Knowledge shared by our community

Deciding If a Management Is the Right Career Path for You

An engineer who wanted to stay on the technical route was asked to try out management. After struggling to juggle between too many things, they took management training and read books and articles about management. This helped them to adjust their management style to each individual on the team, ask the right questions, and become more comfortable with silence during one-on-ones. They learned that what made them an accomplished IC won't make them a good manager and that there are fewer opportunities for principal engineers than for managers.

Influencing People and Getting Your Items Into Their Backlog

A senior IC was interested in having teams work on reliability-related initiatives but lacked engineers to make it a reality. To make his case, he analyzed data, tailored his message to different audiences, and proposed solutions in iterative steps. He learned to align his goals with the organization's planning cadence, tie improvements to business outcomes and customer needs, talk to stakeholders separately, not leave anyone out, and make himself available.

Networking As an Introverted Engineer

An introvert engineer shares how they overcame their fear of networking and built the largest community for WomenInAI. They redefined networking to mean talking to people, learning from people, and helping people, and developed empathy for others. They also share tips on how to maximize their social battery life, such as scheduling time for themselves before and after meetings, and rescheduling if they are socially fatigued.

Staying Productive: A Resource-Rich Cheat Sheet You Will Ever Need

Productivity is a highly valued metric in the modern workplace, and there are many tools and processes available to help individuals become and stay productive. Eight areas of life have been identified where productivity can be improved, such as setting goals, making to-do lists, timeboxing, unboxing time, optimizing tasks, staying focused, feeling inspired, and reviewing progress. It is important to experiment with different tools and processes to find what works best for you, and to remember to take breaks and not become over-obsessed with productivity.

Building an Exponential High-Performing Team

When starting a business, it is important to build a diverse team with different skill sets, backgrounds, knowledge, vision, and preferences. This will enable the team to try new technologies, modify processes quickly, and choose from a variety of perspectives. It is also important to think about duplicating roles as the team grows, and to mix up senior and junior employees, corporate and startup people, and extroverts and introverts. The lesson learned is to look for diversity that can generate more added value instead of hiring like-minded people.

Handing the Team Over To a New Manager

When transitioning a team to a new manager, it is important to be transparent and available to the team, while also avoiding micromanaging and ambiguity. The process should be broken down into three phases: pre-handover, handover, and post-handover. During the pre-handover phase, it is important to transfer operational and personnel knowledge and address any insecurities the team may have. During the handover phase, the transition should be as short as possible and the new manager should be publicly announced. During the post-handover phase, the former manager should check in with the team from a distance and address any issues the new manager may be having.

Skip-Level One-On-Ones: Skip Them of Keep Them?

A leader was struggling with too many reports and decided to hire new managers. To avoid undermining their authority, the leader canceled one-on-ones with their direct reports and instead introduced the Open Doors, a voluntary event that allowed them to stay close to their engineers without taking up too much time. Through this, the leader was able to identify potential problems in their early stages and stay connected with their team.

Growing Engineering Organization: One Step At a Time

This article discusses the challenges faced by a manager when their engineering team rapidly scaled from seven to thirty people. The manager initially tried to manage everything by themselves, but soon realized they needed to delegate responsibilities and hire managers. They developed an organizational structure that included roles and responsibilities and received feedback from their employees. They also followed the MECE principle and avoided managing dependencies. The article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of thinking about the organizational structure in advance, structuring teams by their expertise, and hiring managers who can manage people, not capabilities.

Balancing Multiple Assignments: Determine What Is "Important" in Each of Them

As a senior engineer, the author was tasked with leading a large initiative while managing their regular day-to-day responsibilities. To ensure the success of the project, the author identified the skills and competencies of the team members, identified the critical things to get right, and worked closely with the Product Manager. The author also selectively attended meetings and worked on writing the design doc and reviewing the implementation. Through this process, the author learned to prioritize their time and be available for the team, while also ensuring that the most complex parts of the project were solved correctly.

