&I, understanding that experienced people don't apply, and collaborating with recruiters.

Scaling Onboarding Iteratively

This article discusses the onboarding process for a small engineering team, and the actions taken to improve it. These included leveraging the existing buddy system, recording onboarding sessions, introducing new content, and updating templates. It was found that most people didn't miss the live sessions, and that mentorship and pair/group programming was essential. The article also suggests inviting current engineers to revisit content if it could benefit them. Iterative improvements were easy to do and led to further improvements.

How To Make One-on-Ones More Exciting

This article discusses the importance of structuring and standardizing one-on-ones to make them more beneficial to different people on a team with different personality types. It outlines three parts of the conversation: planning for personal growth, preparing for performance reviews, and tracking quarterly goals. It also provides lessons learned such as delivering regular feedback, developing a personalized career ladder, and calling out people on their goals.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How to Develop an Engineering Working Agreement

At a previous job, the team was experiencing frustration due to lack of clarity and documentation of processes. To address this, the manager created an engineering working agreement to level set expectations and ensure everyone was on the same page. The agreement was created through a participative process, with the manager providing an outline and allowing the team to add their input. This resulted in increased engagement and ownership of the process, and the team met quarterly to review and iterate on the document. The manager learned the importance of encouraging people to take ownership and providing guidelines and context to help them make sound judgments.

Making Recruiting Everyone’s Job

In order to quickly build a team of 20 engineers in a year, Lever established a Toronto office from scratch and taught everyone how to source and promote the company. Sourcing training was introduced to the organization, and sourcing parties were held to bring in new people. As a result, six senior engineers were hired in three months, and the team of 16 engineers was built in less than nine months. Lessons learned included getting people to think beyond referrals, having people think about DE&I, understanding that experienced people don't apply, and collaborating with recruiters.

Scaling Onboarding Iteratively

This article discusses the onboarding process for a small engineering team, and the actions taken to improve it. These included leveraging the existing buddy system, recording onboarding sessions, introducing new content, and updating templates. It was found that most people didn't miss the live sessions, and that mentorship and pair/group programming was essential. The article also suggests inviting current engineers to revisit content if it could benefit them. Iterative improvements were easy to do and led to further improvements.

How To Make One-on-Ones More Exciting

This article discusses the importance of structuring and standardizing one-on-ones to make them more beneficial to different people on a team with different personality types. It outlines three parts of the conversation: planning for personal growth, preparing for performance reviews, and tracking quarterly goals. It also provides lessons learned such as delivering regular feedback, developing a personalized career ladder, and calling out people on their goals.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How to Develop an Engineering Working Agreement

At a previous job, the team was experiencing frustration due to lack of clarity and documentation of processes. To address this, the manager created an engineering working agreement to level set expectations and ensure everyone was on the same page. The agreement was created through a participative process, with the manager providing an outline and allowing the team to add their input. This resulted in increased engagement and ownership of the process, and the team met quarterly to review and iterate on the document. The manager learned the importance of encouraging people to take ownership and providing guidelines and context to help them make sound judgments.

Making Recruiting Everyone’s Job

In order to quickly build a team of 20 engineers in a year, Lever established a Toronto office from scratch and taught everyone how to source and promote the company. Sourcing training was introduced to the organization, and sourcing parties were held to bring in new people. As a result, six senior engineers were hired in three months, and the team of 16 engineers was built in less than nine months. Lessons learned included getting people to think beyond referrals, having people think about DE&I, understanding that experienced people don't apply, and collaborating with recruiters.

Scaling Onboarding Iteratively

This article discusses the onboarding process for a small engineering team, and the actions taken to improve it. These included leveraging the existing buddy system, recording onboarding sessions, introducing new content, and updating templates. It was found that most people didn't miss the live sessions, and that mentorship and pair/group programming was essential. The article also suggests inviting current engineers to revisit content if it could benefit them. Iterative improvements were easy to do and led to further improvements.

How To Make One-on-Ones More Exciting

This article discusses the importance of structuring and standardizing one-on-ones to make them more beneficial to different people on a team with different personality types. It outlines three parts of the conversation: planning for personal growth, preparing for performance reviews, and tracking quarterly goals. It also provides lessons learned such as delivering regular feedback, developing a personalized career ladder, and calling out people on their goals.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How to Develop an Engineering Working Agreement

At a previous job, the team was experiencing frustration due to lack of clarity and documentation of processes. To address this, the manager created an engineering working agreement to level set expectations and ensure everyone was on the same page. The agreement was created through a participative process, with the manager providing an outline and allowing the team to add their input. This resulted in increased engagement and ownership of the process, and the team met quarterly to review and iterate on the document. The manager learned the importance of encouraging people to take ownership and providing guidelines and context to help them make sound judgments.

Making Recruiting Everyone’s Job

In order to quickly build a team of 20 engineers in a year, Lever established a Toronto office from scratch and taught everyone how to source and promote the company. Sourcing training was introduced to the organization, and sourcing parties were held to bring in new people. As a result, six senior engineers were hired in three months, and the team of 16 engineers was built in less than nine months. Lessons learned included getting people to think beyond referrals, having people think about DE&I, understanding that experienced people don't apply, and collaborating with recruiters.

Scaling Onboarding Iteratively

This article discusses the onboarding process for a small engineering team, and the actions taken to improve it. These included leveraging the existing buddy system, recording onboarding sessions, introducing new content, and updating templates. It was found that most people didn't miss the live sessions, and that mentorship and pair/group programming was essential. The article also suggests inviting current engineers to revisit content if it could benefit them. Iterative improvements were easy to do and led to further improvements.

How To Make One-on-Ones More Exciting

This article discusses the importance of structuring and standardizing one-on-ones to make them more beneficial to different people on a team with different personality types. It outlines three parts of the conversation: planning for personal growth, preparing for performance reviews, and tracking quarterly goals. It also provides lessons learned such as delivering regular feedback, developing a personalized career ladder, and calling out people on their goals.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.