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How to Ensure Company-Wide Alignment

When the author joined a small startup, they noticed that employees lacked direction and engagement. To address this, the author introduced minimal and least-demanding pieces such as one-pagers, team representatives, and regular conversations to build alignment and communication. This enabled employees to preserve their autonomy while also increasing engagement and clarity. The author learned that introducing lightweight processes and making them easy and concise is key to getting people to do the right thing.

How to Restructure Organization and Break Down Silos

As the company scaled, communication issues arose due to the shared services model. To address this, the company shifted to a group lead model with four individual group leads that owned a portion of the business and had dedicated design, development and product management resources. This allowed for subject matter experts in particular areas of the product and gave people the ability to own, measure and develop UX over time. However, it also created challenges with career paths. Extra work was needed to give people the breadth of knowledge and experience so they wouldn't feel limited.

When First-Time Founders Become Managers

This article discusses the challenges of working with first-time founders and how to best leverage their expertise. It outlines three key actions to take: setting up a two-way feedback mechanism, establishing a clear accountability framework, and overleveraging skip-level one-on-ones. It also provides lessons learned, such as not assuming the founders know what you need and asking upfront if they have done something before.

Agile or Not Agile: That Is the Question

This article discusses the challenges of working in the traditional healthcare sector, particularly in insurance, due to the lack of continual feedback and slow development cycles. To address this, the company adopted the Shape Up framework, which allowed for longer cycles, more resilience to the lack of data, and the ability to ship asynchronously to the code. The company also modified Agile to serve their needs and learned how to separate shipping from delivering features to customers. This allowed them to move onto the next thing while their program management and marketing teams worked on the actual deployment of the feature.

Building a Team in the Midwest

This article discusses the challenges of hiring in the Midwest, specifically in Columbus, Ohio. It outlines the actions taken to find talent with the necessary skill sets, such as targeting people who had worked on ATM machines, medical hardware integration, etc. and looking for people who wanted to work in an Agile environment. It also discusses the lessons learned, such as the importance of general skill sets over specific ones, allowing leaders to make mistakes, and being willing to change the interview process.

An Integral Career Progression Path for Engineering Teams

Organizations often create career progression paths that only focus on developing an employee's skills in a specific area of the business, which can lead to employees lacking holistic skills and experience. To address this, a career progression path should be created that includes three layers of competencies: Execution, Technical Competency, and Leadership. This will help engineers make informed decisions when navigating their career paths, and will also help them develop the skills and experience needed to succeed in technical and leadership roles.

The Problem of a Time-Quality Tradeoff

Product-first organizations often struggle with the dilemma of delivering a feature with the best quality or within a stipulated timeline. This is caused by a lack of communication between Product and Engineering teams on the nature of a feature. To address this, Product Owners should make a conscious decision of whether a feature is time- or quality-sensitive before engineering teams start with development. This helps Product and Engineering teams to work in sync with common goals and objectives, and to scope and organize their work based on the nature of the product or feature.

Fostering a Culture That Celebrates Failures and Successes Equally

This article discusses how an organization was able to successfully encourage their teams to experiment with new ideas by creating an event called "Fuckup Evenings" where people could openly talk about their failures. It also highlights the importance of setting boundaries and having leadership team members talk about their own failures in order to foster a culture of embracing failure.

Hiring the Right Product Person for Your Team

Hiring the right product person is a difficult challenge for product leaders. To do this, it is important to identify the company's needs and the specific competencies required to address them. Hard and soft skills should be taken into consideration, and an interview checklist should be prepared. It is also important to explain the company culture and mission/vision to potential hires, as this is often a critical factor in attracting great talent. Finally, it is important to take into consideration other people's perspectives, especially if they have worked with the potential hire in the past.

Building a New Product Hub From Scratch

This article describes the challenges of building a new hub from scratch in Barcelona, including the need to hire new people, onboard them, and make them familiar with the company's processes, product(s), context, people, and culture. It also outlines the actions taken to ensure autonomy while still being connected to the main office, such as spending time in the main office before launching the hub, having new hires spend time interacting with people from the main office, and starting small and committing to smaller things with less significant impact. The article also highlights the importance of remote communication and investing time to introduce preliminaries and share context before asking for any action.

Transitioning From a Co-Founder to a CTO

The main challenge for the CTO of a growing company is transitioning from working on the product to managing people. This requires letting go of control and ownership of the code, and learning to trust the people hired. External help, such as a coach or mentor, can be useful in guiding the transition and improving communication skills. As the team grows, the CTO must build a process that allows everyone to contribute and be visible.

How to Deal With Employees Performing Below Expectations

A manager was faced with an underperforming employee and had to figure out the best way to address the situation. After months of understanding the problem, working with an executive coach, and consulting with HR and a lawyer, the manager set goals and benchmarks for the employee to improve. When the employee failed to meet the goals, the manager had to let them go. Lessons learned included being clear about expectations upfront, keeping communication channels open, involving different professionals, being transparent, and not delaying action.

Supporting Your Employees In Their Career Transition

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a QA engineer to a development role, including the challenges faced and lessons learned. The company had to assess the resources needed to support the transition and training, and create a timeline with milestones for the transition. The transition was successful and highlighted the company's goal of supporting career progressions of their employees. The manager learned that they should be more concerned with their employees' happiness and career progression.

Building a Prototype With Limited Resources

This article discusses the process of building a prototype with limited resources and how to manage the risks associated with it. It emphasizes the importance of setting clear objectives and success metrics, envisioning the MVP, and checking in regularly to ensure that the project is on track. It also highlights the need to keep a written trail to prevent misunderstandings and to make sure that everyone is aware of the risks associated with the project.

How to Achieve Cross-Departmental Alignment

Misunderstandings and misalignments between departments can be caused by different terminologies, agendas, and contexts. To overcome this, it is important to ask questions, listen carefully, and refer to first principles and annual business goals. Everyone should understand their role in the company and how it contributes to the company's success, and use first principles as pillars to safeguard that. If all else fails, people should take the calculated risk to choose the best approach.

