Knowledge shared by our community

Limits of Too Much Trust

A leader learned the value of verifiable trust when one of their reports stopped working after being approved for a transfer to Berlin. After investigating, the leader found that the report had not been doing any work for a month and a half and had been absent from meetings. The leader spoke to the VP of Engineering and the report was transferred to Berlin, where they became a disciplinary problem. The leader learned lessons about trust, pair programming, and accepting that people may not want to be productive at their job.

Handling Tech Debt: A Story About a Notification System Gone Amiss

The Head of Platform Engineering at a company was tasked with managing tech debt, but was not given any PMs or budget to hire one. The team decided to track the latency of notifications through the systems, but found that the code explicitly dictated that the notifications should be delayed. After much work, they were able to tune a few variables which made the system much better for the users. The lesson learned was that documentation and organizational knowledge transfer are essential for understanding and managing tech debt.

Demystifying Story Points

Story points are a difficult concept to understand and can be mistakenly correlated with productivity or time. To fix this problem, story points should be used to measure complexity, risk, and unknowns instead of time. To ensure accurate estimates, the team must discuss why they disagree and understand the different information they have. This approach will help the team come up with more precise estimates and dissolve the perception that the team is not productive.

A New Manager Role: Transitioning from the Solution to Problem Space

This article discusses the transition from a technical person to a manager, and the importance of focusing on the problem space rather than the solution space. It outlines the actions taken by the author to transition from the solution space to the problem space, and the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons include the importance of understanding the problem space, challenging existing problems, and being patient with feedback in the problem space.

Reframing Estimates

Estimation is a difficult skill to master and is often a guess. It is hard to predict the future and come up with accurate estimates when you have limited information. To improve estimation, reframe it as a budget and focus on the tradeoffs that need to be made. With practice, it is possible to deliver on time and on budget.

How to Improve Your Hiring Process

The author joined a company and was responsible for hiring new people. They realized the interviewing process was not streamlined and decided to apply knowledge from their previous company to improve it. This included developing pre-briefs and de-briefs, creating templates on how to write feedback, starting a question bank, introducing shadowing, and giving a talk on how to conduct interviews. The author learned that it is important to standardize the interview process and provide the best candidate experience to attract the best talent.

How to Transition From a Large Company to a Startup With Ease

After leaving Amazon for Lambda School, the author was warned of the difficulty of adapting to a startup's working environment and culture. However, they found that 70-80% of the processes and tools they used at Amazon were transferable, and they were able to introduce new processes and tools with great caution. They also conducted retrospectives to retire processes that did not work.

How to Help Your Reports Grow and Pursue Their Goals

This engineer became a manager and used their experience with different managers to create a Career Development Plan (CDP) and Transition Development Plan (TDP) to help their team members manage their career growth and transition to new roles. They also encouraged their team to have mentors and provided them with opportunities to reach their goals. They learned that as a manager, they should be responsible for their team's happiness and normalize the talk about career.

Driving Clarity of Charter in a Large Organization

The Director of Engineering at a company was tasked with reorganizing a new area composed of four disparate teams, as well as dotted-line dependencies. The process included political machinations, deep-diving into technology, and building relationships with product management. After creating an inventory and analysis of the code areas, the Director had to get buy-in from their management chain and socialize the proposal. This process took seven weeks and included lessons such as patience, being cautious when committing, and communicating risks to executives.

Changing of a Guard

After a company underwent a significant transformation, the new leadership brought in new people to fill the ranks. The protagonist was eager to stay with the company, but was not given an opportunity to move up. To showcase their worth, they spoke with old management and other people from their field, and used a football analogy to express their interest to the new president. Ultimately, they learned that if you want something, you should be proactive and show your interest, and that the average work span of an employee in technology is two to three years.

Who To Promote? A Manager’s Dilemma

A manager was faced with the difficult decision of who to promote, with two candidates expressing interest. After testing their commitment and assessing the team's feelings, the manager decided to promote the more experienced candidate, despite lacking leadership potential and people skills. This turned out to be the wrong decision, as the other candidate left the company and the promoted candidate did not work out as a manager. The manager learned that it is important to make the right decision, even if it means losing something, and to not make decisions based on the path of least resistance.