The Power of Documentation Seen Through the Lens of a Manager

This article discusses the importance of comprehensive, reliable, and accessible documentation for managers to ensure consistency and alignment across the company. The author provides insight into the actions taken to create and maintain documentation, such as creating templates, reading documentation daily, and using tools that encourage team collaboration. The article also highlights the importance of providing a framework for documentation to help engineers grow in their careers and transfer knowledge to their colleagues.

Managing an Engineer’s Career Development in a Fast-Paced Environment

Managers play a critical role in the career development of engineers, especially in startups where job roles and departments are not well-defined. To ensure engineers are productive and happy, managers should customize one-on-ones to the engineer's preferences, set SMART objectives, and allow engineers to pursue their own projects. Managers should also listen to engineers to understand their preferences and clarify leadership and management roles to avoid confusion.

Ramping-Up a New Person

This article outlines a checklist of ramp-up activities to ensure successful onboarding of a new person. These activities include having a framework in place, setting clear expectations, having regular check-ins, documenting everything, tracking progress, delegating onboarding tasks, and keeping communication channels accessible. At the end of the six months introductory period, a small celebration is held and information about a successful onboarding is sent out to the whole company. The article also highlights the importance of having a functional and meaningful structure and setting clear expectations to ensure successful onboarding.

Delivering Negative Feedback Effectively

As a leader, delivering negative feedback can be difficult and uncomfortable. However, it is important to provide constructive criticism and help people improve their performance or behavior. To do this, it is important to approach the situation with curiosity and compassion and to focus on the business side of the problem. It is also important to provide clear expectations and ensure accountability. With this approach, it is possible to navigate uncomfortable situations and help people become successful.

A New Promotion Guidelines: A Road To Fairness

In order to ensure fairness and transparency in the promotion process, new guidelines were created to provide measurable and actionable items for employees to fulfill. The engineering leadership team had to be aligned on the values they wanted to follow and the scrutiny of who they would promote. The new guidelines allowed managers to objectively evaluate the goals that had been clearly defined in advance and ensure fairness of the process.

Transitioning From an IC To a Manager: A Hybrid Role Perspective

A manager was asked to provide analytic support and manage a team, including a remote employee, but there was no framework in place to support the hybrid role. The manager discussed the problem with their boss and proposed a solution that included delegating some of their work to other members of the team. The manager learned that it is important to ensure clarity in roles and to be fair when delegating work.

Prioritizing Happiness vs. Pursuing Happiness

When deciding to move to San Francisco, the author created a framework to evaluate different rational choices and prioritize their lifestyle, learning, and personal growth. This framework helped them to maximize their happiness and be disciplined about it. The author learned the importance of self- and social awareness when making decisions, and to be mindful of other people's boundaries.

Five Useful Tips for Emerging Leaders

This article provides five key tips for emerging leaders to help them set their goals, navigate their careers, and excel in their leadership roles. These tips include self-growth, self-awareness, vulnerability, managing up, and being a good listener. Self-growth involves doing a gap analysis on one's skill set and creating a career plan. Self-awareness is understanding one's values, passions, aspirations, reactions, and impact on others. Vulnerability is being open about mistakes and showing humility and teachability. Managing up is clarifying expectations with one's manager. Being a good listener is key to making people feel cared for and heard.

Managing Up: A Lesson in Clarifying the Expectations

As a new VP at AdKnowledge, the author was overwhelmed with the responsibilities and challenges of managing an entire Engineering Organization. To succeed, the author got to know their boss, peers, and reports, and kept an eye outside the company. Lessons learned included knowing the boss's success metrics, understanding the business, relating to peers, and representing the department.

How to Build an Effective Development Team From Scratch

This article describes the process of building and scaling two development teams of one or two engineers to 10+ engineers. The author incorporated best practices and values into the team's foundation, such as changing code safely, having a clean commit history, owning knowledge, and having good documentation. The author also automated verification and defined a code review code of conduct to ensure the team conformed to the highest standards. Finally, the author provided administrative rights for the team contributors to push their code into production. The lessons learned from this process include having well-defined guidelines, using a ”bot” for code reviews, and understanding that all rules don't apply to every subteam.