Preventing Engineering Turnover

This article discusses how to retain software engineers, especially in smaller companies, in the face of competition from larger companies. The author's approach was to focus on creating a company culture of psychological safety, lightheartedness, empathy, autonomy, and transparency. This approach was successful in retaining talent, and the author believes that engineers often look beyond financial compensation when deciding on a company.

Staying Technical as a Mobile Engineering Manager

Mobile engineering managers often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies in the industry. To stay up to date, they should read technical blogs, attend conferences, and become familiar with recent trends in software engineering. While it is possible to stay technical, managers should focus on developing a shared context between different departments and creating a synergy that will bring value to the business.

Handling Strong Personalities on the Team

A manager encountered a domineering engineer on their team who was overly concerned with tech debt and proposed a number of changes, but due to his domineering personality, everyone else on the team was taking his opinion for granted and avoiding confronting him. The manager had to confront the engineer and ask for a foolproof strategy for tech debt before moving forward, as well as repeatedly talk to other people on the team and encourage them to voice their opinions. The manager learned that they had to confront domineering engineers and make them accountable, do due diligence, and demonstrate the exact value of a project before moving forward.

Setting the Right OKRs With Your Team

A SEO team was tasked with increasing their page indexing in Google to 7 percent. To achieve this, the team was divided into small groups and encouraged to brainstorm ideas. After discussing the ideas and voting on them, five sprint stories were developed and tasks were assigned. At the end of the quarter, the team managed to reach 13 percent, a 17 percent increase. The lesson learned was that involving the team in goal-setting and having a collaborative brainstorming session was beneficial in terms of ownership and engagement.

Improving an Underperforming Team by Instilling in Them a Sense of Ownership

A small team of engineers was not producing satisfactory work due to the senior engineer's overburdening of knowledge from multiple projects. To solve this, the team was split into smaller squads and given ownership of specific services. Through documentation, brown bag sessions, and support from the manager, the team was able to become more organized and successful, eventually being assigned the most ambitious project. The manager learned that ownership and the right balance of support and motivation are key to success.

How to Ensure Company-Wide Alignment

When the author joined a small startup, they noticed that employees lacked direction and engagement. To address this, the author introduced minimal and least-demanding pieces such as one-pagers, team representatives, and regular conversations to build alignment and communication. This enabled employees to preserve their autonomy while also increasing engagement and clarity. The author learned that introducing lightweight processes and making them easy and concise is key to getting people to do the right thing.

How to Restructure Organization and Break Down Silos

As the company scaled, communication issues arose due to the shared services model. To address this, the company shifted to a group lead model with four individual group leads that owned a portion of the business and had dedicated design, development and product management resources. This allowed for subject matter experts in particular areas of the product and gave people the ability to own, measure and develop UX over time. However, it also created challenges with career paths. Extra work was needed to give people the breadth of knowledge and experience so they wouldn't feel limited.

When First-Time Founders Become Managers

This article discusses the challenges of working with first-time founders and how to best leverage their expertise. It outlines three key actions to take: setting up a two-way feedback mechanism, establishing a clear accountability framework, and overleveraging skip-level one-on-ones. It also provides lessons learned, such as not assuming the founders know what you need and asking upfront if they have done something before.

Agile or Not Agile: That Is the Question

This article discusses the challenges of working in the traditional healthcare sector, particularly in insurance, due to the lack of continual feedback and slow development cycles. To address this, the company adopted the Shape Up framework, which allowed for longer cycles, more resilience to the lack of data, and the ability to ship asynchronously to the code. The company also modified Agile to serve their needs and learned how to separate shipping from delivering features to customers. This allowed them to move onto the next thing while their program management and marketing teams worked on the actual deployment of the feature.

Building a Team in the Midwest

This article discusses the challenges of hiring in the Midwest, specifically in Columbus, Ohio. It outlines the actions taken to find talent with the necessary skill sets, such as targeting people who had worked on ATM machines, medical hardware integration, etc. and looking for people who wanted to work in an Agile environment. It also discusses the lessons learned, such as the importance of general skill sets over specific ones, allowing leaders to make mistakes, and being willing to change the interview process.

An Integral Career Progression Path for Engineering Teams

Organizations often create career progression paths that only focus on developing an employee's skills in a specific area of the business, which can lead to employees lacking holistic skills and experience. To address this, a career progression path should be created that includes three layers of competencies: Execution, Technical Competency, and Leadership. This will help engineers make informed decisions when navigating their career paths, and will also help them develop the skills and experience needed to succeed in technical and leadership roles.

The Problem of a Time-Quality Tradeoff

Product-first organizations often struggle with the dilemma of delivering a feature with the best quality or within a stipulated timeline. This is caused by a lack of communication between Product and Engineering teams on the nature of a feature. To address this, Product Owners should make a conscious decision of whether a feature is time- or quality-sensitive before engineering teams start with development. This helps Product and Engineering teams to work in sync with common goals and objectives, and to scope and organize their work based on the nature of the product or feature.

Fostering a Culture That Celebrates Failures and Successes Equally

This article discusses how an organization was able to successfully encourage their teams to experiment with new ideas by creating an event called "Fuckup Evenings" where people could openly talk about their failures. It also highlights the importance of setting boundaries and having leadership team members talk about their own failures in order to foster a culture of embracing failure.

Hiring the Right Product Person for Your Team

Hiring the right product person is a difficult challenge for product leaders. To do this, it is important to identify the company's needs and the specific competencies required to address them. Hard and soft skills should be taken into consideration, and an interview checklist should be prepared. It is also important to explain the company culture and mission/vision to potential hires, as this is often a critical factor in attracting great talent. Finally, it is important to take into consideration other people's perspectives, especially if they have worked with the potential hire in the past.

Building a New Product Hub From Scratch

This article describes the challenges of building a new hub from scratch in Barcelona, including the need to hire new people, onboard them, and make them familiar with the company's processes, product(s), context, people, and culture. It also outlines the actions taken to ensure autonomy while still being connected to the main office, such as spending time in the main office before launching the hub, having new hires spend time interacting with people from the main office, and starting small and committing to smaller things with less significant impact. The article also highlights the importance of remote communication and investing time to introduce preliminaries and share context before asking for any action.

