Knowledge shared by our community

Picking the Right Tool for a Remote Engineering Team

In order to improve productivity, a remote engineering team had to fix their project management tools. After gathering feedback and trying a new software product for a month, the team was split between keeping the new tool or going back to their old suite. After reviewing all the feedback, they realized they could use a subset of their old tools to implement the new process they preferred, resulting in improved productivity. The trial was a success, as it allowed them to learn and improve.

Turning Product Usage Data Into User Features

The Sr Director of Product Analytics at Autodesk faced the challenge of helping product managers understand product usage data at scale. To tackle this, a product growth-led team was assembled to create an insight platform and business processes to ingest product usage data, run signal detection algorithms and ML models to identify out-of-norm usage patterns and deliver personalized insights to end-users. After one year, the system is now in production and processes billions of user transactions weekly. Lessons learned include the importance of putting the end-user first, the power and sensitivity of product usage data, and the need for quality instrumentation and a solid technology infrastructure.

How Data Made Me More Confident to Drive Big Decisions

Dell and EMC had to delay the launch of their next-generation product by six months in order to allow for integration and a more effective marketing strategy. The Product Manager conducted an in-depth financial impact analysis and engaged in conversations with stakeholders to secure their buy-in. The executive team was convinced and the product was launched two months ahead of schedule, resulting in multiple improvements and increased revenue. The Product Manager learned the importance of a data-driven approach, getting all stakeholders on the same page, and balancing between being risk-averse and being a maverick.

Helping Engineers Become Well-Rounded Product Managers

To help new Product Managers with an engineering background understand the business, sales, and marketing side of things, a manager created a safe environment for them to get out of their comfort zone and fail without fear of consequences. They were taught to read and interpret key data, make the right decisions, and build convincing business cases. This experience taught the manager that a growth mindset is essential for being a successful Product Manager, and that understanding the significance of the business point of view is crucial.

Keeping Your Team Motivated and Connected in the Midst of Pandemic

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, a manager faced the challenge of motivating their now-remote team. To keep the team motivated and connected, the manager launched virtual social hours, compiled a newsletter to showcase team achievements, and emphasized the Get Things Done (GTD) principles. The manager also encouraged team members to talk about how they were coping with the pandemic and set up training sessions to help the team learn about features and capabilities. Finally, the manager set aside time for self-development and learning, and empowered the team to prioritize tasks and maintain work-life balance.

Struggling to Deliver Negative Feedback

A manager was faced with the difficult task of delivering negative feedback to a junior manager who had failed to implement a critical part of a project. Despite feeling anxious, the manager chose to have a private conversation and was surprised to find that the junior manager accepted the criticism gracefully and even thanked the manager for it afterwards. The manager learned that negative feedback can strengthen relationships if it is presented in a constructive way.

Increasing Visibility When Doing Well

This article discusses the struggles of a manager to increase visibility on the work they were doing for the team. Initially, standups and one-on-ones did not work, but the manager found success with a weekly newsletter called the Engineering Manager Report. This newsletter provided up-to-date information on subjects the team was unaware of due to the nature of their day-to-day work. It also provided the manager with an opportunity to reflect and evaluate all the things they did throughout a week. The article also provides lessons learned from this experience, such as taking an indirect route and finding the right format to instigate curiosity.

Learning to Delegate

The author experienced a loss of velocity and technical, product, and marketing challenges while working on an MVP version of a product. After being scolded by their manager, the author learned to trust their team, give them autonomy, and help them level up their skills. They realized that delegating work was necessary for the product to be successful. The author learned that working together is more effective than working alone, and that they gained the opportunity to build an MVP and make their idea successful beyond imagination.

My Hackathon Story

This is a story about a hackathon project that was successful in creating a product with business value and scalability. The author reached out to a PM and rounded up a few developers to create an animated video for retargeting ads. After eight months of hard work, the team was able to create an MVP and eventually a full scalable version that was deployed to customers. The author learned that incremental changes can make a big impact and that passion and dedication are key to success.

Focusing on Customer Problems

A person joined a company that was in the midst of implementing a complex project and assumed that everyone knew what they were doing. However, when they started to look at the project from a customer’s perspective, they realized that no one had asked why they were doing it in the first place. Through conversations with other VPs and C-level executives, they were able to pivot the strategy and get the features customers wanted without having to go through a difficult migration process. The lessons learned from this experience include: asking why in a big meeting can be difficult, having one-on-ones can help secure support, reassess projects regularly, and if actions will cause pain to customers, find another approach.

Joint Skip-Level Meetings

This article outlines the approach taken by an executive to engage and motivate a team of high-performing entry-level people. The executive created joint skip-level meetings, which he named “Team Collaboration Meetings”, to provide an opportunity for the team to ask questions, learn, and grow. The meetings included discussions on what the team had learned, what new skills they wanted to acquire, and their challenges and pain points. The executive also incorporated a reading club session to dissect books he thought every product person should read. The meetings were successful and helped the team members to develop quickly and propel their careers. The article also outlines the lessons learned from this approach, such as the importance of creating a good working relationship with one level down, and the need to create a space for entry-level PMs to raise their concerns without their bosses present.

Interviewing for an Entry-Level Product Role: Why Presentations Matter

In order to include entry-level PMs in the interviewing process, the manager decided to ask all candidates to deliver a presentation and have the entire product team sit on it for QA. This allowed the juniors to ask questions and provide feedback, while also assessing the candidates' product skills, self-starter attitude, and ability to follow instructions. The manager also found that the presentations helped the entry-level PMs develop a critical approach to their own presentations and understand the importance of building strong working relationships.

Increasing Test Coverage

The author was tasked with increasing the test coverage of a product suffering from quality deficiencies. He conducted a study to quantify the data, plotted it on a graph, and identified the coverage needed to reduce the defect rate. He then refined the list of components and invested in the most critical ones, resulting in improved quality. The author learned that engineers should rely more on data to optimize their execution and be data-driven.

Introducing OKRs: A Lesson in Compromise

A team of first-time managers lacked focus and technical quality, so the leader decided to introduce the OKR framework. Through collaboration and guidance, the team was able to come up with their own goal-setting system that was similar to OKRs, but less solid. With this imperfect system, the team was able to improve their stability and quality metrics significantly. The leader learned that strong relationships, collaboration, and teamwork are essential for successful project implementation, and that people need more than encouragement when doing something for the first time.