Building an Efficient Data Science Team While Still Being Agile

This article discusses the challenges of implementing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for data science projects. It identifies three key problems: timeboxing, reviews, and incorporating SDLC best practices. Solutions are proposed for each problem, such as using a Kanban board for timeboxing, analytical reviews for evaluation, and peer programming for best practices. The article also emphasizes the importance of being open-minded and learning from SDLC.

Deciding If a Management Is the Right Career Path for You

An engineer who wanted to stay on the technical route was asked to try out management. After struggling to juggle between too many things, they took management training and read books and articles about management. This helped them to adjust their management style to each individual on the team, ask the right questions, and become more comfortable with silence during one-on-ones. They learned that what made them an accomplished IC won't make them a good manager and that there are fewer opportunities for principal engineers than for managers.

Influencing People and Getting Your Items Into Their Backlog

A senior IC was interested in having teams work on reliability-related initiatives but lacked engineers to make it a reality. To make his case, he analyzed data, tailored his message to different audiences, and proposed solutions in iterative steps. He learned to align his goals with the organization's planning cadence, tie improvements to business outcomes and customer needs, talk to stakeholders separately, not leave anyone out, and make himself available.

Networking As an Introverted Engineer

An introvert engineer shares how they overcame their fear of networking and built the largest community for WomenInAI. They redefined networking to mean talking to people, learning from people, and helping people, and developed empathy for others. They also share tips on how to maximize their social battery life, such as scheduling time for themselves before and after meetings, and rescheduling if they are socially fatigued.

Staying Productive: A Resource-Rich Cheat Sheet You Will Ever Need

Productivity is a highly valued metric in the modern workplace, and there are many tools and processes available to help individuals become and stay productive. Eight areas of life have been identified where productivity can be improved, such as setting goals, making to-do lists, timeboxing, unboxing time, optimizing tasks, staying focused, feeling inspired, and reviewing progress. It is important to experiment with different tools and processes to find what works best for you, and to remember to take breaks and not become over-obsessed with productivity.

Building an Exponential High-Performing Team

When starting a business, it is important to build a diverse team with different skill sets, backgrounds, knowledge, vision, and preferences. This will enable the team to try new technologies, modify processes quickly, and choose from a variety of perspectives. It is also important to think about duplicating roles as the team grows, and to mix up senior and junior employees, corporate and startup people, and extroverts and introverts. The lesson learned is to look for diversity that can generate more added value instead of hiring like-minded people.

Handing the Team Over To a New Manager

When transitioning a team to a new manager, it is important to be transparent and available to the team, while also avoiding micromanaging and ambiguity. The process should be broken down into three phases: pre-handover, handover, and post-handover. During the pre-handover phase, it is important to transfer operational and personnel knowledge and address any insecurities the team may have. During the handover phase, the transition should be as short as possible and the new manager should be publicly announced. During the post-handover phase, the former manager should check in with the team from a distance and address any issues the new manager may be having.

Skip-Level One-On-Ones: Skip Them of Keep Them?

A leader was struggling with too many reports and decided to hire new managers. To avoid undermining their authority, the leader canceled one-on-ones with their direct reports and instead introduced the Open Doors, a voluntary event that allowed them to stay close to their engineers without taking up too much time. Through this, the leader was able to identify potential problems in their early stages and stay connected with their team.

Growing Engineering Organization: One Step At a Time

This article discusses the challenges faced by a manager when their engineering team rapidly scaled from seven to thirty people. The manager initially tried to manage everything by themselves, but soon realized they needed to delegate responsibilities and hire managers. They developed an organizational structure that included roles and responsibilities and received feedback from their employees. They also followed the MECE principle and avoided managing dependencies. The article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of thinking about the organizational structure in advance, structuring teams by their expertise, and hiring managers who can manage people, not capabilities.

Balancing Multiple Assignments: Determine What Is "Important" in Each of Them

As a senior engineer, the author was tasked with leading a large initiative while managing their regular day-to-day responsibilities. To ensure the success of the project, the author identified the skills and competencies of the team members, identified the critical things to get right, and worked closely with the Product Manager. The author also selectively attended meetings and worked on writing the design doc and reviewing the implementation. Through this process, the author learned to prioritize their time and be available for the team, while also ensuring that the most complex parts of the project were solved correctly.