Transitioning From a Co-Founder to a CTO

The main challenge for the CTO of a growing company is transitioning from working on the product to managing people. This requires letting go of control and ownership of the code, and learning to trust the people hired. External help, such as a coach or mentor, can be useful in guiding the transition and improving communication skills. As the team grows, the CTO must build a process that allows everyone to contribute and be visible.

How to Deal With Employees Performing Below Expectations

A manager was faced with an underperforming employee and had to figure out the best way to address the situation. After months of understanding the problem, working with an executive coach, and consulting with HR and a lawyer, the manager set goals and benchmarks for the employee to improve. When the employee failed to meet the goals, the manager had to let them go. Lessons learned included being clear about expectations upfront, keeping communication channels open, involving different professionals, being transparent, and not delaying action.

Supporting Your Employees In Their Career Transition

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a QA engineer to a development role, including the challenges faced and lessons learned. The company had to assess the resources needed to support the transition and training, and create a timeline with milestones for the transition. The transition was successful and highlighted the company's goal of supporting career progressions of their employees. The manager learned that they should be more concerned with their employees' happiness and career progression.

Building a Prototype With Limited Resources

This article discusses the process of building a prototype with limited resources and how to manage the risks associated with it. It emphasizes the importance of setting clear objectives and success metrics, envisioning the MVP, and checking in regularly to ensure that the project is on track. It also highlights the need to keep a written trail to prevent misunderstandings and to make sure that everyone is aware of the risks associated with the project.

How to Achieve Cross-Departmental Alignment

Misunderstandings and misalignments between departments can be caused by different terminologies, agendas, and contexts. To overcome this, it is important to ask questions, listen carefully, and refer to first principles and annual business goals. Everyone should understand their role in the company and how it contributes to the company's success, and use first principles as pillars to safeguard that. If all else fails, people should take the calculated risk to choose the best approach.

Preventing Engineering Turnover

This article discusses how to retain software engineers, especially in smaller companies, in the face of competition from larger companies. The author's approach was to focus on creating a company culture of psychological safety, lightheartedness, empathy, autonomy, and transparency. This approach was successful in retaining talent, and the author believes that engineers often look beyond financial compensation when deciding on a company.

Staying Technical as a Mobile Engineering Manager

Mobile engineering managers often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies in the industry. To stay up to date, they should read technical blogs, attend conferences, and become familiar with recent trends in software engineering. While it is possible to stay technical, managers should focus on developing a shared context between different departments and creating a synergy that will bring value to the business.

Handling Strong Personalities on the Team

A manager encountered a domineering engineer on their team who was overly concerned with tech debt and proposed a number of changes, but due to his domineering personality, everyone else on the team was taking his opinion for granted and avoiding confronting him. The manager had to confront the engineer and ask for a foolproof strategy for tech debt before moving forward, as well as repeatedly talk to other people on the team and encourage them to voice their opinions. The manager learned that they had to confront domineering engineers and make them accountable, do due diligence, and demonstrate the exact value of a project before moving forward.

Setting the Right OKRs With Your Team

A SEO team was tasked with increasing their page indexing in Google to 7 percent. To achieve this, the team was divided into small groups and encouraged to brainstorm ideas. After discussing the ideas and voting on them, five sprint stories were developed and tasks were assigned. At the end of the quarter, the team managed to reach 13 percent, a 17 percent increase. The lesson learned was that involving the team in goal-setting and having a collaborative brainstorming session was beneficial in terms of ownership and engagement.

Improving an Underperforming Team by Instilling in Them a Sense of Ownership

A small team of engineers was not producing satisfactory work due to the senior engineer's overburdening of knowledge from multiple projects. To solve this, the team was split into smaller squads and given ownership of specific services. Through documentation, brown bag sessions, and support from the manager, the team was able to become more organized and successful, eventually being assigned the most ambitious project. The manager learned that ownership and the right balance of support and motivation are key to success.

How to Ensure Company-Wide Alignment

When the author joined a small startup, they noticed that employees lacked direction and engagement. To address this, the author introduced minimal and least-demanding pieces such as one-pagers, team representatives, and regular conversations to build alignment and communication. This enabled employees to preserve their autonomy while also increasing engagement and clarity. The author learned that introducing lightweight processes and making them easy and concise is key to getting people to do the right thing.

How to Restructure Organization and Break Down Silos

As the company scaled, communication issues arose due to the shared services model. To address this, the company shifted to a group lead model with four individual group leads that owned a portion of the business and had dedicated design, development and product management resources. This allowed for subject matter experts in particular areas of the product and gave people the ability to own, measure and develop UX over time. However, it also created challenges with career paths. Extra work was needed to give people the breadth of knowledge and experience so they wouldn't feel limited.

When First-Time Founders Become Managers

This article discusses the challenges of working with first-time founders and how to best leverage their expertise. It outlines three key actions to take: setting up a two-way feedback mechanism, establishing a clear accountability framework, and overleveraging skip-level one-on-ones. It also provides lessons learned, such as not assuming the founders know what you need and asking upfront if they have done something before.

Agile or Not Agile: That Is the Question

This article discusses the challenges of working in the traditional healthcare sector, particularly in insurance, due to the lack of continual feedback and slow development cycles. To address this, the company adopted the Shape Up framework, which allowed for longer cycles, more resilience to the lack of data, and the ability to ship asynchronously to the code. The company also modified Agile to serve their needs and learned how to separate shipping from delivering features to customers. This allowed them to move onto the next thing while their program management and marketing teams worked on the actual deployment of the feature.

Building a Team in the Midwest

This article discusses the challenges of hiring in the Midwest, specifically in Columbus, Ohio. It outlines the actions taken to find talent with the necessary skill sets, such as targeting people who had worked on ATM machines, medical hardware integration, etc. and looking for people who wanted to work in an Agile environment. It also discusses the lessons learned, such as the importance of general skill sets over specific ones, allowing leaders to make mistakes, and being willing to change the interview process.