Managing Managers: The Three Don’ts

Managing managers is a different job than managing individual contributors and requires a different skill set. The author shares three mandatory don'ts for first-time managers of managers: don't impose your style, don't interact directly with their reports, and don't reveal all you know. These don'ts are important to help managers grow and become successful, and to ensure transparency and trust.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Limits of Too Much Trust

A leader learned the value of verifiable trust when one of their reports stopped working after being approved for a transfer to Berlin. After investigating, the leader found that the report had not been doing any work for a month and a half and had been absent from meetings. The leader spoke to the VP of Engineering and the report was transferred to Berlin, where they became a disciplinary problem. The leader learned lessons about trust, pair programming, and accepting that people may not want to be productive at their job.

Handling Tech Debt: A Story About a Notification System Gone Amiss

The Head of Platform Engineering at a company was tasked with managing tech debt, but was not given any PMs or budget to hire one. The team decided to track the latency of notifications through the systems, but found that the code explicitly dictated that the notifications should be delayed. After much work, they were able to tune a few variables which made the system much better for the users. The lesson learned was that documentation and organizational knowledge transfer are essential for understanding and managing tech debt.

Demystifying Story Points

Story points are a difficult concept to understand and can be mistakenly correlated with productivity or time. To fix this problem, story points should be used to measure complexity, risk, and unknowns instead of time. To ensure accurate estimates, the team must discuss why they disagree and understand the different information they have. This approach will help the team come up with more precise estimates and dissolve the perception that the team is not productive.

A New Manager Role: Transitioning from the Solution to Problem Space

This article discusses the transition from a technical person to a manager, and the importance of focusing on the problem space rather than the solution space. It outlines the actions taken by the author to transition from the solution space to the problem space, and the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons include the importance of understanding the problem space, challenging existing problems, and being patient with feedback in the problem space.

Reframing Estimates

Estimation is a difficult skill to master and is often a guess. It is hard to predict the future and come up with accurate estimates when you have limited information. To improve estimation, reframe it as a budget and focus on the tradeoffs that need to be made. With practice, it is possible to deliver on time and on budget.

How to Improve Your Hiring Process

The author joined a company and was responsible for hiring new people. They realized the interviewing process was not streamlined and decided to apply knowledge from their previous company to improve it. This included developing pre-briefs and de-briefs, creating templates on how to write feedback, starting a question bank, introducing shadowing, and giving a talk on how to conduct interviews. The author learned that it is important to standardize the interview process and provide the best candidate experience to attract the best talent.

How to Transition From a Large Company to a Startup With Ease

After leaving Amazon for Lambda School, the author was warned of the difficulty of adapting to a startup's working environment and culture. However, they found that 70-80% of the processes and tools they used at Amazon were transferable, and they were able to introduce new processes and tools with great caution. They also conducted retrospectives to retire processes that did not work.

How to Help Your Reports Grow and Pursue Their Goals

This engineer became a manager and used their experience with different managers to create a Career Development Plan (CDP) and Transition Development Plan (TDP) to help their team members manage their career growth and transition to new roles. They also encouraged their team to have mentors and provided them with opportunities to reach their goals. They learned that as a manager, they should be responsible for their team's happiness and normalize the talk about career.

Driving Clarity of Charter in a Large Organization

The Director of Engineering at a company was tasked with reorganizing a new area composed of four disparate teams, as well as dotted-line dependencies. The process included political machinations, deep-diving into technology, and building relationships with product management. After creating an inventory and analysis of the code areas, the Director had to get buy-in from their management chain and socialize the proposal. This process took seven weeks and included lessons such as patience, being cautious when committing, and communicating risks to executives.

Changing of a Guard

After a company underwent a significant transformation, the new leadership brought in new people to fill the ranks. The protagonist was eager to stay with the company, but was not given an opportunity to move up. To showcase their worth, they spoke with old management and other people from their field, and used a football analogy to express their interest to the new president. Ultimately, they learned that if you want something, you should be proactive and show your interest, and that the average work span of an employee in technology is two to three years.

Who To Promote? A Manager’s Dilemma

A manager was faced with the difficult decision of who to promote, with two candidates expressing interest. After testing their commitment and assessing the team's feelings, the manager decided to promote the more experienced candidate, despite lacking leadership potential and people skills. This turned out to be the wrong decision, as the other candidate left the company and the promoted candidate did not work out as a manager. The manager learned that it is important to make the right decision, even if it means losing something, and to not make decisions based on the path of least resistance.