The Power of Documentation Seen Through the Lens of a Manager

This article discusses the importance of comprehensive, reliable, and accessible documentation for managers to ensure consistency and alignment across the company. The author provides insight into the actions taken to create and maintain documentation, such as creating templates, reading documentation daily, and using tools that encourage team collaboration. The article also highlights the importance of providing a framework for documentation to help engineers grow in their careers and transfer knowledge to their colleagues.

Managing an Engineer’s Career Development in a Fast-Paced Environment

Managers play a critical role in the career development of engineers, especially in startups where job roles and departments are not well-defined. To ensure engineers are productive and happy, managers should customize one-on-ones to the engineer's preferences, set SMART objectives, and allow engineers to pursue their own projects. Managers should also listen to engineers to understand their preferences and clarify leadership and management roles to avoid confusion.

Ramping-Up a New Person

This article outlines a checklist of ramp-up activities to ensure successful onboarding of a new person. These activities include having a framework in place, setting clear expectations, having regular check-ins, documenting everything, tracking progress, delegating onboarding tasks, and keeping communication channels accessible. At the end of the six months introductory period, a small celebration is held and information about a successful onboarding is sent out to the whole company. The article also highlights the importance of having a functional and meaningful structure and setting clear expectations to ensure successful onboarding.

Delivering Negative Feedback Effectively

As a leader, delivering negative feedback can be difficult and uncomfortable. However, it is important to provide constructive criticism and help people improve their performance or behavior. To do this, it is important to approach the situation with curiosity and compassion and to focus on the business side of the problem. It is also important to provide clear expectations and ensure accountability. With this approach, it is possible to navigate uncomfortable situations and help people become successful.

A New Promotion Guidelines: A Road To Fairness

In order to ensure fairness and transparency in the promotion process, new guidelines were created to provide measurable and actionable items for employees to fulfill. The engineering leadership team had to be aligned on the values they wanted to follow and the scrutiny of who they would promote. The new guidelines allowed managers to objectively evaluate the goals that had been clearly defined in advance and ensure fairness of the process.

Transitioning From an IC To a Manager: A Hybrid Role Perspective

A manager was asked to provide analytic support and manage a team, including a remote employee, but there was no framework in place to support the hybrid role. The manager discussed the problem with their boss and proposed a solution that included delegating some of their work to other members of the team. The manager learned that it is important to ensure clarity in roles and to be fair when delegating work.

Prioritizing Happiness vs. Pursuing Happiness

When deciding to move to San Francisco, the author created a framework to evaluate different rational choices and prioritize their lifestyle, learning, and personal growth. This framework helped them to maximize their happiness and be disciplined about it. The author learned the importance of self- and social awareness when making decisions, and to be mindful of other people's boundaries.

Five Useful Tips for Emerging Leaders

This article provides five key tips for emerging leaders to help them set their goals, navigate their careers, and excel in their leadership roles. These tips include self-growth, self-awareness, vulnerability, managing up, and being a good listener. Self-growth involves doing a gap analysis on one's skill set and creating a career plan. Self-awareness is understanding one's values, passions, aspirations, reactions, and impact on others. Vulnerability is being open about mistakes and showing humility and teachability. Managing up is clarifying expectations with one's manager. Being a good listener is key to making people feel cared for and heard.

Managing Up: A Lesson in Clarifying the Expectations

As a new VP at AdKnowledge, the author was overwhelmed with the responsibilities and challenges of managing an entire Engineering Organization. To succeed, the author got to know their boss, peers, and reports, and kept an eye outside the company. Lessons learned included knowing the boss's success metrics, understanding the business, relating to peers, and representing the department.

How to Build an Effective Development Team From Scratch

This article describes the process of building and scaling two development teams of one or two engineers to 10+ engineers. The author incorporated best practices and values into the team's foundation, such as changing code safely, having a clean commit history, owning knowledge, and having good documentation. The author also automated verification and defined a code review code of conduct to ensure the team conformed to the highest standards. Finally, the author provided administrative rights for the team contributors to push their code into production. The lessons learned from this process include having well-defined guidelines, using a ”bot” for code reviews, and understanding that all rules don't apply to every subteam.