Modifying the Shape Up Process

Curology implemented Basecamp's Shape Up product development process in November 2019, but ran into problems due to their complex product and workflows. To build in more flexibility, they created a Strike Team of engineers led by an Engineering Manager and funneled all incoming requests through them. This allowed them to triage and prioritize issues, as well as onboard new engineers. The lessons learned were to be ready to make changes to processes, not tie up all resources in large chunks of time, and have one point of entry for all stakeholders.

Promotion Alignment Amongst Managers

Curology had a problem with inconsistency when it came to career progression due to different managers interpreting the level items differently. To solve this, they implemented a lightweight process called "Level Change Alignment" to encourage conversation amongst the managers around their standards for levels to be more consistent. The process involves writing up a document to support the level change and sending it out to the other managers for review. The lessons learned from this process are that if you want consistent results, you need to involve a member of each team, the decision for career progression should remain up to the direct manager, it's better to start with a lightweight process, and removing single point of failures is important.

Building and Formalizing a Career Ladder in a Startup

Small startups often lack career ladders, but formalizing them is not recommended for teams with less than 30 employees. To help engineers grow their skills, managers should identify the skill sets they lack and line up appropriate training and incentives. For those on the management track, they should be given function, task, client, and project management responsibilities to master before taking on human management. Soft skills and training courses should also be lined up to help organize and structure employee progress. Ultimately, it is important to remember that every person is an individual and requires an individual approach.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

How to Formalize a Career Ladder

When creating a career ladder for a company, it is important to look at the company values and open-source career ladders for inspiration. It is important to tailor the ladder to fit the company's needs and not try to rewrite the ladder for current employees. It is also important to be transparent about where the ladder was taken from and why it was chosen.

How to Build a Platform Team

When building a platform team, it is important to consider the scope of the project, the technical and business challenges, and the need to populate the team with experienced engineers as well as juniors. It is also important to set realistic expectations and to not try to boil the ocean. Following the principles of Domain-Driven Design, it is important to identify recurring patterns and define common domains to be used across brands or platforms. Finally, it is important to roll out the platform to feature teams, either by imploring them to use the software or by embedding platform engineers into feature teams.

Picking the Right Tool for a Remote Engineering Team

In order to improve productivity, a remote engineering team had to fix their project management tools. After gathering feedback and trying a new software product for a month, the team was split between keeping the new tool or going back to their old suite. After reviewing all the feedback, they realized they could use a subset of their old tools to implement the new process they preferred, resulting in improved productivity. The trial was a success, as it allowed them to learn and improve.

Turning Product Usage Data Into User Features

The Sr Director of Product Analytics at Autodesk faced the challenge of helping product managers understand product usage data at scale. To tackle this, a product growth-led team was assembled to create an insight platform and business processes to ingest product usage data, run signal detection algorithms and ML models to identify out-of-norm usage patterns and deliver personalized insights to end-users. After one year, the system is now in production and processes billions of user transactions weekly. Lessons learned include the importance of putting the end-user first, the power and sensitivity of product usage data, and the need for quality instrumentation and a solid technology infrastructure.

How Data Made Me More Confident to Drive Big Decisions

Dell and EMC had to delay the launch of their next-generation product by six months in order to allow for integration and a more effective marketing strategy. The Product Manager conducted an in-depth financial impact analysis and engaged in conversations with stakeholders to secure their buy-in. The executive team was convinced and the product was launched two months ahead of schedule, resulting in multiple improvements and increased revenue. The Product Manager learned the importance of a data-driven approach, getting all stakeholders on the same page, and balancing between being risk-averse and being a maverick.

Helping Engineers Become Well-Rounded Product Managers

To help new Product Managers with an engineering background understand the business, sales, and marketing side of things, a manager created a safe environment for them to get out of their comfort zone and fail without fear of consequences. They were taught to read and interpret key data, make the right decisions, and build convincing business cases. This experience taught the manager that a growth mindset is essential for being a successful Product Manager, and that understanding the significance of the business point of view is crucial.

Keeping Your Team Motivated and Connected in the Midst of Pandemic

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, a manager faced the challenge of motivating their now-remote team. To keep the team motivated and connected, the manager launched virtual social hours, compiled a newsletter to showcase team achievements, and emphasized the Get Things Done (GTD) principles. The manager also encouraged team members to talk about how they were coping with the pandemic and set up training sessions to help the team learn about features and capabilities. Finally, the manager set aside time for self-development and learning, and empowered the team to prioritize tasks and maintain work-life balance.

Struggling to Deliver Negative Feedback

A manager was faced with the difficult task of delivering negative feedback to a junior manager who had failed to implement a critical part of a project. Despite feeling anxious, the manager chose to have a private conversation and was surprised to find that the junior manager accepted the criticism gracefully and even thanked the manager for it afterwards. The manager learned that negative feedback can strengthen relationships if it is presented in a constructive way.

Increasing Visibility When Doing Well

This article discusses the struggles of a manager to increase visibility on the work they were doing for the team. Initially, standups and one-on-ones did not work, but the manager found success with a weekly newsletter called the Engineering Manager Report. This newsletter provided up-to-date information on subjects the team was unaware of due to the nature of their day-to-day work. It also provided the manager with an opportunity to reflect and evaluate all the things they did throughout a week. The article also provides lessons learned from this experience, such as taking an indirect route and finding the right format to instigate curiosity.

Learning to Delegate

The author experienced a loss of velocity and technical, product, and marketing challenges while working on an MVP version of a product. After being scolded by their manager, the author learned to trust their team, give them autonomy, and help them level up their skills. They realized that delegating work was necessary for the product to be successful. The author learned that working together is more effective than working alone, and that they gained the opportunity to build an MVP and make their idea successful beyond imagination.

My Hackathon Story

This is a story about a hackathon project that was successful in creating a product with business value and scalability. The author reached out to a PM and rounded up a few developers to create an animated video for retargeting ads. After eight months of hard work, the team was able to create an MVP and eventually a full scalable version that was deployed to customers. The author learned that incremental changes can make a big impact and that passion and dedication are key to success.

Focusing on Customer Problems

A person joined a company that was in the midst of implementing a complex project and assumed that everyone knew what they were doing. However, when they started to look at the project from a customer’s perspective, they realized that no one had asked why they were doing it in the first place. Through conversations with other VPs and C-level executives, they were able to pivot the strategy and get the features customers wanted without having to go through a difficult migration process. The lessons learned from this experience include: asking why in a big meeting can be difficult, having one-on-ones can help secure support, reassess projects regularly, and if actions will cause pain to customers, find another approach.