Managing Managers: The Three Don’ts

Managing managers is a different job than managing individual contributors and requires a different skill set. The author shares three mandatory don'ts for first-time managers of managers: don't impose your style, don't interact directly with their reports, and don't reveal all you know. These don'ts are important to help managers grow and become successful, and to ensure transparency and trust.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Limits of Too Much Trust

A leader learned the value of verifiable trust when one of their reports stopped working after being approved for a transfer to Berlin. After investigating, the leader found that the report had not been doing any work for a month and a half and had been absent from meetings. The leader spoke to the VP of Engineering and the report was transferred to Berlin, where they became a disciplinary problem. The leader learned lessons about trust, pair programming, and accepting that people may not want to be productive at their job.

Handling Tech Debt: A Story About a Notification System Gone Amiss

The Head of Platform Engineering at a company was tasked with managing tech debt, but was not given any PMs or budget to hire one. The team decided to track the latency of notifications through the systems, but found that the code explicitly dictated that the notifications should be delayed. After much work, they were able to tune a few variables which made the system much better for the users. The lesson learned was that documentation and organizational knowledge transfer are essential for understanding and managing tech debt.

Demystifying Story Points

Story points are a difficult concept to understand and can be mistakenly correlated with productivity or time. To fix this problem, story points should be used to measure complexity, risk, and unknowns instead of time. To ensure accurate estimates, the team must discuss why they disagree and understand the different information they have. This approach will help the team come up with more precise estimates and dissolve the perception that the team is not productive.

A New Manager Role: Transitioning from the Solution to Problem Space

This article discusses the transition from a technical person to a manager, and the importance of focusing on the problem space rather than the solution space. It outlines the actions taken by the author to transition from the solution space to the problem space, and the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons include the importance of understanding the problem space, challenging existing problems, and being patient with feedback in the problem space.

Reframing Estimates

Estimation is a difficult skill to master and is often a guess. It is hard to predict the future and come up with accurate estimates when you have limited information. To improve estimation, reframe it as a budget and focus on the tradeoffs that need to be made. With practice, it is possible to deliver on time and on budget.

How to Improve Your Hiring Process

The author joined a company and was responsible for hiring new people. They realized the interviewing process was not streamlined and decided to apply knowledge from their previous company to improve it. This included developing pre-briefs and de-briefs, creating templates on how to write feedback, starting a question bank, introducing shadowing, and giving a talk on how to conduct interviews. The author learned that it is important to standardize the interview process and provide the best candidate experience to attract the best talent.

How to Transition From a Large Company to a Startup With Ease

After leaving Amazon for Lambda School, the author was warned of the difficulty of adapting to a startup's working environment and culture. However, they found that 70-80% of the processes and tools they used at Amazon were transferable, and they were able to introduce new processes and tools with great caution. They also conducted retrospectives to retire processes that did not work.

How to Help Your Reports Grow and Pursue Their Goals

This engineer became a manager and used their experience with different managers to create a Career Development Plan (CDP) and Transition Development Plan (TDP) to help their team members manage their career growth and transition to new roles. They also encouraged their team to have mentors and provided them with opportunities to reach their goals. They learned that as a manager, they should be responsible for their team's happiness and normalize the talk about career.

Driving Clarity of Charter in a Large Organization

The Director of Engineering at a company was tasked with reorganizing a new area composed of four disparate teams, as well as dotted-line dependencies. The process included political machinations, deep-diving into technology, and building relationships with product management. After creating an inventory and analysis of the code areas, the Director had to get buy-in from their management chain and socialize the proposal. This process took seven weeks and included lessons such as patience, being cautious when committing, and communicating risks to executives.

Changing of a Guard

After a company underwent a significant transformation, the new leadership brought in new people to fill the ranks. The protagonist was eager to stay with the company, but was not given an opportunity to move up. To showcase their worth, they spoke with old management and other people from their field, and used a football analogy to express their interest to the new president. Ultimately, they learned that if you want something, you should be proactive and show your interest, and that the average work span of an employee in technology is two to three years.

Who To Promote? A Manager’s Dilemma

A manager was faced with the difficult decision of who to promote, with two candidates expressing interest. After testing their commitment and assessing the team's feelings, the manager decided to promote the more experienced candidate, despite lacking leadership potential and people skills. This turned out to be the wrong decision, as the other candidate left the company and the promoted candidate did not work out as a manager. The manager learned that it is important to make the right decision, even if it means losing something, and to not make decisions based on the path of least resistance.