An Integral Career Progression Path for Engineering Teams

Organizations often create career progression paths that only focus on developing an employee's skills in a specific area of the business, which can lead to employees lacking holistic skills and experience. To address this, a career progression path should be created that includes three layers of competencies: Execution, Technical Competency, and Leadership. This will help engineers make informed decisions when navigating their career paths, and will also help them develop the skills and experience needed to succeed in technical and leadership roles.

The Problem of a Time-Quality Tradeoff

Product-first organizations often struggle with the dilemma of delivering a feature with the best quality or within a stipulated timeline. This is caused by a lack of communication between Product and Engineering teams on the nature of a feature. To address this, Product Owners should make a conscious decision of whether a feature is time- or quality-sensitive before engineering teams start with development. This helps Product and Engineering teams to work in sync with common goals and objectives, and to scope and organize their work based on the nature of the product or feature.

Fostering a Culture That Celebrates Failures and Successes Equally

This article discusses how an organization was able to successfully encourage their teams to experiment with new ideas by creating an event called "Fuckup Evenings" where people could openly talk about their failures. It also highlights the importance of setting boundaries and having leadership team members talk about their own failures in order to foster a culture of embracing failure.

Hiring the Right Product Person for Your Team

Hiring the right product person is a difficult challenge for product leaders. To do this, it is important to identify the company's needs and the specific competencies required to address them. Hard and soft skills should be taken into consideration, and an interview checklist should be prepared. It is also important to explain the company culture and mission/vision to potential hires, as this is often a critical factor in attracting great talent. Finally, it is important to take into consideration other people's perspectives, especially if they have worked with the potential hire in the past.

Building a New Product Hub From Scratch

This article describes the challenges of building a new hub from scratch in Barcelona, including the need to hire new people, onboard them, and make them familiar with the company's processes, product(s), context, people, and culture. It also outlines the actions taken to ensure autonomy while still being connected to the main office, such as spending time in the main office before launching the hub, having new hires spend time interacting with people from the main office, and starting small and committing to smaller things with less significant impact. The article also highlights the importance of remote communication and investing time to introduce preliminaries and share context before asking for any action.

Transitioning From a Co-Founder to a CTO

The main challenge for the CTO of a growing company is transitioning from working on the product to managing people. This requires letting go of control and ownership of the code, and learning to trust the people hired. External help, such as a coach or mentor, can be useful in guiding the transition and improving communication skills. As the team grows, the CTO must build a process that allows everyone to contribute and be visible.

How to Deal With Employees Performing Below Expectations

A manager was faced with an underperforming employee and had to figure out the best way to address the situation. After months of understanding the problem, working with an executive coach, and consulting with HR and a lawyer, the manager set goals and benchmarks for the employee to improve. When the employee failed to meet the goals, the manager had to let them go. Lessons learned included being clear about expectations upfront, keeping communication channels open, involving different professionals, being transparent, and not delaying action.

Supporting Your Employees In Their Career Transition

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a QA engineer to a development role, including the challenges faced and lessons learned. The company had to assess the resources needed to support the transition and training, and create a timeline with milestones for the transition. The transition was successful and highlighted the company's goal of supporting career progressions of their employees. The manager learned that they should be more concerned with their employees' happiness and career progression.

Building a Prototype With Limited Resources

This article discusses the process of building a prototype with limited resources and how to manage the risks associated with it. It emphasizes the importance of setting clear objectives and success metrics, envisioning the MVP, and checking in regularly to ensure that the project is on track. It also highlights the need to keep a written trail to prevent misunderstandings and to make sure that everyone is aware of the risks associated with the project.

How to Achieve Cross-Departmental Alignment

Misunderstandings and misalignments between departments can be caused by different terminologies, agendas, and contexts. To overcome this, it is important to ask questions, listen carefully, and refer to first principles and annual business goals. Everyone should understand their role in the company and how it contributes to the company's success, and use first principles as pillars to safeguard that. If all else fails, people should take the calculated risk to choose the best approach.

Preventing Engineering Turnover

This article discusses how to retain software engineers, especially in smaller companies, in the face of competition from larger companies. The author's approach was to focus on creating a company culture of psychological safety, lightheartedness, empathy, autonomy, and transparency. This approach was successful in retaining talent, and the author believes that engineers often look beyond financial compensation when deciding on a company.

Staying Technical as a Mobile Engineering Manager

Mobile engineering managers often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies in the industry. To stay up to date, they should read technical blogs, attend conferences, and become familiar with recent trends in software engineering. While it is possible to stay technical, managers should focus on developing a shared context between different departments and creating a synergy that will bring value to the business.

Handling Strong Personalities on the Team

A manager encountered a domineering engineer on their team who was overly concerned with tech debt and proposed a number of changes, but due to his domineering personality, everyone else on the team was taking his opinion for granted and avoiding confronting him. The manager had to confront the engineer and ask for a foolproof strategy for tech debt before moving forward, as well as repeatedly talk to other people on the team and encourage them to voice their opinions. The manager learned that they had to confront domineering engineers and make them accountable, do due diligence, and demonstrate the exact value of a project before moving forward.

Setting the Right OKRs With Your Team

A SEO team was tasked with increasing their page indexing in Google to 7 percent. To achieve this, the team was divided into small groups and encouraged to brainstorm ideas. After discussing the ideas and voting on them, five sprint stories were developed and tasks were assigned. At the end of the quarter, the team managed to reach 13 percent, a 17 percent increase. The lesson learned was that involving the team in goal-setting and having a collaborative brainstorming session was beneficial in terms of ownership and engagement.

Improving an Underperforming Team by Instilling in Them a Sense of Ownership

A small team of engineers was not producing satisfactory work due to the senior engineer's overburdening of knowledge from multiple projects. To solve this, the team was split into smaller squads and given ownership of specific services. Through documentation, brown bag sessions, and support from the manager, the team was able to become more organized and successful, eventually being assigned the most ambitious project. The manager learned that ownership and the right balance of support and motivation are key to success.

