Knowledge shared by our community

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 a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Encouraging Your Team to Make Decisions Autonomously

This article describes the process of introducing a simplified documentation process to a growing team in order to increase autonomy and reduce bottlenecks in decision-making. The process included introducing a brief document template that included a problem description, background information, alternatives and recommendations. Through this process, the team was able to become more autonomous and confident in their decision-making, as well as improve their documentation and critical thinking. The article also highlights the importance of allowing people to adjust to the new process at their own pace and providing support throughout the process.

How to Bring New People to Your Team

After being promoted to a tech lead role, the author had to build a team from scratch and hire in a thoughtful and sustainable way. To do this, the author thought about the team's needs and had conversations with potential candidates to assess their skills, mindset, and untapped potential. The author also learned to sell the team and present themselves as the face of the team, and to tailor the story to match the interests and aspirations of each individual.

Two Months Into a New Role

This article discusses the strategies used by someone who is two months into a new role and company to reduce anxiety caused by their arrival. The individual took actions such as explaining their onboarding process, being meticulous in their plans, painting a broader picture, and interacting with people to build motivation and excitement. The individual also learned lessons such as being explicit about things that are implicit, being transparent, and leveraging the hope people have in newcomers.

Developing a Strategy: Abstracting Up Vs. Adding

When managing a larger organization with multiple projects, it can be difficult to keep track of the impact of each project and how they are connected to the larger picture. To address this, it is important to define three to five key objectives and ensure that all projects are related to these objectives. This will help to measure performance based on outcomes, track the organization's progress, and motivate the team.

Why Defining Engineering Principles Is Critical

A manager of a large organization wanted to enable their team to operate independently while still consistently moving in the same direction. To do so, they gathered feedback from one-on-ones and brainstorming sessions, and formed a working group to develop guiding principles. The principles were socialized across the organization and codified to make them functional in different situations. The lessons learned were that without principles in place, chaos is imminent, inconsistency is tightly connected with growth, and it is important to involve the team in the process of defining values and principles.

Taking a Product From a Concept to Launch

The speaker heard from customers that they needed a way to easily manage their products, so they did a market analysis and gathered data from stakeholders, competitors, and customers. They developed a product requirements document, did a build-versus-buy analysis, and presented the recommendations to the executive team. They ended up OEMing a third-party vendor software and building integrations around it. Lessons learned included doing a 360-degree analysis, making decisions quickly, and testing thoroughly with end-to-end customer scenarios.

Using Data to Increase One’s Sphere of Influence

This article describes the process of analyzing Severity 1 and Severity 2 support cases to identify underlying causes and develop a plan to prevent them from happening again. The author used data to provide insights, collaborated with stakeholders to formulate the plan, and created a tracker to follow up on the discussions and action plan. The article also highlights the importance of using data to provide credibility and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure the plan is feasible.

When Promotion Comes Too Quickly

A company rapidly growing needed more managers and the Head of Engineering approached the narrator, surprising them with the promotion. Managing people more senior to them caused some to be upset and argue the narrator was underqualified. With the help of their manager, the narrator learned to ignore the complaints and focus on building credibility with their team. They identified easy wins and were responsive to requests, eventually gaining their trust. The narrator learned to ignore distractions and view mistakes as a learning opportunity.

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 a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Encouraging Your Team to Make Decisions Autonomously

This article describes the process of introducing a simplified documentation process to a growing team in order to increase autonomy and reduce bottlenecks in decision-making. The process included introducing a brief document template that included a problem description, background information, alternatives and recommendations. Through this process, the team was able to become more autonomous and confident in their decision-making, as well as improve their documentation and critical thinking. The article also highlights the importance of allowing people to adjust to the new process at their own pace and providing support throughout the process.