Joint Skip-Level Meetings

This article outlines the approach taken by an executive to engage and motivate a team of high-performing entry-level people. The executive created joint skip-level meetings, which he named “Team Collaboration Meetings”, to provide an opportunity for the team to ask questions, learn, and grow. The meetings included discussions on what the team had learned, what new skills they wanted to acquire, and their challenges and pain points. The executive also incorporated a reading club session to dissect books he thought every product person should read. The meetings were successful and helped the team members to develop quickly and propel their careers. The article also outlines the lessons learned from this approach, such as the importance of creating a good working relationship with one level down, and the need to create a space for entry-level PMs to raise their concerns without their bosses present.

Interviewing for an Entry-Level Product Role: Why Presentations Matter

In order to include entry-level PMs in the interviewing process, the manager decided to ask all candidates to deliver a presentation and have the entire product team sit on it for QA. This allowed the juniors to ask questions and provide feedback, while also assessing the candidates' product skills, self-starter attitude, and ability to follow instructions. The manager also found that the presentations helped the entry-level PMs develop a critical approach to their own presentations and understand the importance of building strong working relationships.

Increasing Test Coverage

The author was tasked with increasing the test coverage of a product suffering from quality deficiencies. He conducted a study to quantify the data, plotted it on a graph, and identified the coverage needed to reduce the defect rate. He then refined the list of components and invested in the most critical ones, resulting in improved quality. The author learned that engineers should rely more on data to optimize their execution and be data-driven.

Introducing OKRs: A Lesson in Compromise

A team of first-time managers lacked focus and technical quality, so the leader decided to introduce the OKR framework. Through collaboration and guidance, the team was able to come up with their own goal-setting system that was similar to OKRs, but less solid. With this imperfect system, the team was able to improve their stability and quality metrics significantly. The leader learned that strong relationships, collaboration, and teamwork are essential for successful project implementation, and that people need more than encouragement when doing something for the first time.

Modifying the Shape Up Process

Curology implemented Basecamp's Shape Up product development process in November 2019, but ran into problems due to their complex product and workflows. To build in more flexibility, they created a Strike Team of engineers led by an Engineering Manager and funneled all incoming requests through them. This allowed them to triage and prioritize issues, as well as onboard new engineers. The lessons learned were to be ready to make changes to processes, not tie up all resources in large chunks of time, and have one point of entry for all stakeholders.

Promotion Alignment Amongst Managers

Curology had a problem with inconsistency when it came to career progression due to different managers interpreting the level items differently. To solve this, they implemented a lightweight process called "Level Change Alignment" to encourage conversation amongst the managers around their standards for levels to be more consistent. The process involves writing up a document to support the level change and sending it out to the other managers for review. The lessons learned from this process are that if you want consistent results, you need to involve a member of each team, the decision for career progression should remain up to the direct manager, it's better to start with a lightweight process, and removing single point of failures is important.

Building and Formalizing a Career Ladder in a Startup

Small startups often lack career ladders, but formalizing them is not recommended for teams with less than 30 employees. To help engineers grow their skills, managers should identify the skill sets they lack and line up appropriate training and incentives. For those on the management track, they should be given function, task, client, and project management responsibilities to master before taking on human management. Soft skills and training courses should also be lined up to help organize and structure employee progress. Ultimately, it is important to remember that every person is an individual and requires an individual approach.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

How to Formalize a Career Ladder

When creating a career ladder for a company, it is important to look at the company values and open-source career ladders for inspiration. It is important to tailor the ladder to fit the company's needs and not try to rewrite the ladder for current employees. It is also important to be transparent about where the ladder was taken from and why it was chosen.

How to Build a Platform Team

When building a platform team, it is important to consider the scope of the project, the technical and business challenges, and the need to populate the team with experienced engineers as well as juniors. It is also important to set realistic expectations and to not try to boil the ocean. Following the principles of Domain-Driven Design, it is important to identify recurring patterns and define common domains to be used across brands or platforms. Finally, it is important to roll out the platform to feature teams, either by imploring them to use the software or by embedding platform engineers into feature teams.

Picking the Right Tool for a Remote Engineering Team

In order to improve productivity, a remote engineering team had to fix their project management tools. After gathering feedback and trying a new software product for a month, the team was split between keeping the new tool or going back to their old suite. After reviewing all the feedback, they realized they could use a subset of their old tools to implement the new process they preferred, resulting in improved productivity. The trial was a success, as it allowed them to learn and improve.

Turning Product Usage Data Into User Features

The Sr Director of Product Analytics at Autodesk faced the challenge of helping product managers understand product usage data at scale. To tackle this, a product growth-led team was assembled to create an insight platform and business processes to ingest product usage data, run signal detection algorithms and ML models to identify out-of-norm usage patterns and deliver personalized insights to end-users. After one year, the system is now in production and processes billions of user transactions weekly. Lessons learned include the importance of putting the end-user first, the power and sensitivity of product usage data, and the need for quality instrumentation and a solid technology infrastructure.

How Data Made Me More Confident to Drive Big Decisions

Dell and EMC had to delay the launch of their next-generation product by six months in order to allow for integration and a more effective marketing strategy. The Product Manager conducted an in-depth financial impact analysis and engaged in conversations with stakeholders to secure their buy-in. The executive team was convinced and the product was launched two months ahead of schedule, resulting in multiple improvements and increased revenue. The Product Manager learned the importance of a data-driven approach, getting all stakeholders on the same page, and balancing between being risk-averse and being a maverick.

Helping Engineers Become Well-Rounded Product Managers

To help new Product Managers with an engineering background understand the business, sales, and marketing side of things, a manager created a safe environment for them to get out of their comfort zone and fail without fear of consequences. They were taught to read and interpret key data, make the right decisions, and build convincing business cases. This experience taught the manager that a growth mindset is essential for being a successful Product Manager, and that understanding the significance of the business point of view is crucial.

Keeping Your Team Motivated and Connected in the Midst of Pandemic

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, a manager faced the challenge of motivating their now-remote team. To keep the team motivated and connected, the manager launched virtual social hours, compiled a newsletter to showcase team achievements, and emphasized the Get Things Done (GTD) principles. The manager also encouraged team members to talk about how they were coping with the pandemic and set up training sessions to help the team learn about features and capabilities. Finally, the manager set aside time for self-development and learning, and empowered the team to prioritize tasks and maintain work-life balance.