How to Ensure Company-Wide Alignment

When the author joined a small startup, they noticed that employees lacked direction and engagement. To address this, the author introduced minimal and least-demanding pieces such as one-pagers, team representatives, and regular conversations to build alignment and communication. This enabled employees to preserve their autonomy while also increasing engagement and clarity. The author learned that introducing lightweight processes and making them easy and concise is key to getting people to do the right thing.

How to Restructure Organization and Break Down Silos

As the company scaled, communication issues arose due to the shared services model. To address this, the company shifted to a group lead model with four individual group leads that owned a portion of the business and had dedicated design, development and product management resources. This allowed for subject matter experts in particular areas of the product and gave people the ability to own, measure and develop UX over time. However, it also created challenges with career paths. Extra work was needed to give people the breadth of knowledge and experience so they wouldn't feel limited.

When First-Time Founders Become Managers

This article discusses the challenges of working with first-time founders and how to best leverage their expertise. It outlines three key actions to take: setting up a two-way feedback mechanism, establishing a clear accountability framework, and overleveraging skip-level one-on-ones. It also provides lessons learned, such as not assuming the founders know what you need and asking upfront if they have done something before.

Agile or Not Agile: That Is the Question

This article discusses the challenges of working in the traditional healthcare sector, particularly in insurance, due to the lack of continual feedback and slow development cycles. To address this, the company adopted the Shape Up framework, which allowed for longer cycles, more resilience to the lack of data, and the ability to ship asynchronously to the code. The company also modified Agile to serve their needs and learned how to separate shipping from delivering features to customers. This allowed them to move onto the next thing while their program management and marketing teams worked on the actual deployment of the feature.

Building a Team in the Midwest

This article discusses the challenges of hiring in the Midwest, specifically in Columbus, Ohio. It outlines the actions taken to find talent with the necessary skill sets, such as targeting people who had worked on ATM machines, medical hardware integration, etc. and looking for people who wanted to work in an Agile environment. It also discusses the lessons learned, such as the importance of general skill sets over specific ones, allowing leaders to make mistakes, and being willing to change the interview process.

An Integral Career Progression Path for Engineering Teams

Organizations often create career progression paths that only focus on developing an employee's skills in a specific area of the business, which can lead to employees lacking holistic skills and experience. To address this, a career progression path should be created that includes three layers of competencies: Execution, Technical Competency, and Leadership. This will help engineers make informed decisions when navigating their career paths, and will also help them develop the skills and experience needed to succeed in technical and leadership roles.

The Problem of a Time-Quality Tradeoff

Product-first organizations often struggle with the dilemma of delivering a feature with the best quality or within a stipulated timeline. This is caused by a lack of communication between Product and Engineering teams on the nature of a feature. To address this, Product Owners should make a conscious decision of whether a feature is time- or quality-sensitive before engineering teams start with development. This helps Product and Engineering teams to work in sync with common goals and objectives, and to scope and organize their work based on the nature of the product or feature.

Fostering a Culture That Celebrates Failures and Successes Equally

This article discusses how an organization was able to successfully encourage their teams to experiment with new ideas by creating an event called "Fuckup Evenings" where people could openly talk about their failures. It also highlights the importance of setting boundaries and having leadership team members talk about their own failures in order to foster a culture of embracing failure.

Hiring the Right Product Person for Your Team

Hiring the right product person is a difficult challenge for product leaders. To do this, it is important to identify the company's needs and the specific competencies required to address them. Hard and soft skills should be taken into consideration, and an interview checklist should be prepared. It is also important to explain the company culture and mission/vision to potential hires, as this is often a critical factor in attracting great talent. Finally, it is important to take into consideration other people's perspectives, especially if they have worked with the potential hire in the past.

Building a New Product Hub From Scratch

This article describes the challenges of building a new hub from scratch in Barcelona, including the need to hire new people, onboard them, and make them familiar with the company's processes, product(s), context, people, and culture. It also outlines the actions taken to ensure autonomy while still being connected to the main office, such as spending time in the main office before launching the hub, having new hires spend time interacting with people from the main office, and starting small and committing to smaller things with less significant impact. The article also highlights the importance of remote communication and investing time to introduce preliminaries and share context before asking for any action.

Transitioning From a Co-Founder to a CTO

The main challenge for the CTO of a growing company is transitioning from working on the product to managing people. This requires letting go of control and ownership of the code, and learning to trust the people hired. External help, such as a coach or mentor, can be useful in guiding the transition and improving communication skills. As the team grows, the CTO must build a process that allows everyone to contribute and be visible.

How to Deal With Employees Performing Below Expectations

A manager was faced with an underperforming employee and had to figure out the best way to address the situation. After months of understanding the problem, working with an executive coach, and consulting with HR and a lawyer, the manager set goals and benchmarks for the employee to improve. When the employee failed to meet the goals, the manager had to let them go. Lessons learned included being clear about expectations upfront, keeping communication channels open, involving different professionals, being transparent, and not delaying action.

Supporting Your Employees In Their Career Transition

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a QA engineer to a development role, including the challenges faced and lessons learned. The company had to assess the resources needed to support the transition and training, and create a timeline with milestones for the transition. The transition was successful and highlighted the company's goal of supporting career progressions of their employees. The manager learned that they should be more concerned with their employees' happiness and career progression.

Building a Prototype With Limited Resources

This article discusses the process of building a prototype with limited resources and how to manage the risks associated with it. It emphasizes the importance of setting clear objectives and success metrics, envisioning the MVP, and checking in regularly to ensure that the project is on track. It also highlights the need to keep a written trail to prevent misunderstandings and to make sure that everyone is aware of the risks associated with the project.

How to Achieve Cross-Departmental Alignment

Misunderstandings and misalignments between departments can be caused by different terminologies, agendas, and contexts. To overcome this, it is important to ask questions, listen carefully, and refer to first principles and annual business goals. Everyone should understand their role in the company and how it contributes to the company's success, and use first principles as pillars to safeguard that. If all else fails, people should take the calculated risk to choose the best approach.