How to Bring New People to Your Team

After being promoted to a tech lead role, the author had to build a team from scratch and hire in a thoughtful and sustainable way. To do this, the author thought about the team's needs and had conversations with potential candidates to assess their skills, mindset, and untapped potential. The author also learned to sell the team and present themselves as the face of the team, and to tailor the story to match the interests and aspirations of each individual.

Two Months Into a New Role

This article discusses the strategies used by someone who is two months into a new role and company to reduce anxiety caused by their arrival. The individual took actions such as explaining their onboarding process, being meticulous in their plans, painting a broader picture, and interacting with people to build motivation and excitement. The individual also learned lessons such as being explicit about things that are implicit, being transparent, and leveraging the hope people have in newcomers.

Developing a Strategy: Abstracting Up Vs. Adding

When managing a larger organization with multiple projects, it can be difficult to keep track of the impact of each project and how they are connected to the larger picture. To address this, it is important to define three to five key objectives and ensure that all projects are related to these objectives. This will help to measure performance based on outcomes, track the organization's progress, and motivate the team.

Why Defining Engineering Principles Is Critical

A manager of a large organization wanted to enable their team to operate independently while still consistently moving in the same direction. To do so, they gathered feedback from one-on-ones and brainstorming sessions, and formed a working group to develop guiding principles. The principles were socialized across the organization and codified to make them functional in different situations. The lessons learned were that without principles in place, chaos is imminent, inconsistency is tightly connected with growth, and it is important to involve the team in the process of defining values and principles.

Taking a Product From a Concept to Launch

The speaker heard from customers that they needed a way to easily manage their products, so they did a market analysis and gathered data from stakeholders, competitors, and customers. They developed a product requirements document, did a build-versus-buy analysis, and presented the recommendations to the executive team. They ended up OEMing a third-party vendor software and building integrations around it. Lessons learned included doing a 360-degree analysis, making decisions quickly, and testing thoroughly with end-to-end customer scenarios.

Using Data to Increase One’s Sphere of Influence

This article describes the process of analyzing Severity 1 and Severity 2 support cases to identify underlying causes and develop a plan to prevent them from happening again. The author used data to provide insights, collaborated with stakeholders to formulate the plan, and created a tracker to follow up on the discussions and action plan. The article also highlights the importance of using data to provide credibility and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure the plan is feasible.

When Promotion Comes Too Quickly

A company rapidly growing needed more managers and the Head of Engineering approached the narrator, surprising them with the promotion. Managing people more senior to them caused some to be upset and argue the narrator was underqualified. With the help of their manager, the narrator learned to ignore the complaints and focus on building credibility with their team. They identified easy wins and were responsive to requests, eventually gaining their trust. The narrator learned to ignore distractions and view mistakes as a learning opportunity.

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 a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Encouraging Your Team to Make Decisions Autonomously

This article describes the process of introducing a simplified documentation process to a growing team in order to increase autonomy and reduce bottlenecks in decision-making. The process included introducing a brief document template that included a problem description, background information, alternatives and recommendations. Through this process, the team was able to become more autonomous and confident in their decision-making, as well as improve their documentation and critical thinking. The article also highlights the importance of allowing people to adjust to the new process at their own pace and providing support throughout the process.

How to Bring New People to Your Team

After being promoted to a tech lead role, the author had to build a team from scratch and hire in a thoughtful and sustainable way. To do this, the author thought about the team's needs and had conversations with potential candidates to assess their skills, mindset, and untapped potential. The author also learned to sell the team and present themselves as the face of the team, and to tailor the story to match the interests and aspirations of each individual.

Two Months Into a New Role

This article discusses the strategies used by someone who is two months into a new role and company to reduce anxiety caused by their arrival. The individual took actions such as explaining their onboarding process, being meticulous in their plans, painting a broader picture, and interacting with people to build motivation and excitement. The individual also learned lessons such as being explicit about things that are implicit, being transparent, and leveraging the hope people have in newcomers.