Struggling to Deliver Negative Feedback

A manager was faced with the difficult task of delivering negative feedback to a junior manager who had failed to implement a critical part of a project. Despite feeling anxious, the manager chose to have a private conversation and was surprised to find that the junior manager accepted the criticism gracefully and even thanked the manager for it afterwards. The manager learned that negative feedback can strengthen relationships if it is presented in a constructive way.

Increasing Visibility When Doing Well

This article discusses the struggles of a manager to increase visibility on the work they were doing for the team. Initially, standups and one-on-ones did not work, but the manager found success with a weekly newsletter called the Engineering Manager Report. This newsletter provided up-to-date information on subjects the team was unaware of due to the nature of their day-to-day work. It also provided the manager with an opportunity to reflect and evaluate all the things they did throughout a week. The article also provides lessons learned from this experience, such as taking an indirect route and finding the right format to instigate curiosity.

Learning to Delegate

The author experienced a loss of velocity and technical, product, and marketing challenges while working on an MVP version of a product. After being scolded by their manager, the author learned to trust their team, give them autonomy, and help them level up their skills. They realized that delegating work was necessary for the product to be successful. The author learned that working together is more effective than working alone, and that they gained the opportunity to build an MVP and make their idea successful beyond imagination.

My Hackathon Story

This is a story about a hackathon project that was successful in creating a product with business value and scalability. The author reached out to a PM and rounded up a few developers to create an animated video for retargeting ads. After eight months of hard work, the team was able to create an MVP and eventually a full scalable version that was deployed to customers. The author learned that incremental changes can make a big impact and that passion and dedication are key to success.

Focusing on Customer Problems

A person joined a company that was in the midst of implementing a complex project and assumed that everyone knew what they were doing. However, when they started to look at the project from a customer’s perspective, they realized that no one had asked why they were doing it in the first place. Through conversations with other VPs and C-level executives, they were able to pivot the strategy and get the features customers wanted without having to go through a difficult migration process. The lessons learned from this experience include: asking why in a big meeting can be difficult, having one-on-ones can help secure support, reassess projects regularly, and if actions will cause pain to customers, find another approach.

Joint Skip-Level Meetings

This article outlines the approach taken by an executive to engage and motivate a team of high-performing entry-level people. The executive created joint skip-level meetings, which he named “Team Collaboration Meetings”, to provide an opportunity for the team to ask questions, learn, and grow. The meetings included discussions on what the team had learned, what new skills they wanted to acquire, and their challenges and pain points. The executive also incorporated a reading club session to dissect books he thought every product person should read. The meetings were successful and helped the team members to develop quickly and propel their careers. The article also outlines the lessons learned from this approach, such as the importance of creating a good working relationship with one level down, and the need to create a space for entry-level PMs to raise their concerns without their bosses present.

Interviewing for an Entry-Level Product Role: Why Presentations Matter

In order to include entry-level PMs in the interviewing process, the manager decided to ask all candidates to deliver a presentation and have the entire product team sit on it for QA. This allowed the juniors to ask questions and provide feedback, while also assessing the candidates' product skills, self-starter attitude, and ability to follow instructions. The manager also found that the presentations helped the entry-level PMs develop a critical approach to their own presentations and understand the importance of building strong working relationships.

Increasing Test Coverage

The author was tasked with increasing the test coverage of a product suffering from quality deficiencies. He conducted a study to quantify the data, plotted it on a graph, and identified the coverage needed to reduce the defect rate. He then refined the list of components and invested in the most critical ones, resulting in improved quality. The author learned that engineers should rely more on data to optimize their execution and be data-driven.

Introducing OKRs: A Lesson in Compromise

A team of first-time managers lacked focus and technical quality, so the leader decided to introduce the OKR framework. Through collaboration and guidance, the team was able to come up with their own goal-setting system that was similar to OKRs, but less solid. With this imperfect system, the team was able to improve their stability and quality metrics significantly. The leader learned that strong relationships, collaboration, and teamwork are essential for successful project implementation, and that people need more than encouragement when doing something for the first time.

Modifying the Shape Up Process

Curology implemented Basecamp's Shape Up product development process in November 2019, but ran into problems due to their complex product and workflows. To build in more flexibility, they created a Strike Team of engineers led by an Engineering Manager and funneled all incoming requests through them. This allowed them to triage and prioritize issues, as well as onboard new engineers. The lessons learned were to be ready to make changes to processes, not tie up all resources in large chunks of time, and have one point of entry for all stakeholders.

Promotion Alignment Amongst Managers

Curology had a problem with inconsistency when it came to career progression due to different managers interpreting the level items differently. To solve this, they implemented a lightweight process called "Level Change Alignment" to encourage conversation amongst the managers around their standards for levels to be more consistent. The process involves writing up a document to support the level change and sending it out to the other managers for review. The lessons learned from this process are that if you want consistent results, you need to involve a member of each team, the decision for career progression should remain up to the direct manager, it's better to start with a lightweight process, and removing single point of failures is important.

Building and Formalizing a Career Ladder in a Startup

Small startups often lack career ladders, but formalizing them is not recommended for teams with less than 30 employees. To help engineers grow their skills, managers should identify the skill sets they lack and line up appropriate training and incentives. For those on the management track, they should be given function, task, client, and project management responsibilities to master before taking on human management. Soft skills and training courses should also be lined up to help organize and structure employee progress. Ultimately, it is important to remember that every person is an individual and requires an individual approach.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

How to Formalize a Career Ladder

When creating a career ladder for a company, it is important to look at the company values and open-source career ladders for inspiration. It is important to tailor the ladder to fit the company's needs and not try to rewrite the ladder for current employees. It is also important to be transparent about where the ladder was taken from and why it was chosen.

How to Build a Platform Team

When building a platform team, it is important to consider the scope of the project, the technical and business challenges, and the need to populate the team with experienced engineers as well as juniors. It is also important to set realistic expectations and to not try to boil the ocean. Following the principles of Domain-Driven Design, it is important to identify recurring patterns and define common domains to be used across brands or platforms. Finally, it is important to roll out the platform to feature teams, either by imploring them to use the software or by embedding platform engineers into feature teams.

Picking the Right Tool for a Remote Engineering Team

In order to improve productivity, a remote engineering team had to fix their project management tools. After gathering feedback and trying a new software product for a month, the team was split between keeping the new tool or going back to their old suite. After reviewing all the feedback, they realized they could use a subset of their old tools to implement the new process they preferred, resulting in improved productivity. The trial was a success, as it allowed them to learn and improve.