Preventing Engineering Turnover

This article discusses how to retain software engineers, especially in smaller companies, in the face of competition from larger companies. The author's approach was to focus on creating a company culture of psychological safety, lightheartedness, empathy, autonomy, and transparency. This approach was successful in retaining talent, and the author believes that engineers often look beyond financial compensation when deciding on a company.

Staying Technical as a Mobile Engineering Manager

Mobile engineering managers often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies in the industry. To stay up to date, they should read technical blogs, attend conferences, and become familiar with recent trends in software engineering. While it is possible to stay technical, managers should focus on developing a shared context between different departments and creating a synergy that will bring value to the business.

Handling Strong Personalities on the Team

A manager encountered a domineering engineer on their team who was overly concerned with tech debt and proposed a number of changes, but due to his domineering personality, everyone else on the team was taking his opinion for granted and avoiding confronting him. The manager had to confront the engineer and ask for a foolproof strategy for tech debt before moving forward, as well as repeatedly talk to other people on the team and encourage them to voice their opinions. The manager learned that they had to confront domineering engineers and make them accountable, do due diligence, and demonstrate the exact value of a project before moving forward.

Setting the Right OKRs With Your Team

A SEO team was tasked with increasing their page indexing in Google to 7 percent. To achieve this, the team was divided into small groups and encouraged to brainstorm ideas. After discussing the ideas and voting on them, five sprint stories were developed and tasks were assigned. At the end of the quarter, the team managed to reach 13 percent, a 17 percent increase. The lesson learned was that involving the team in goal-setting and having a collaborative brainstorming session was beneficial in terms of ownership and engagement.

Improving an Underperforming Team by Instilling in Them a Sense of Ownership

A small team of engineers was not producing satisfactory work due to the senior engineer's overburdening of knowledge from multiple projects. To solve this, the team was split into smaller squads and given ownership of specific services. Through documentation, brown bag sessions, and support from the manager, the team was able to become more organized and successful, eventually being assigned the most ambitious project. The manager learned that ownership and the right balance of support and motivation are key to success.

How to Ensure Company-Wide Alignment

When the author joined a small startup, they noticed that employees lacked direction and engagement. To address this, the author introduced minimal and least-demanding pieces such as one-pagers, team representatives, and regular conversations to build alignment and communication. This enabled employees to preserve their autonomy while also increasing engagement and clarity. The author learned that introducing lightweight processes and making them easy and concise is key to getting people to do the right thing.

How to Restructure Organization and Break Down Silos

As the company scaled, communication issues arose due to the shared services model. To address this, the company shifted to a group lead model with four individual group leads that owned a portion of the business and had dedicated design, development and product management resources. This allowed for subject matter experts in particular areas of the product and gave people the ability to own, measure and develop UX over time. However, it also created challenges with career paths. Extra work was needed to give people the breadth of knowledge and experience so they wouldn't feel limited.

When First-Time Founders Become Managers

This article discusses the challenges of working with first-time founders and how to best leverage their expertise. It outlines three key actions to take: setting up a two-way feedback mechanism, establishing a clear accountability framework, and overleveraging skip-level one-on-ones. It also provides lessons learned, such as not assuming the founders know what you need and asking upfront if they have done something before.

Agile or Not Agile: That Is the Question

This article discusses the challenges of working in the traditional healthcare sector, particularly in insurance, due to the lack of continual feedback and slow development cycles. To address this, the company adopted the Shape Up framework, which allowed for longer cycles, more resilience to the lack of data, and the ability to ship asynchronously to the code. The company also modified Agile to serve their needs and learned how to separate shipping from delivering features to customers. This allowed them to move onto the next thing while their program management and marketing teams worked on the actual deployment of the feature.

Building a Team in the Midwest

This article discusses the challenges of hiring in the Midwest, specifically in Columbus, Ohio. It outlines the actions taken to find talent with the necessary skill sets, such as targeting people who had worked on ATM machines, medical hardware integration, etc. and looking for people who wanted to work in an Agile environment. It also discusses the lessons learned, such as the importance of general skill sets over specific ones, allowing leaders to make mistakes, and being willing to change the interview process.

An Integral Career Progression Path for Engineering Teams

Organizations often create career progression paths that only focus on developing an employee's skills in a specific area of the business, which can lead to employees lacking holistic skills and experience. To address this, a career progression path should be created that includes three layers of competencies: Execution, Technical Competency, and Leadership. This will help engineers make informed decisions when navigating their career paths, and will also help them develop the skills and experience needed to succeed in technical and leadership roles.

The Problem of a Time-Quality Tradeoff

Product-first organizations often struggle with the dilemma of delivering a feature with the best quality or within a stipulated timeline. This is caused by a lack of communication between Product and Engineering teams on the nature of a feature. To address this, Product Owners should make a conscious decision of whether a feature is time- or quality-sensitive before engineering teams start with development. This helps Product and Engineering teams to work in sync with common goals and objectives, and to scope and organize their work based on the nature of the product or feature.

Fostering a Culture That Celebrates Failures and Successes Equally

This article discusses how an organization was able to successfully encourage their teams to experiment with new ideas by creating an event called "Fuckup Evenings" where people could openly talk about their failures. It also highlights the importance of setting boundaries and having leadership team members talk about their own failures in order to foster a culture of embracing failure.

Hiring the Right Product Person for Your Team

Hiring the right product person is a difficult challenge for product leaders. To do this, it is important to identify the company's needs and the specific competencies required to address them. Hard and soft skills should be taken into consideration, and an interview checklist should be prepared. It is also important to explain the company culture and mission/vision to potential hires, as this is often a critical factor in attracting great talent. Finally, it is important to take into consideration other people's perspectives, especially if they have worked with the potential hire in the past.

Building a New Product Hub From Scratch

This article describes the challenges of building a new hub from scratch in Barcelona, including the need to hire new people, onboard them, and make them familiar with the company's processes, product(s), context, people, and culture. It also outlines the actions taken to ensure autonomy while still being connected to the main office, such as spending time in the main office before launching the hub, having new hires spend time interacting with people from the main office, and starting small and committing to smaller things with less significant impact. The article also highlights the importance of remote communication and investing time to introduce preliminaries and share context before asking for any action.