Building an Efficient Data Science Team While Still Being Agile

This article discusses the challenges of implementing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for data science projects. It identifies three key problems: timeboxing, reviews, and incorporating SDLC best practices. Solutions are proposed for each problem, such as using a Kanban board for timeboxing, analytical reviews for evaluation, and peer programming for best practices. The article also emphasizes the importance of being open-minded and learning from SDLC.

Deciding If a Management Is the Right Career Path for You

An engineer who wanted to stay on the technical route was asked to try out management. After struggling to juggle between too many things, they took management training and read books and articles about management. This helped them to adjust their management style to each individual on the team, ask the right questions, and become more comfortable with silence during one-on-ones. They learned that what made them an accomplished IC won't make them a good manager and that there are fewer opportunities for principal engineers than for managers.

Influencing People and Getting Your Items Into Their Backlog

A senior IC was interested in having teams work on reliability-related initiatives but lacked engineers to make it a reality. To make his case, he analyzed data, tailored his message to different audiences, and proposed solutions in iterative steps. He learned to align his goals with the organization's planning cadence, tie improvements to business outcomes and customer needs, talk to stakeholders separately, not leave anyone out, and make himself available.

Networking As an Introverted Engineer

An introvert engineer shares how they overcame their fear of networking and built the largest community for WomenInAI. They redefined networking to mean talking to people, learning from people, and helping people, and developed empathy for others. They also share tips on how to maximize their social battery life, such as scheduling time for themselves before and after meetings, and rescheduling if they are socially fatigued.

Staying Productive: A Resource-Rich Cheat Sheet You Will Ever Need

Productivity is a highly valued metric in the modern workplace, and there are many tools and processes available to help individuals become and stay productive. Eight areas of life have been identified where productivity can be improved, such as setting goals, making to-do lists, timeboxing, unboxing time, optimizing tasks, staying focused, feeling inspired, and reviewing progress. It is important to experiment with different tools and processes to find what works best for you, and to remember to take breaks and not become over-obsessed with productivity.

Building an Exponential High-Performing Team

When starting a business, it is important to build a diverse team with different skill sets, backgrounds, knowledge, vision, and preferences. This will enable the team to try new technologies, modify processes quickly, and choose from a variety of perspectives. It is also important to think about duplicating roles as the team grows, and to mix up senior and junior employees, corporate and startup people, and extroverts and introverts. The lesson learned is to look for diversity that can generate more added value instead of hiring like-minded people.

Handing the Team Over To a New Manager

When transitioning a team to a new manager, it is important to be transparent and available to the team, while also avoiding micromanaging and ambiguity. The process should be broken down into three phases: pre-handover, handover, and post-handover. During the pre-handover phase, it is important to transfer operational and personnel knowledge and address any insecurities the team may have. During the handover phase, the transition should be as short as possible and the new manager should be publicly announced. During the post-handover phase, the former manager should check in with the team from a distance and address any issues the new manager may be having.

Skip-Level One-On-Ones: Skip Them of Keep Them?

A leader was struggling with too many reports and decided to hire new managers. To avoid undermining their authority, the leader canceled one-on-ones with their direct reports and instead introduced the Open Doors, a voluntary event that allowed them to stay close to their engineers without taking up too much time. Through this, the leader was able to identify potential problems in their early stages and stay connected with their team.

Growing Engineering Organization: One Step At a Time

This article discusses the challenges faced by a manager when their engineering team rapidly scaled from seven to thirty people. The manager initially tried to manage everything by themselves, but soon realized they needed to delegate responsibilities and hire managers. They developed an organizational structure that included roles and responsibilities and received feedback from their employees. They also followed the MECE principle and avoided managing dependencies. The article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of thinking about the organizational structure in advance, structuring teams by their expertise, and hiring managers who can manage people, not capabilities.