Turning Product Usage Data Into User Features

The Sr Director of Product Analytics at Autodesk faced the challenge of helping product managers understand product usage data at scale. To tackle this, a product growth-led team was assembled to create an insight platform and business processes to ingest product usage data, run signal detection algorithms and ML models to identify out-of-norm usage patterns and deliver personalized insights to end-users. After one year, the system is now in production and processes billions of user transactions weekly. Lessons learned include the importance of putting the end-user first, the power and sensitivity of product usage data, and the need for quality instrumentation and a solid technology infrastructure.

How Data Made Me More Confident to Drive Big Decisions

Dell and EMC had to delay the launch of their next-generation product by six months in order to allow for integration and a more effective marketing strategy. The Product Manager conducted an in-depth financial impact analysis and engaged in conversations with stakeholders to secure their buy-in. The executive team was convinced and the product was launched two months ahead of schedule, resulting in multiple improvements and increased revenue. The Product Manager learned the importance of a data-driven approach, getting all stakeholders on the same page, and balancing between being risk-averse and being a maverick.

Helping Engineers Become Well-Rounded Product Managers

To help new Product Managers with an engineering background understand the business, sales, and marketing side of things, a manager created a safe environment for them to get out of their comfort zone and fail without fear of consequences. They were taught to read and interpret key data, make the right decisions, and build convincing business cases. This experience taught the manager that a growth mindset is essential for being a successful Product Manager, and that understanding the significance of the business point of view is crucial.

Keeping Your Team Motivated and Connected in the Midst of Pandemic

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, a manager faced the challenge of motivating their now-remote team. To keep the team motivated and connected, the manager launched virtual social hours, compiled a newsletter to showcase team achievements, and emphasized the Get Things Done (GTD) principles. The manager also encouraged team members to talk about how they were coping with the pandemic and set up training sessions to help the team learn about features and capabilities. Finally, the manager set aside time for self-development and learning, and empowered the team to prioritize tasks and maintain work-life balance.

Struggling to Deliver Negative Feedback

A manager was faced with the difficult task of delivering negative feedback to a junior manager who had failed to implement a critical part of a project. Despite feeling anxious, the manager chose to have a private conversation and was surprised to find that the junior manager accepted the criticism gracefully and even thanked the manager for it afterwards. The manager learned that negative feedback can strengthen relationships if it is presented in a constructive way.

Increasing Visibility When Doing Well

This article discusses the struggles of a manager to increase visibility on the work they were doing for the team. Initially, standups and one-on-ones did not work, but the manager found success with a weekly newsletter called the Engineering Manager Report. This newsletter provided up-to-date information on subjects the team was unaware of due to the nature of their day-to-day work. It also provided the manager with an opportunity to reflect and evaluate all the things they did throughout a week. The article also provides lessons learned from this experience, such as taking an indirect route and finding the right format to instigate curiosity.

Learning to Delegate

The author experienced a loss of velocity and technical, product, and marketing challenges while working on an MVP version of a product. After being scolded by their manager, the author learned to trust their team, give them autonomy, and help them level up their skills. They realized that delegating work was necessary for the product to be successful. The author learned that working together is more effective than working alone, and that they gained the opportunity to build an MVP and make their idea successful beyond imagination.

My Hackathon Story

This is a story about a hackathon project that was successful in creating a product with business value and scalability. The author reached out to a PM and rounded up a few developers to create an animated video for retargeting ads. After eight months of hard work, the team was able to create an MVP and eventually a full scalable version that was deployed to customers. The author learned that incremental changes can make a big impact and that passion and dedication are key to success.

Focusing on Customer Problems

A person joined a company that was in the midst of implementing a complex project and assumed that everyone knew what they were doing. However, when they started to look at the project from a customer’s perspective, they realized that no one had asked why they were doing it in the first place. Through conversations with other VPs and C-level executives, they were able to pivot the strategy and get the features customers wanted without having to go through a difficult migration process. The lessons learned from this experience include: asking why in a big meeting can be difficult, having one-on-ones can help secure support, reassess projects regularly, and if actions will cause pain to customers, find another approach.

Joint Skip-Level Meetings

This article outlines the approach taken by an executive to engage and motivate a team of high-performing entry-level people. The executive created joint skip-level meetings, which he named “Team Collaboration Meetings”, to provide an opportunity for the team to ask questions, learn, and grow. The meetings included discussions on what the team had learned, what new skills they wanted to acquire, and their challenges and pain points. The executive also incorporated a reading club session to dissect books he thought every product person should read. The meetings were successful and helped the team members to develop quickly and propel their careers. The article also outlines the lessons learned from this approach, such as the importance of creating a good working relationship with one level down, and the need to create a space for entry-level PMs to raise their concerns without their bosses present.

Interviewing for an Entry-Level Product Role: Why Presentations Matter

In order to include entry-level PMs in the interviewing process, the manager decided to ask all candidates to deliver a presentation and have the entire product team sit on it for QA. This allowed the juniors to ask questions and provide feedback, while also assessing the candidates' product skills, self-starter attitude, and ability to follow instructions. The manager also found that the presentations helped the entry-level PMs develop a critical approach to their own presentations and understand the importance of building strong working relationships.

Increasing Test Coverage

The author was tasked with increasing the test coverage of a product suffering from quality deficiencies. He conducted a study to quantify the data, plotted it on a graph, and identified the coverage needed to reduce the defect rate. He then refined the list of components and invested in the most critical ones, resulting in improved quality. The author learned that engineers should rely more on data to optimize their execution and be data-driven.

Introducing OKRs: A Lesson in Compromise

A team of first-time managers lacked focus and technical quality, so the leader decided to introduce the OKR framework. Through collaboration and guidance, the team was able to come up with their own goal-setting system that was similar to OKRs, but less solid. With this imperfect system, the team was able to improve their stability and quality metrics significantly. The leader learned that strong relationships, collaboration, and teamwork are essential for successful project implementation, and that people need more than encouragement when doing something for the first time.

Modifying the Shape Up Process

Curology implemented Basecamp's Shape Up product development process in November 2019, but ran into problems due to their complex product and workflows. To build in more flexibility, they created a Strike Team of engineers led by an Engineering Manager and funneled all incoming requests through them. This allowed them to triage and prioritize issues, as well as onboard new engineers. The lessons learned were to be ready to make changes to processes, not tie up all resources in large chunks of time, and have one point of entry for all stakeholders.