Developing a Strategy: Abstracting Up Vs. Adding

When managing a larger organization with multiple projects, it can be difficult to keep track of the impact of each project and how they are connected to the larger picture. To address this, it is important to define three to five key objectives and ensure that all projects are related to these objectives. This will help to measure performance based on outcomes, track the organization's progress, and motivate the team.

Why Defining Engineering Principles Is Critical

A manager of a large organization wanted to enable their team to operate independently while still consistently moving in the same direction. To do so, they gathered feedback from one-on-ones and brainstorming sessions, and formed a working group to develop guiding principles. The principles were socialized across the organization and codified to make them functional in different situations. The lessons learned were that without principles in place, chaos is imminent, inconsistency is tightly connected with growth, and it is important to involve the team in the process of defining values and principles.

Taking a Product From a Concept to Launch

The speaker heard from customers that they needed a way to easily manage their products, so they did a market analysis and gathered data from stakeholders, competitors, and customers. They developed a product requirements document, did a build-versus-buy analysis, and presented the recommendations to the executive team. They ended up OEMing a third-party vendor software and building integrations around it. Lessons learned included doing a 360-degree analysis, making decisions quickly, and testing thoroughly with end-to-end customer scenarios.

Using Data to Increase One’s Sphere of Influence

This article describes the process of analyzing Severity 1 and Severity 2 support cases to identify underlying causes and develop a plan to prevent them from happening again. The author used data to provide insights, collaborated with stakeholders to formulate the plan, and created a tracker to follow up on the discussions and action plan. The article also highlights the importance of using data to provide credibility and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure the plan is feasible.

When Promotion Comes Too Quickly

A company rapidly growing needed more managers and the Head of Engineering approached the narrator, surprising them with the promotion. Managing people more senior to them caused some to be upset and argue the narrator was underqualified. With the help of their manager, the narrator learned to ignore the complaints and focus on building credibility with their team. They identified easy wins and were responsive to requests, eventually gaining their trust. The narrator learned to ignore distractions and view mistakes as a learning opportunity.

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 a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Encouraging Your Team to Make Decisions Autonomously

This article describes the process of introducing a simplified documentation process to a growing team in order to increase autonomy and reduce bottlenecks in decision-making. The process included introducing a brief document template that included a problem description, background information, alternatives and recommendations. Through this process, the team was able to become more autonomous and confident in their decision-making, as well as improve their documentation and critical thinking. The article also highlights the importance of allowing people to adjust to the new process at their own pace and providing support throughout the process.

How to Bring New People to Your Team

After being promoted to a tech lead role, the author had to build a team from scratch and hire in a thoughtful and sustainable way. To do this, the author thought about the team's needs and had conversations with potential candidates to assess their skills, mindset, and untapped potential. The author also learned to sell the team and present themselves as the face of the team, and to tailor the story to match the interests and aspirations of each individual.

Two Months Into a New Role

This article discusses the strategies used by someone who is two months into a new role and company to reduce anxiety caused by their arrival. The individual took actions such as explaining their onboarding process, being meticulous in their plans, painting a broader picture, and interacting with people to build motivation and excitement. The individual also learned lessons such as being explicit about things that are implicit, being transparent, and leveraging the hope people have in newcomers.

Developing a Strategy: Abstracting Up Vs. Adding

When managing a larger organization with multiple projects, it can be difficult to keep track of the impact of each project and how they are connected to the larger picture. To address this, it is important to define three to five key objectives and ensure that all projects are related to these objectives. This will help to measure performance based on outcomes, track the organization's progress, and motivate the team.

Why Defining Engineering Principles Is Critical

A manager of a large organization wanted to enable their team to operate independently while still consistently moving in the same direction. To do so, they gathered feedback from one-on-ones and brainstorming sessions, and formed a working group to develop guiding principles. The principles were socialized across the organization and codified to make them functional in different situations. The lessons learned were that without principles in place, chaos is imminent, inconsistency is tightly connected with growth, and it is important to involve the team in the process of defining values and principles.