Managing Managers: The Three Don’ts

Managing managers is a different job than managing individual contributors and requires a different skill set. The author shares three mandatory don'ts for first-time managers of managers: don't impose your style, don't interact directly with their reports, and don't reveal all you know. These don'ts are important to help managers grow and become successful, and to ensure transparency and trust.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Limits of Too Much Trust

A leader learned the value of verifiable trust when one of their reports stopped working after being approved for a transfer to Berlin. After investigating, the leader found that the report had not been doing any work for a month and a half and had been absent from meetings. The leader spoke to the VP of Engineering and the report was transferred to Berlin, where they became a disciplinary problem. The leader learned lessons about trust, pair programming, and accepting that people may not want to be productive at their job.

Handling Tech Debt: A Story About a Notification System Gone Amiss

The Head of Platform Engineering at a company was tasked with managing tech debt, but was not given any PMs or budget to hire one. The team decided to track the latency of notifications through the systems, but found that the code explicitly dictated that the notifications should be delayed. After much work, they were able to tune a few variables which made the system much better for the users. The lesson learned was that documentation and organizational knowledge transfer are essential for understanding and managing tech debt.

Demystifying Story Points

Story points are a difficult concept to understand and can be mistakenly correlated with productivity or time. To fix this problem, story points should be used to measure complexity, risk, and unknowns instead of time. To ensure accurate estimates, the team must discuss why they disagree and understand the different information they have. This approach will help the team come up with more precise estimates and dissolve the perception that the team is not productive.

A New Manager Role: Transitioning from the Solution to Problem Space

This article discusses the transition from a technical person to a manager, and the importance of focusing on the problem space rather than the solution space. It outlines the actions taken by the author to transition from the solution space to the problem space, and the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons include the importance of understanding the problem space, challenging existing problems, and being patient with feedback in the problem space.

Reframing Estimates

Estimation is a difficult skill to master and is often a guess. It is hard to predict the future and come up with accurate estimates when you have limited information. To improve estimation, reframe it as a budget and focus on the tradeoffs that need to be made. With practice, it is possible to deliver on time and on budget.

How to Improve Your Hiring Process

The author joined a company and was responsible for hiring new people. They realized the interviewing process was not streamlined and decided to apply knowledge from their previous company to improve it. This included developing pre-briefs and de-briefs, creating templates on how to write feedback, starting a question bank, introducing shadowing, and giving a talk on how to conduct interviews. The author learned that it is important to standardize the interview process and provide the best candidate experience to attract the best talent.

How to Transition From a Large Company to a Startup With Ease

After leaving Amazon for Lambda School, the author was warned of the difficulty of adapting to a startup's working environment and culture. However, they found that 70-80% of the processes and tools they used at Amazon were transferable, and they were able to introduce new processes and tools with great caution. They also conducted retrospectives to retire processes that did not work.

How to Help Your Reports Grow and Pursue Their Goals

This engineer became a manager and used their experience with different managers to create a Career Development Plan (CDP) and Transition Development Plan (TDP) to help their team members manage their career growth and transition to new roles. They also encouraged their team to have mentors and provided them with opportunities to reach their goals. They learned that as a manager, they should be responsible for their team's happiness and normalize the talk about career.

Driving Clarity of Charter in a Large Organization

The Director of Engineering at a company was tasked with reorganizing a new area composed of four disparate teams, as well as dotted-line dependencies. The process included political machinations, deep-diving into technology, and building relationships with product management. After creating an inventory and analysis of the code areas, the Director had to get buy-in from their management chain and socialize the proposal. This process took seven weeks and included lessons such as patience, being cautious when committing, and communicating risks to executives.

Changing of a Guard

After a company underwent a significant transformation, the new leadership brought in new people to fill the ranks. The protagonist was eager to stay with the company, but was not given an opportunity to move up. To showcase their worth, they spoke with old management and other people from their field, and used a football analogy to express their interest to the new president. Ultimately, they learned that if you want something, you should be proactive and show your interest, and that the average work span of an employee in technology is two to three years.

Who To Promote? A Manager’s Dilemma

A manager was faced with the difficult decision of who to promote, with two candidates expressing interest. After testing their commitment and assessing the team's feelings, the manager decided to promote the more experienced candidate, despite lacking leadership potential and people skills. This turned out to be the wrong decision, as the other candidate left the company and the promoted candidate did not work out as a manager. The manager learned that it is important to make the right decision, even if it means losing something, and to not make decisions based on the path of least resistance.