Promotion Alignment Amongst Managers

Curology had a problem with inconsistency when it came to career progression due to different managers interpreting the level items differently. To solve this, they implemented a lightweight process called "Level Change Alignment" to encourage conversation amongst the managers around their standards for levels to be more consistent. The process involves writing up a document to support the level change and sending it out to the other managers for review. The lessons learned from this process are that if you want consistent results, you need to involve a member of each team, the decision for career progression should remain up to the direct manager, it's better to start with a lightweight process, and removing single point of failures is important.

Building and Formalizing a Career Ladder in a Startup

Small startups often lack career ladders, but formalizing them is not recommended for teams with less than 30 employees. To help engineers grow their skills, managers should identify the skill sets they lack and line up appropriate training and incentives. For those on the management track, they should be given function, task, client, and project management responsibilities to master before taking on human management. Soft skills and training courses should also be lined up to help organize and structure employee progress. Ultimately, it is important to remember that every person is an individual and requires an individual approach.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

How to Formalize a Career Ladder

When creating a career ladder for a company, it is important to look at the company values and open-source career ladders for inspiration. It is important to tailor the ladder to fit the company's needs and not try to rewrite the ladder for current employees. It is also important to be transparent about where the ladder was taken from and why it was chosen.

How to Build a Platform Team

When building a platform team, it is important to consider the scope of the project, the technical and business challenges, and the need to populate the team with experienced engineers as well as juniors. It is also important to set realistic expectations and to not try to boil the ocean. Following the principles of Domain-Driven Design, it is important to identify recurring patterns and define common domains to be used across brands or platforms. Finally, it is important to roll out the platform to feature teams, either by imploring them to use the software or by embedding platform engineers into feature teams.

Picking the Right Tool for a Remote Engineering Team

In order to improve productivity, a remote engineering team had to fix their project management tools. After gathering feedback and trying a new software product for a month, the team was split between keeping the new tool or going back to their old suite. After reviewing all the feedback, they realized they could use a subset of their old tools to implement the new process they preferred, resulting in improved productivity. The trial was a success, as it allowed them to learn and improve.

Turning Product Usage Data Into User Features

The Sr Director of Product Analytics at Autodesk faced the challenge of helping product managers understand product usage data at scale. To tackle this, a product growth-led team was assembled to create an insight platform and business processes to ingest product usage data, run signal detection algorithms and ML models to identify out-of-norm usage patterns and deliver personalized insights to end-users. After one year, the system is now in production and processes billions of user transactions weekly. Lessons learned include the importance of putting the end-user first, the power and sensitivity of product usage data, and the need for quality instrumentation and a solid technology infrastructure.

How Data Made Me More Confident to Drive Big Decisions

Dell and EMC had to delay the launch of their next-generation product by six months in order to allow for integration and a more effective marketing strategy. The Product Manager conducted an in-depth financial impact analysis and engaged in conversations with stakeholders to secure their buy-in. The executive team was convinced and the product was launched two months ahead of schedule, resulting in multiple improvements and increased revenue. The Product Manager learned the importance of a data-driven approach, getting all stakeholders on the same page, and balancing between being risk-averse and being a maverick.

Helping Engineers Become Well-Rounded Product Managers

To help new Product Managers with an engineering background understand the business, sales, and marketing side of things, a manager created a safe environment for them to get out of their comfort zone and fail without fear of consequences. They were taught to read and interpret key data, make the right decisions, and build convincing business cases. This experience taught the manager that a growth mindset is essential for being a successful Product Manager, and that understanding the significance of the business point of view is crucial.

Keeping Your Team Motivated and Connected in the Midst of Pandemic

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, a manager faced the challenge of motivating their now-remote team. To keep the team motivated and connected, the manager launched virtual social hours, compiled a newsletter to showcase team achievements, and emphasized the Get Things Done (GTD) principles. The manager also encouraged team members to talk about how they were coping with the pandemic and set up training sessions to help the team learn about features and capabilities. Finally, the manager set aside time for self-development and learning, and empowered the team to prioritize tasks and maintain work-life balance.

Struggling to Deliver Negative Feedback

A manager was faced with the difficult task of delivering negative feedback to a junior manager who had failed to implement a critical part of a project. Despite feeling anxious, the manager chose to have a private conversation and was surprised to find that the junior manager accepted the criticism gracefully and even thanked the manager for it afterwards. The manager learned that negative feedback can strengthen relationships if it is presented in a constructive way.

Increasing Visibility When Doing Well

This article discusses the struggles of a manager to increase visibility on the work they were doing for the team. Initially, standups and one-on-ones did not work, but the manager found success with a weekly newsletter called the Engineering Manager Report. This newsletter provided up-to-date information on subjects the team was unaware of due to the nature of their day-to-day work. It also provided the manager with an opportunity to reflect and evaluate all the things they did throughout a week. The article also provides lessons learned from this experience, such as taking an indirect route and finding the right format to instigate curiosity.

Learning to Delegate

The author experienced a loss of velocity and technical, product, and marketing challenges while working on an MVP version of a product. After being scolded by their manager, the author learned to trust their team, give them autonomy, and help them level up their skills. They realized that delegating work was necessary for the product to be successful. The author learned that working together is more effective than working alone, and that they gained the opportunity to build an MVP and make their idea successful beyond imagination.

My Hackathon Story

This is a story about a hackathon project that was successful in creating a product with business value and scalability. The author reached out to a PM and rounded up a few developers to create an animated video for retargeting ads. After eight months of hard work, the team was able to create an MVP and eventually a full scalable version that was deployed to customers. The author learned that incremental changes can make a big impact and that passion and dedication are key to success.

Focusing on Customer Problems

A person joined a company that was in the midst of implementing a complex project and assumed that everyone knew what they were doing. However, when they started to look at the project from a customer’s perspective, they realized that no one had asked why they were doing it in the first place. Through conversations with other VPs and C-level executives, they were able to pivot the strategy and get the features customers wanted without having to go through a difficult migration process. The lessons learned from this experience include: asking why in a big meeting can be difficult, having one-on-ones can help secure support, reassess projects regularly, and if actions will cause pain to customers, find another approach.