Taking a Product From a Concept to Launch

The speaker heard from customers that they needed a way to easily manage their products, so they did a market analysis and gathered data from stakeholders, competitors, and customers. They developed a product requirements document, did a build-versus-buy analysis, and presented the recommendations to the executive team. They ended up OEMing a third-party vendor software and building integrations around it. Lessons learned included doing a 360-degree analysis, making decisions quickly, and testing thoroughly with end-to-end customer scenarios.

Using Data to Increase One’s Sphere of Influence

This article describes the process of analyzing Severity 1 and Severity 2 support cases to identify underlying causes and develop a plan to prevent them from happening again. The author used data to provide insights, collaborated with stakeholders to formulate the plan, and created a tracker to follow up on the discussions and action plan. The article also highlights the importance of using data to provide credibility and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure the plan is feasible.

When Promotion Comes Too Quickly

A company rapidly growing needed more managers and the Head of Engineering approached the narrator, surprising them with the promotion. Managing people more senior to them caused some to be upset and argue the narrator was underqualified. With the help of their manager, the narrator learned to ignore the complaints and focus on building credibility with their team. They identified easy wins and were responsive to requests, eventually gaining their trust. The narrator learned to ignore distractions and view mistakes as a learning opportunity.

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 a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Encouraging Your Team to Make Decisions Autonomously

This article describes the process of introducing a simplified documentation process to a growing team in order to increase autonomy and reduce bottlenecks in decision-making. The process included introducing a brief document template that included a problem description, background information, alternatives and recommendations. Through this process, the team was able to become more autonomous and confident in their decision-making, as well as improve their documentation and critical thinking. The article also highlights the importance of allowing people to adjust to the new process at their own pace and providing support throughout the process.

How to Bring New People to Your Team

After being promoted to a tech lead role, the author had to build a team from scratch and hire in a thoughtful and sustainable way. To do this, the author thought about the team's needs and had conversations with potential candidates to assess their skills, mindset, and untapped potential. The author also learned to sell the team and present themselves as the face of the team, and to tailor the story to match the interests and aspirations of each individual.

Two Months Into a New Role

This article discusses the strategies used by someone who is two months into a new role and company to reduce anxiety caused by their arrival. The individual took actions such as explaining their onboarding process, being meticulous in their plans, painting a broader picture, and interacting with people to build motivation and excitement. The individual also learned lessons such as being explicit about things that are implicit, being transparent, and leveraging the hope people have in newcomers.

Developing a Strategy: Abstracting Up Vs. Adding

When managing a larger organization with multiple projects, it can be difficult to keep track of the impact of each project and how they are connected to the larger picture. To address this, it is important to define three to five key objectives and ensure that all projects are related to these objectives. This will help to measure performance based on outcomes, track the organization's progress, and motivate the team.

Why Defining Engineering Principles Is Critical

A manager of a large organization wanted to enable their team to operate independently while still consistently moving in the same direction. To do so, they gathered feedback from one-on-ones and brainstorming sessions, and formed a working group to develop guiding principles. The principles were socialized across the organization and codified to make them functional in different situations. The lessons learned were that without principles in place, chaos is imminent, inconsistency is tightly connected with growth, and it is important to involve the team in the process of defining values and principles.

Taking a Product From a Concept to Launch

The speaker heard from customers that they needed a way to easily manage their products, so they did a market analysis and gathered data from stakeholders, competitors, and customers. They developed a product requirements document, did a build-versus-buy analysis, and presented the recommendations to the executive team. They ended up OEMing a third-party vendor software and building integrations around it. Lessons learned included doing a 360-degree analysis, making decisions quickly, and testing thoroughly with end-to-end customer scenarios.