Balancing Multiple Assignments: Determine What Is "Important" in Each of Them

As a senior engineer, the author was tasked with leading a large initiative while managing their regular day-to-day responsibilities. To ensure the success of the project, the author identified the skills and competencies of the team members, identified the critical things to get right, and worked closely with the Product Manager. The author also selectively attended meetings and worked on writing the design doc and reviewing the implementation. Through this process, the author learned to prioritize their time and be available for the team, while also ensuring that the most complex parts of the project were solved correctly.

The Power of Documentation Seen Through the Lens of a Manager

This article discusses the importance of comprehensive, reliable, and accessible documentation for managers to ensure consistency and alignment across the company. The author provides insight into the actions taken to create and maintain documentation, such as creating templates, reading documentation daily, and using tools that encourage team collaboration. The article also highlights the importance of providing a framework for documentation to help engineers grow in their careers and transfer knowledge to their colleagues.

Managing an Engineer’s Career Development in a Fast-Paced Environment

Managers play a critical role in the career development of engineers, especially in startups where job roles and departments are not well-defined. To ensure engineers are productive and happy, managers should customize one-on-ones to the engineer's preferences, set SMART objectives, and allow engineers to pursue their own projects. Managers should also listen to engineers to understand their preferences and clarify leadership and management roles to avoid confusion.

Ramping-Up a New Person

This article outlines a checklist of ramp-up activities to ensure successful onboarding of a new person. These activities include having a framework in place, setting clear expectations, having regular check-ins, documenting everything, tracking progress, delegating onboarding tasks, and keeping communication channels accessible. At the end of the six months introductory period, a small celebration is held and information about a successful onboarding is sent out to the whole company. The article also highlights the importance of having a functional and meaningful structure and setting clear expectations to ensure successful onboarding.

Delivering Negative Feedback Effectively

As a leader, delivering negative feedback can be difficult and uncomfortable. However, it is important to provide constructive criticism and help people improve their performance or behavior. To do this, it is important to approach the situation with curiosity and compassion and to focus on the business side of the problem. It is also important to provide clear expectations and ensure accountability. With this approach, it is possible to navigate uncomfortable situations and help people become successful.

A New Promotion Guidelines: A Road To Fairness

In order to ensure fairness and transparency in the promotion process, new guidelines were created to provide measurable and actionable items for employees to fulfill. The engineering leadership team had to be aligned on the values they wanted to follow and the scrutiny of who they would promote. The new guidelines allowed managers to objectively evaluate the goals that had been clearly defined in advance and ensure fairness of the process.

Transitioning From an IC To a Manager: A Hybrid Role Perspective

A manager was asked to provide analytic support and manage a team, including a remote employee, but there was no framework in place to support the hybrid role. The manager discussed the problem with their boss and proposed a solution that included delegating some of their work to other members of the team. The manager learned that it is important to ensure clarity in roles and to be fair when delegating work.

Prioritizing Happiness vs. Pursuing Happiness

When deciding to move to San Francisco, the author created a framework to evaluate different rational choices and prioritize their lifestyle, learning, and personal growth. This framework helped them to maximize their happiness and be disciplined about it. The author learned the importance of self- and social awareness when making decisions, and to be mindful of other people's boundaries.

Five Useful Tips for Emerging Leaders

This article provides five key tips for emerging leaders to help them set their goals, navigate their careers, and excel in their leadership roles. These tips include self-growth, self-awareness, vulnerability, managing up, and being a good listener. Self-growth involves doing a gap analysis on one's skill set and creating a career plan. Self-awareness is understanding one's values, passions, aspirations, reactions, and impact on others. Vulnerability is being open about mistakes and showing humility and teachability. Managing up is clarifying expectations with one's manager. Being a good listener is key to making people feel cared for and heard.

Managing Up: A Lesson in Clarifying the Expectations

As a new VP at AdKnowledge, the author was overwhelmed with the responsibilities and challenges of managing an entire Engineering Organization. To succeed, the author got to know their boss, peers, and reports, and kept an eye outside the company. Lessons learned included knowing the boss's success metrics, understanding the business, relating to peers, and representing the department.