Joint Skip-Level Meetings

This article outlines the approach taken by an executive to engage and motivate a team of high-performing entry-level people. The executive created joint skip-level meetings, which he named “Team Collaboration Meetings”, to provide an opportunity for the team to ask questions, learn, and grow. The meetings included discussions on what the team had learned, what new skills they wanted to acquire, and their challenges and pain points. The executive also incorporated a reading club session to dissect books he thought every product person should read. The meetings were successful and helped the team members to develop quickly and propel their careers. The article also outlines the lessons learned from this approach, such as the importance of creating a good working relationship with one level down, and the need to create a space for entry-level PMs to raise their concerns without their bosses present.

Interviewing for an Entry-Level Product Role: Why Presentations Matter

In order to include entry-level PMs in the interviewing process, the manager decided to ask all candidates to deliver a presentation and have the entire product team sit on it for QA. This allowed the juniors to ask questions and provide feedback, while also assessing the candidates' product skills, self-starter attitude, and ability to follow instructions. The manager also found that the presentations helped the entry-level PMs develop a critical approach to their own presentations and understand the importance of building strong working relationships.

Increasing Test Coverage

The author was tasked with increasing the test coverage of a product suffering from quality deficiencies. He conducted a study to quantify the data, plotted it on a graph, and identified the coverage needed to reduce the defect rate. He then refined the list of components and invested in the most critical ones, resulting in improved quality. The author learned that engineers should rely more on data to optimize their execution and be data-driven.

Introducing OKRs: A Lesson in Compromise

A team of first-time managers lacked focus and technical quality, so the leader decided to introduce the OKR framework. Through collaboration and guidance, the team was able to come up with their own goal-setting system that was similar to OKRs, but less solid. With this imperfect system, the team was able to improve their stability and quality metrics significantly. The leader learned that strong relationships, collaboration, and teamwork are essential for successful project implementation, and that people need more than encouragement when doing something for the first time.

Modifying the Shape Up Process

Curology implemented Basecamp's Shape Up product development process in November 2019, but ran into problems due to their complex product and workflows. To build in more flexibility, they created a Strike Team of engineers led by an Engineering Manager and funneled all incoming requests through them. This allowed them to triage and prioritize issues, as well as onboard new engineers. The lessons learned were to be ready to make changes to processes, not tie up all resources in large chunks of time, and have one point of entry for all stakeholders.

Promotion Alignment Amongst Managers

Curology had a problem with inconsistency when it came to career progression due to different managers interpreting the level items differently. To solve this, they implemented a lightweight process called "Level Change Alignment" to encourage conversation amongst the managers around their standards for levels to be more consistent. The process involves writing up a document to support the level change and sending it out to the other managers for review. The lessons learned from this process are that if you want consistent results, you need to involve a member of each team, the decision for career progression should remain up to the direct manager, it's better to start with a lightweight process, and removing single point of failures is important.

Building and Formalizing a Career Ladder in a Startup

Small startups often lack career ladders, but formalizing them is not recommended for teams with less than 30 employees. To help engineers grow their skills, managers should identify the skill sets they lack and line up appropriate training and incentives. For those on the management track, they should be given function, task, client, and project management responsibilities to master before taking on human management. Soft skills and training courses should also be lined up to help organize and structure employee progress. Ultimately, it is important to remember that every person is an individual and requires an individual approach.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

How to Formalize a Career Ladder

When creating a career ladder for a company, it is important to look at the company values and open-source career ladders for inspiration. It is important to tailor the ladder to fit the company's needs and not try to rewrite the ladder for current employees. It is also important to be transparent about where the ladder was taken from and why it was chosen.

How to Build a Platform Team

When building a platform team, it is important to consider the scope of the project, the technical and business challenges, and the need to populate the team with experienced engineers as well as juniors. It is also important to set realistic expectations and to not try to boil the ocean. Following the principles of Domain-Driven Design, it is important to identify recurring patterns and define common domains to be used across brands or platforms. Finally, it is important to roll out the platform to feature teams, either by imploring them to use the software or by embedding platform engineers into feature teams.

Picking the Right Tool for a Remote Engineering Team

In order to improve productivity, a remote engineering team had to fix their project management tools. After gathering feedback and trying a new software product for a month, the team was split between keeping the new tool or going back to their old suite. After reviewing all the feedback, they realized they could use a subset of their old tools to implement the new process they preferred, resulting in improved productivity. The trial was a success, as it allowed them to learn and improve.

Turning Product Usage Data Into User Features

The Sr Director of Product Analytics at Autodesk faced the challenge of helping product managers understand product usage data at scale. To tackle this, a product growth-led team was assembled to create an insight platform and business processes to ingest product usage data, run signal detection algorithms and ML models to identify out-of-norm usage patterns and deliver personalized insights to end-users. After one year, the system is now in production and processes billions of user transactions weekly. Lessons learned include the importance of putting the end-user first, the power and sensitivity of product usage data, and the need for quality instrumentation and a solid technology infrastructure.

How Data Made Me More Confident to Drive Big Decisions

Dell and EMC had to delay the launch of their next-generation product by six months in order to allow for integration and a more effective marketing strategy. The Product Manager conducted an in-depth financial impact analysis and engaged in conversations with stakeholders to secure their buy-in. The executive team was convinced and the product was launched two months ahead of schedule, resulting in multiple improvements and increased revenue. The Product Manager learned the importance of a data-driven approach, getting all stakeholders on the same page, and balancing between being risk-averse and being a maverick.

Helping Engineers Become Well-Rounded Product Managers

To help new Product Managers with an engineering background understand the business, sales, and marketing side of things, a manager created a safe environment for them to get out of their comfort zone and fail without fear of consequences. They were taught to read and interpret key data, make the right decisions, and build convincing business cases. This experience taught the manager that a growth mindset is essential for being a successful Product Manager, and that understanding the significance of the business point of view is crucial.

Keeping Your Team Motivated and Connected in the Midst of Pandemic

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, a manager faced the challenge of motivating their now-remote team. To keep the team motivated and connected, the manager launched virtual social hours, compiled a newsletter to showcase team achievements, and emphasized the Get Things Done (GTD) principles. The manager also encouraged team members to talk about how they were coping with the pandemic and set up training sessions to help the team learn about features and capabilities. Finally, the manager set aside time for self-development and learning, and empowered the team to prioritize tasks and maintain work-life balance.

Struggling to Deliver Negative Feedback

A manager was faced with the difficult task of delivering negative feedback to a junior manager who had failed to implement a critical part of a project. Despite feeling anxious, the manager chose to have a private conversation and was surprised to find that the junior manager accepted the criticism gracefully and even thanked the manager for it afterwards. The manager learned that negative feedback can strengthen relationships if it is presented in a constructive way.