Managing Managers: The Three Don’ts

Managing managers is a different job than managing individual contributors and requires a different skill set. The author shares three mandatory don'ts for first-time managers of managers: don't impose your style, don't interact directly with their reports, and don't reveal all you know. These don'ts are important to help managers grow and become successful, and to ensure transparency and trust.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Limits of Too Much Trust

A leader learned the value of verifiable trust when one of their reports stopped working after being approved for a transfer to Berlin. After investigating, the leader found that the report had not been doing any work for a month and a half and had been absent from meetings. The leader spoke to the VP of Engineering and the report was transferred to Berlin, where they became a disciplinary problem. The leader learned lessons about trust, pair programming, and accepting that people may not want to be productive at their job.

Handling Tech Debt: A Story About a Notification System Gone Amiss

The Head of Platform Engineering at a company was tasked with managing tech debt, but was not given any PMs or budget to hire one. The team decided to track the latency of notifications through the systems, but found that the code explicitly dictated that the notifications should be delayed. After much work, they were able to tune a few variables which made the system much better for the users. The lesson learned was that documentation and organizational knowledge transfer are essential for understanding and managing tech debt.

Demystifying Story Points

Story points are a difficult concept to understand and can be mistakenly correlated with productivity or time. To fix this problem, story points should be used to measure complexity, risk, and unknowns instead of time. To ensure accurate estimates, the team must discuss why they disagree and understand the different information they have. This approach will help the team come up with more precise estimates and dissolve the perception that the team is not productive.

A New Manager Role: Transitioning from the Solution to Problem Space

This article discusses the transition from a technical person to a manager, and the importance of focusing on the problem space rather than the solution space. It outlines the actions taken by the author to transition from the solution space to the problem space, and the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons include the importance of understanding the problem space, challenging existing problems, and being patient with feedback in the problem space.

Reframing Estimates

Estimation is a difficult skill to master and is often a guess. It is hard to predict the future and come up with accurate estimates when you have limited information. To improve estimation, reframe it as a budget and focus on the tradeoffs that need to be made. With practice, it is possible to deliver on time and on budget.

How to Improve Your Hiring Process

The author joined a company and was responsible for hiring new people. They realized the interviewing process was not streamlined and decided to apply knowledge from their previous company to improve it. This included developing pre-briefs and de-briefs, creating templates on how to write feedback, starting a question bank, introducing shadowing, and giving a talk on how to conduct interviews. The author learned that it is important to standardize the interview process and provide the best candidate experience to attract the best talent.

How to Transition From a Large Company to a Startup With Ease

After leaving Amazon for Lambda School, the author was warned of the difficulty of adapting to a startup's working environment and culture. However, they found that 70-80% of the processes and tools they used at Amazon were transferable, and they were able to introduce new processes and tools with great caution. They also conducted retrospectives to retire processes that did not work.

How to Help Your Reports Grow and Pursue Their Goals

This engineer became a manager and used their experience with different managers to create a Career Development Plan (CDP) and Transition Development Plan (TDP) to help their team members manage their career growth and transition to new roles. They also encouraged their team to have mentors and provided them with opportunities to reach their goals. They learned that as a manager, they should be responsible for their team's happiness and normalize the talk about career.

Driving Clarity of Charter in a Large Organization

The Director of Engineering at a company was tasked with reorganizing a new area composed of four disparate teams, as well as dotted-line dependencies. The process included political machinations, deep-diving into technology, and building relationships with product management. After creating an inventory and analysis of the code areas, the Director had to get buy-in from their management chain and socialize the proposal. This process took seven weeks and included lessons such as patience, being cautious when committing, and communicating risks to executives.

Changing of a Guard

After a company underwent a significant transformation, the new leadership brought in new people to fill the ranks. The protagonist was eager to stay with the company, but was not given an opportunity to move up. To showcase their worth, they spoke with old management and other people from their field, and used a football analogy to express their interest to the new president. Ultimately, they learned that if you want something, you should be proactive and show your interest, and that the average work span of an employee in technology is two to three years.

Who To Promote? A Manager’s Dilemma

A manager was faced with the difficult decision of who to promote, with two candidates expressing interest. After testing their commitment and assessing the team's feelings, the manager decided to promote the more experienced candidate, despite lacking leadership potential and people skills. This turned out to be the wrong decision, as the other candidate left the company and the promoted candidate did not work out as a manager. The manager learned that it is important to make the right decision, even if it means losing something, and to not make decisions based on the path of least resistance.