Transitioning From a Co-Founder to a CTO

The main challenge for the CTO of a growing company is transitioning from working on the product to managing people. This requires letting go of control and ownership of the code, and learning to trust the people hired. External help, such as a coach or mentor, can be useful in guiding the transition and improving communication skills. As the team grows, the CTO must build a process that allows everyone to contribute and be visible.

How to Deal With Employees Performing Below Expectations

A manager was faced with an underperforming employee and had to figure out the best way to address the situation. After months of understanding the problem, working with an executive coach, and consulting with HR and a lawyer, the manager set goals and benchmarks for the employee to improve. When the employee failed to meet the goals, the manager had to let them go. Lessons learned included being clear about expectations upfront, keeping communication channels open, involving different professionals, being transparent, and not delaying action.

Supporting Your Employees In Their Career Transition

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a QA engineer to a development role, including the challenges faced and lessons learned. The company had to assess the resources needed to support the transition and training, and create a timeline with milestones for the transition. The transition was successful and highlighted the company's goal of supporting career progressions of their employees. The manager learned that they should be more concerned with their employees' happiness and career progression.

Building a Prototype With Limited Resources

This article discusses the process of building a prototype with limited resources and how to manage the risks associated with it. It emphasizes the importance of setting clear objectives and success metrics, envisioning the MVP, and checking in regularly to ensure that the project is on track. It also highlights the need to keep a written trail to prevent misunderstandings and to make sure that everyone is aware of the risks associated with the project.

How to Achieve Cross-Departmental Alignment

Misunderstandings and misalignments between departments can be caused by different terminologies, agendas, and contexts. To overcome this, it is important to ask questions, listen carefully, and refer to first principles and annual business goals. Everyone should understand their role in the company and how it contributes to the company's success, and use first principles as pillars to safeguard that. If all else fails, people should take the calculated risk to choose the best approach.

Preventing Engineering Turnover

This article discusses how to retain software engineers, especially in smaller companies, in the face of competition from larger companies. The author's approach was to focus on creating a company culture of psychological safety, lightheartedness, empathy, autonomy, and transparency. This approach was successful in retaining talent, and the author believes that engineers often look beyond financial compensation when deciding on a company.

Staying Technical as a Mobile Engineering Manager

Mobile engineering managers often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies in the industry. To stay up to date, they should read technical blogs, attend conferences, and become familiar with recent trends in software engineering. While it is possible to stay technical, managers should focus on developing a shared context between different departments and creating a synergy that will bring value to the business.

Handling Strong Personalities on the Team

A manager encountered a domineering engineer on their team who was overly concerned with tech debt and proposed a number of changes, but due to his domineering personality, everyone else on the team was taking his opinion for granted and avoiding confronting him. The manager had to confront the engineer and ask for a foolproof strategy for tech debt before moving forward, as well as repeatedly talk to other people on the team and encourage them to voice their opinions. The manager learned that they had to confront domineering engineers and make them accountable, do due diligence, and demonstrate the exact value of a project before moving forward.

Setting the Right OKRs With Your Team

A SEO team was tasked with increasing their page indexing in Google to 7 percent. To achieve this, the team was divided into small groups and encouraged to brainstorm ideas. After discussing the ideas and voting on them, five sprint stories were developed and tasks were assigned. At the end of the quarter, the team managed to reach 13 percent, a 17 percent increase. The lesson learned was that involving the team in goal-setting and having a collaborative brainstorming session was beneficial in terms of ownership and engagement.

Improving an Underperforming Team by Instilling in Them a Sense of Ownership

A small team of engineers was not producing satisfactory work due to the senior engineer's overburdening of knowledge from multiple projects. To solve this, the team was split into smaller squads and given ownership of specific services. Through documentation, brown bag sessions, and support from the manager, the team was able to become more organized and successful, eventually being assigned the most ambitious project. The manager learned that ownership and the right balance of support and motivation are key to success.

How to Ensure Company-Wide Alignment

When the author joined a small startup, they noticed that employees lacked direction and engagement. To address this, the author introduced minimal and least-demanding pieces such as one-pagers, team representatives, and regular conversations to build alignment and communication. This enabled employees to preserve their autonomy while also increasing engagement and clarity. The author learned that introducing lightweight processes and making them easy and concise is key to getting people to do the right thing.

How to Restructure Organization and Break Down Silos

As the company scaled, communication issues arose due to the shared services model. To address this, the company shifted to a group lead model with four individual group leads that owned a portion of the business and had dedicated design, development and product management resources. This allowed for subject matter experts in particular areas of the product and gave people the ability to own, measure and develop UX over time. However, it also created challenges with career paths. Extra work was needed to give people the breadth of knowledge and experience so they wouldn't feel limited.

When First-Time Founders Become Managers

This article discusses the challenges of working with first-time founders and how to best leverage their expertise. It outlines three key actions to take: setting up a two-way feedback mechanism, establishing a clear accountability framework, and overleveraging skip-level one-on-ones. It also provides lessons learned, such as not assuming the founders know what you need and asking upfront if they have done something before.

Agile or Not Agile: That Is the Question

This article discusses the challenges of working in the traditional healthcare sector, particularly in insurance, due to the lack of continual feedback and slow development cycles. To address this, the company adopted the Shape Up framework, which allowed for longer cycles, more resilience to the lack of data, and the ability to ship asynchronously to the code. The company also modified Agile to serve their needs and learned how to separate shipping from delivering features to customers. This allowed them to move onto the next thing while their program management and marketing teams worked on the actual deployment of the feature.

Building a Team in the Midwest

This article discusses the challenges of hiring in the Midwest, specifically in Columbus, Ohio. It outlines the actions taken to find talent with the necessary skill sets, such as targeting people who had worked on ATM machines, medical hardware integration, etc. and looking for people who wanted to work in an Agile environment. It also discusses the lessons learned, such as the importance of general skill sets over specific ones, allowing leaders to make mistakes, and being willing to change the interview process.