Using Data to Increase One’s Sphere of Influence

This article describes the process of analyzing Severity 1 and Severity 2 support cases to identify underlying causes and develop a plan to prevent them from happening again. The author used data to provide insights, collaborated with stakeholders to formulate the plan, and created a tracker to follow up on the discussions and action plan. The article also highlights the importance of using data to provide credibility and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure the plan is feasible.

When Promotion Comes Too Quickly

A company rapidly growing needed more managers and the Head of Engineering approached the narrator, surprising them with the promotion. Managing people more senior to them caused some to be upset and argue the narrator was underqualified. With the help of their manager, the narrator learned to ignore the complaints and focus on building credibility with their team. They identified easy wins and were responsive to requests, eventually gaining their trust. The narrator learned to ignore distractions and view mistakes as a learning opportunity.

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 a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Encouraging Your Team to Make Decisions Autonomously

This article describes the process of introducing a simplified documentation process to a growing team in order to increase autonomy and reduce bottlenecks in decision-making. The process included introducing a brief document template that included a problem description, background information, alternatives and recommendations. Through this process, the team was able to become more autonomous and confident in their decision-making, as well as improve their documentation and critical thinking. The article also highlights the importance of allowing people to adjust to the new process at their own pace and providing support throughout the process.

How to Bring New People to Your Team

After being promoted to a tech lead role, the author had to build a team from scratch and hire in a thoughtful and sustainable way. To do this, the author thought about the team's needs and had conversations with potential candidates to assess their skills, mindset, and untapped potential. The author also learned to sell the team and present themselves as the face of the team, and to tailor the story to match the interests and aspirations of each individual.

Two Months Into a New Role

This article discusses the strategies used by someone who is two months into a new role and company to reduce anxiety caused by their arrival. The individual took actions such as explaining their onboarding process, being meticulous in their plans, painting a broader picture, and interacting with people to build motivation and excitement. The individual also learned lessons such as being explicit about things that are implicit, being transparent, and leveraging the hope people have in newcomers.

Developing a Strategy: Abstracting Up Vs. Adding

When managing a larger organization with multiple projects, it can be difficult to keep track of the impact of each project and how they are connected to the larger picture. To address this, it is important to define three to five key objectives and ensure that all projects are related to these objectives. This will help to measure performance based on outcomes, track the organization's progress, and motivate the team.

Why Defining Engineering Principles Is Critical

A manager of a large organization wanted to enable their team to operate independently while still consistently moving in the same direction. To do so, they gathered feedback from one-on-ones and brainstorming sessions, and formed a working group to develop guiding principles. The principles were socialized across the organization and codified to make them functional in different situations. The lessons learned were that without principles in place, chaos is imminent, inconsistency is tightly connected with growth, and it is important to involve the team in the process of defining values and principles.

Taking a Product From a Concept to Launch

The speaker heard from customers that they needed a way to easily manage their products, so they did a market analysis and gathered data from stakeholders, competitors, and customers. They developed a product requirements document, did a build-versus-buy analysis, and presented the recommendations to the executive team. They ended up OEMing a third-party vendor software and building integrations around it. Lessons learned included doing a 360-degree analysis, making decisions quickly, and testing thoroughly with end-to-end customer scenarios.

Using Data to Increase One’s Sphere of Influence

This article describes the process of analyzing Severity 1 and Severity 2 support cases to identify underlying causes and develop a plan to prevent them from happening again. The author used data to provide insights, collaborated with stakeholders to formulate the plan, and created a tracker to follow up on the discussions and action plan. The article also highlights the importance of using data to provide credibility and collaborating with stakeholders to ensure the plan is feasible.

When Promotion Comes Too Quickly

A company rapidly growing needed more managers and the Head of Engineering approached the narrator, surprising them with the promotion. Managing people more senior to them caused some to be upset and argue the narrator was underqualified. With the help of their manager, the narrator learned to ignore the complaints and focus on building credibility with their team. They identified easy wins and were responsive to requests, eventually gaining their trust. The narrator learned to ignore distractions and view mistakes as a learning opportunity.