Managing Managers: The Three Don’ts

Managing managers is a different job than managing individual contributors and requires a different skill set. The author shares three mandatory don'ts for first-time managers of managers: don't impose your style, don't interact directly with their reports, and don't reveal all you know. These don'ts are important to help managers grow and become successful, and to ensure transparency and trust.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Limits of Too Much Trust

A leader learned the value of verifiable trust when one of their reports stopped working after being approved for a transfer to Berlin. After investigating, the leader found that the report had not been doing any work for a month and a half and had been absent from meetings. The leader spoke to the VP of Engineering and the report was transferred to Berlin, where they became a disciplinary problem. The leader learned lessons about trust, pair programming, and accepting that people may not want to be productive at their job.

Handling Tech Debt: A Story About a Notification System Gone Amiss

The Head of Platform Engineering at a company was tasked with managing tech debt, but was not given any PMs or budget to hire one. The team decided to track the latency of notifications through the systems, but found that the code explicitly dictated that the notifications should be delayed. After much work, they were able to tune a few variables which made the system much better for the users. The lesson learned was that documentation and organizational knowledge transfer are essential for understanding and managing tech debt.

Demystifying Story Points

Story points are a difficult concept to understand and can be mistakenly correlated with productivity or time. To fix this problem, story points should be used to measure complexity, risk, and unknowns instead of time. To ensure accurate estimates, the team must discuss why they disagree and understand the different information they have. This approach will help the team come up with more precise estimates and dissolve the perception that the team is not productive.

A New Manager Role: Transitioning from the Solution to Problem Space

This article discusses the transition from a technical person to a manager, and the importance of focusing on the problem space rather than the solution space. It outlines the actions taken by the author to transition from the solution space to the problem space, and the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons include the importance of understanding the problem space, challenging existing problems, and being patient with feedback in the problem space.

Reframing Estimates

Estimation is a difficult skill to master and is often a guess. It is hard to predict the future and come up with accurate estimates when you have limited information. To improve estimation, reframe it as a budget and focus on the tradeoffs that need to be made. With practice, it is possible to deliver on time and on budget.

How to Improve Your Hiring Process

The author joined a company and was responsible for hiring new people. They realized the interviewing process was not streamlined and decided to apply knowledge from their previous company to improve it. This included developing pre-briefs and de-briefs, creating templates on how to write feedback, starting a question bank, introducing shadowing, and giving a talk on how to conduct interviews. The author learned that it is important to standardize the interview process and provide the best candidate experience to attract the best talent.

How to Transition From a Large Company to a Startup With Ease

After leaving Amazon for Lambda School, the author was warned of the difficulty of adapting to a startup's working environment and culture. However, they found that 70-80% of the processes and tools they used at Amazon were transferable, and they were able to introduce new processes and tools with great caution. They also conducted retrospectives to retire processes that did not work.

How to Help Your Reports Grow and Pursue Their Goals

This engineer became a manager and used their experience with different managers to create a Career Development Plan (CDP) and Transition Development Plan (TDP) to help their team members manage their career growth and transition to new roles. They also encouraged their team to have mentors and provided them with opportunities to reach their goals. They learned that as a manager, they should be responsible for their team's happiness and normalize the talk about career.

Driving Clarity of Charter in a Large Organization

The Director of Engineering at a company was tasked with reorganizing a new area composed of four disparate teams, as well as dotted-line dependencies. The process included political machinations, deep-diving into technology, and building relationships with product management. After creating an inventory and analysis of the code areas, the Director had to get buy-in from their management chain and socialize the proposal. This process took seven weeks and included lessons such as patience, being cautious when committing, and communicating risks to executives.

Changing of a Guard

After a company underwent a significant transformation, the new leadership brought in new people to fill the ranks. The protagonist was eager to stay with the company, but was not given an opportunity to move up. To showcase their worth, they spoke with old management and other people from their field, and used a football analogy to express their interest to the new president. Ultimately, they learned that if you want something, you should be proactive and show your interest, and that the average work span of an employee in technology is two to three years.

Who To Promote? A Manager’s Dilemma

A manager was faced with the difficult decision of who to promote, with two candidates expressing interest. After testing their commitment and assessing the team's feelings, the manager decided to promote the more experienced candidate, despite lacking leadership potential and people skills. This turned out to be the wrong decision, as the other candidate left the company and the promoted candidate did not work out as a manager. The manager learned that it is important to make the right decision, even if it means losing something, and to not make decisions based on the path of least resistance.

Managing Managers: The Three Don’ts

Managing managers is a different job than managing individual contributors and requires a different skill set. The author shares three mandatory don'ts for first-time managers of managers: don't impose your style, don't interact directly with their reports, and don't reveal all you know. These don'ts are important to help managers grow and become successful, and to ensure transparency and trust.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.