An Integral Career Progression Path for Engineering Teams

Organizations often create career progression paths that only focus on developing an employee's skills in a specific area of the business, which can lead to employees lacking holistic skills and experience. To address this, a career progression path should be created that includes three layers of competencies: Execution, Technical Competency, and Leadership. This will help engineers make informed decisions when navigating their career paths, and will also help them develop the skills and experience needed to succeed in technical and leadership roles.

The Problem of a Time-Quality Tradeoff

Product-first organizations often struggle with the dilemma of delivering a feature with the best quality or within a stipulated timeline. This is caused by a lack of communication between Product and Engineering teams on the nature of a feature. To address this, Product Owners should make a conscious decision of whether a feature is time- or quality-sensitive before engineering teams start with development. This helps Product and Engineering teams to work in sync with common goals and objectives, and to scope and organize their work based on the nature of the product or feature.

Fostering a Culture That Celebrates Failures and Successes Equally

This article discusses how an organization was able to successfully encourage their teams to experiment with new ideas by creating an event called "Fuckup Evenings" where people could openly talk about their failures. It also highlights the importance of setting boundaries and having leadership team members talk about their own failures in order to foster a culture of embracing failure.

Hiring the Right Product Person for Your Team

Hiring the right product person is a difficult challenge for product leaders. To do this, it is important to identify the company's needs and the specific competencies required to address them. Hard and soft skills should be taken into consideration, and an interview checklist should be prepared. It is also important to explain the company culture and mission/vision to potential hires, as this is often a critical factor in attracting great talent. Finally, it is important to take into consideration other people's perspectives, especially if they have worked with the potential hire in the past.

Building a New Product Hub From Scratch

This article describes the challenges of building a new hub from scratch in Barcelona, including the need to hire new people, onboard them, and make them familiar with the company's processes, product(s), context, people, and culture. It also outlines the actions taken to ensure autonomy while still being connected to the main office, such as spending time in the main office before launching the hub, having new hires spend time interacting with people from the main office, and starting small and committing to smaller things with less significant impact. The article also highlights the importance of remote communication and investing time to introduce preliminaries and share context before asking for any action.

Transitioning From a Co-Founder to a CTO

The main challenge for the CTO of a growing company is transitioning from working on the product to managing people. This requires letting go of control and ownership of the code, and learning to trust the people hired. External help, such as a coach or mentor, can be useful in guiding the transition and improving communication skills. As the team grows, the CTO must build a process that allows everyone to contribute and be visible.

How to Deal With Employees Performing Below Expectations

A manager was faced with an underperforming employee and had to figure out the best way to address the situation. After months of understanding the problem, working with an executive coach, and consulting with HR and a lawyer, the manager set goals and benchmarks for the employee to improve. When the employee failed to meet the goals, the manager had to let them go. Lessons learned included being clear about expectations upfront, keeping communication channels open, involving different professionals, being transparent, and not delaying action.

Supporting Your Employees In Their Career Transition

This case study outlines the process of transitioning a QA engineer to a development role, including the challenges faced and lessons learned. The company had to assess the resources needed to support the transition and training, and create a timeline with milestones for the transition. The transition was successful and highlighted the company's goal of supporting career progressions of their employees. The manager learned that they should be more concerned with their employees' happiness and career progression.

Building a Prototype With Limited Resources

This article discusses the process of building a prototype with limited resources and how to manage the risks associated with it. It emphasizes the importance of setting clear objectives and success metrics, envisioning the MVP, and checking in regularly to ensure that the project is on track. It also highlights the need to keep a written trail to prevent misunderstandings and to make sure that everyone is aware of the risks associated with the project.

How to Achieve Cross-Departmental Alignment

Misunderstandings and misalignments between departments can be caused by different terminologies, agendas, and contexts. To overcome this, it is important to ask questions, listen carefully, and refer to first principles and annual business goals. Everyone should understand their role in the company and how it contributes to the company's success, and use first principles as pillars to safeguard that. If all else fails, people should take the calculated risk to choose the best approach.

Preventing Engineering Turnover

This article discusses how to retain software engineers, especially in smaller companies, in the face of competition from larger companies. The author's approach was to focus on creating a company culture of psychological safety, lightheartedness, empathy, autonomy, and transparency. This approach was successful in retaining talent, and the author believes that engineers often look beyond financial compensation when deciding on a company.

Staying Technical as a Mobile Engineering Manager

Mobile engineering managers often struggle to keep up with the rapidly evolving technologies in the industry. To stay up to date, they should read technical blogs, attend conferences, and become familiar with recent trends in software engineering. While it is possible to stay technical, managers should focus on developing a shared context between different departments and creating a synergy that will bring value to the business.

Handling Strong Personalities on the Team

A manager encountered a domineering engineer on their team who was overly concerned with tech debt and proposed a number of changes, but due to his domineering personality, everyone else on the team was taking his opinion for granted and avoiding confronting him. The manager had to confront the engineer and ask for a foolproof strategy for tech debt before moving forward, as well as repeatedly talk to other people on the team and encourage them to voice their opinions. The manager learned that they had to confront domineering engineers and make them accountable, do due diligence, and demonstrate the exact value of a project before moving forward.

Setting the Right OKRs With Your Team

A SEO team was tasked with increasing their page indexing in Google to 7 percent. To achieve this, the team was divided into small groups and encouraged to brainstorm ideas. After discussing the ideas and voting on them, five sprint stories were developed and tasks were assigned. At the end of the quarter, the team managed to reach 13 percent, a 17 percent increase. The lesson learned was that involving the team in goal-setting and having a collaborative brainstorming session was beneficial in terms of ownership and engagement.

Improving an Underperforming Team by Instilling in Them a Sense of Ownership

A small team of engineers was not producing satisfactory work due to the senior engineer's overburdening of knowledge from multiple projects. To solve this, the team was split into smaller squads and given ownership of specific services. Through documentation, brown bag sessions, and support from the manager, the team was able to become more organized and successful, eventually being assigned the most ambitious project. The manager learned that ownership and the right balance of support and motivation are key to success.