Increasing Visibility When Doing Well

This article discusses the struggles of a manager to increase visibility on the work they were doing for the team. Initially, standups and one-on-ones did not work, but the manager found success with a weekly newsletter called the Engineering Manager Report. This newsletter provided up-to-date information on subjects the team was unaware of due to the nature of their day-to-day work. It also provided the manager with an opportunity to reflect and evaluate all the things they did throughout a week. The article also provides lessons learned from this experience, such as taking an indirect route and finding the right format to instigate curiosity.

Learning to Delegate

The author experienced a loss of velocity and technical, product, and marketing challenges while working on an MVP version of a product. After being scolded by their manager, the author learned to trust their team, give them autonomy, and help them level up their skills. They realized that delegating work was necessary for the product to be successful. The author learned that working together is more effective than working alone, and that they gained the opportunity to build an MVP and make their idea successful beyond imagination.

My Hackathon Story

This is a story about a hackathon project that was successful in creating a product with business value and scalability. The author reached out to a PM and rounded up a few developers to create an animated video for retargeting ads. After eight months of hard work, the team was able to create an MVP and eventually a full scalable version that was deployed to customers. The author learned that incremental changes can make a big impact and that passion and dedication are key to success.

Focusing on Customer Problems

A person joined a company that was in the midst of implementing a complex project and assumed that everyone knew what they were doing. However, when they started to look at the project from a customer’s perspective, they realized that no one had asked why they were doing it in the first place. Through conversations with other VPs and C-level executives, they were able to pivot the strategy and get the features customers wanted without having to go through a difficult migration process. The lessons learned from this experience include: asking why in a big meeting can be difficult, having one-on-ones can help secure support, reassess projects regularly, and if actions will cause pain to customers, find another approach.

Joint Skip-Level Meetings

This article outlines the approach taken by an executive to engage and motivate a team of high-performing entry-level people. The executive created joint skip-level meetings, which he named “Team Collaboration Meetings”, to provide an opportunity for the team to ask questions, learn, and grow. The meetings included discussions on what the team had learned, what new skills they wanted to acquire, and their challenges and pain points. The executive also incorporated a reading club session to dissect books he thought every product person should read. The meetings were successful and helped the team members to develop quickly and propel their careers. The article also outlines the lessons learned from this approach, such as the importance of creating a good working relationship with one level down, and the need to create a space for entry-level PMs to raise their concerns without their bosses present.

Interviewing for an Entry-Level Product Role: Why Presentations Matter

In order to include entry-level PMs in the interviewing process, the manager decided to ask all candidates to deliver a presentation and have the entire product team sit on it for QA. This allowed the juniors to ask questions and provide feedback, while also assessing the candidates' product skills, self-starter attitude, and ability to follow instructions. The manager also found that the presentations helped the entry-level PMs develop a critical approach to their own presentations and understand the importance of building strong working relationships.

Increasing Test Coverage

The author was tasked with increasing the test coverage of a product suffering from quality deficiencies. He conducted a study to quantify the data, plotted it on a graph, and identified the coverage needed to reduce the defect rate. He then refined the list of components and invested in the most critical ones, resulting in improved quality. The author learned that engineers should rely more on data to optimize their execution and be data-driven.

Introducing OKRs: A Lesson in Compromise

A team of first-time managers lacked focus and technical quality, so the leader decided to introduce the OKR framework. Through collaboration and guidance, the team was able to come up with their own goal-setting system that was similar to OKRs, but less solid. With this imperfect system, the team was able to improve their stability and quality metrics significantly. The leader learned that strong relationships, collaboration, and teamwork are essential for successful project implementation, and that people need more than encouragement when doing something for the first time.

Modifying the Shape Up Process

Curology implemented Basecamp's Shape Up product development process in November 2019, but ran into problems due to their complex product and workflows. To build in more flexibility, they created a Strike Team of engineers led by an Engineering Manager and funneled all incoming requests through them. This allowed them to triage and prioritize issues, as well as onboard new engineers. The lessons learned were to be ready to make changes to processes, not tie up all resources in large chunks of time, and have one point of entry for all stakeholders.

Promotion Alignment Amongst Managers

Curology had a problem with inconsistency when it came to career progression due to different managers interpreting the level items differently. To solve this, they implemented a lightweight process called "Level Change Alignment" to encourage conversation amongst the managers around their standards for levels to be more consistent. The process involves writing up a document to support the level change and sending it out to the other managers for review. The lessons learned from this process are that if you want consistent results, you need to involve a member of each team, the decision for career progression should remain up to the direct manager, it's better to start with a lightweight process, and removing single point of failures is important.

Building and Formalizing a Career Ladder in a Startup

Small startups often lack career ladders, but formalizing them is not recommended for teams with less than 30 employees. To help engineers grow their skills, managers should identify the skill sets they lack and line up appropriate training and incentives. For those on the management track, they should be given function, task, client, and project management responsibilities to master before taking on human management. Soft skills and training courses should also be lined up to help organize and structure employee progress. Ultimately, it is important to remember that every person is an individual and requires an individual approach.

From Chaos to Structure on the Operations Team

At my previous job, I was assigned a team that was not functioning well and had a poor reputation. I took a number of actions to improve their operations, such as using a single ticketing system, providing training and cross-functional competencies, setting up rotations for the support team, creating runbooks, and setting up standard SLAs. I also established healthy hours for operations and communicated to external stakeholders. Through this process, I learned to take time to assess the situation, spend time with each team member, communicate change to the outside world, and align team celebrations with meaningful milestone deliveries.

How to Formalize a Career Ladder

When creating a career ladder for a company, it is important to look at the company values and open-source career ladders for inspiration. It is important to tailor the ladder to fit the company's needs and not try to rewrite the ladder for current employees. It is also important to be transparent about where the ladder was taken from and why it was chosen.

How to Build a Platform Team

When building a platform team, it is important to consider the scope of the project, the technical and business challenges, and the need to populate the team with experienced engineers as well as juniors. It is also important to set realistic expectations and to not try to boil the ocean. Following the principles of Domain-Driven Design, it is important to identify recurring patterns and define common domains to be used across brands or platforms. Finally, it is important to roll out the platform to feature teams, either by imploring them to use the software or by embedding platform engineers into feature teams.