How to Build an Effective Development Team From Scratch

This article describes the process of building and scaling two development teams of one or two engineers to 10+ engineers. The author incorporated best practices and values into the team's foundation, such as changing code safely, having a clean commit history, owning knowledge, and having good documentation. The author also automated verification and defined a code review code of conduct to ensure the team conformed to the highest standards. Finally, the author provided administrative rights for the team contributors to push their code into production. The lessons learned from this process include having well-defined guidelines, using a ”bot” for code reviews, and understanding that all rules don't apply to every subteam.

Building an Efficient Data Science Team While Still Being Agile

This article discusses the challenges of implementing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for data science projects. It identifies three key problems: timeboxing, reviews, and incorporating SDLC best practices. Solutions are proposed for each problem, such as using a Kanban board for timeboxing, analytical reviews for evaluation, and peer programming for best practices. The article also emphasizes the importance of being open-minded and learning from SDLC.

Deciding If a Management Is the Right Career Path for You

An engineer who wanted to stay on the technical route was asked to try out management. After struggling to juggle between too many things, they took management training and read books and articles about management. This helped them to adjust their management style to each individual on the team, ask the right questions, and become more comfortable with silence during one-on-ones. They learned that what made them an accomplished IC won't make them a good manager and that there are fewer opportunities for principal engineers than for managers.

Influencing People and Getting Your Items Into Their Backlog

A senior IC was interested in having teams work on reliability-related initiatives but lacked engineers to make it a reality. To make his case, he analyzed data, tailored his message to different audiences, and proposed solutions in iterative steps. He learned to align his goals with the organization's planning cadence, tie improvements to business outcomes and customer needs, talk to stakeholders separately, not leave anyone out, and make himself available.

Networking As an Introverted Engineer

An introvert engineer shares how they overcame their fear of networking and built the largest community for WomenInAI. They redefined networking to mean talking to people, learning from people, and helping people, and developed empathy for others. They also share tips on how to maximize their social battery life, such as scheduling time for themselves before and after meetings, and rescheduling if they are socially fatigued.

Staying Productive: A Resource-Rich Cheat Sheet You Will Ever Need

Productivity is a highly valued metric in the modern workplace, and there are many tools and processes available to help individuals become and stay productive. Eight areas of life have been identified where productivity can be improved, such as setting goals, making to-do lists, timeboxing, unboxing time, optimizing tasks, staying focused, feeling inspired, and reviewing progress. It is important to experiment with different tools and processes to find what works best for you, and to remember to take breaks and not become over-obsessed with productivity.

Building an Exponential High-Performing Team

When starting a business, it is important to build a diverse team with different skill sets, backgrounds, knowledge, vision, and preferences. This will enable the team to try new technologies, modify processes quickly, and choose from a variety of perspectives. It is also important to think about duplicating roles as the team grows, and to mix up senior and junior employees, corporate and startup people, and extroverts and introverts. The lesson learned is to look for diversity that can generate more added value instead of hiring like-minded people.

Handing the Team Over To a New Manager

When transitioning a team to a new manager, it is important to be transparent and available to the team, while also avoiding micromanaging and ambiguity. The process should be broken down into three phases: pre-handover, handover, and post-handover. During the pre-handover phase, it is important to transfer operational and personnel knowledge and address any insecurities the team may have. During the handover phase, the transition should be as short as possible and the new manager should be publicly announced. During the post-handover phase, the former manager should check in with the team from a distance and address any issues the new manager may be having.

Skip-Level One-On-Ones: Skip Them of Keep Them?

A leader was struggling with too many reports and decided to hire new managers. To avoid undermining their authority, the leader canceled one-on-ones with their direct reports and instead introduced the Open Doors, a voluntary event that allowed them to stay close to their engineers without taking up too much time. Through this, the leader was able to identify potential problems in their early stages and stay connected with their team.

Growing Engineering Organization: One Step At a Time

This article discusses the challenges faced by a manager when their engineering team rapidly scaled from seven to thirty people. The manager initially tried to manage everything by themselves, but soon realized they needed to delegate responsibilities and hire managers. They developed an organizational structure that included roles and responsibilities and received feedback from their employees. They also followed the MECE principle and avoided managing dependencies. The article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of thinking about the organizational structure in advance, structuring teams by their expertise, and hiring managers who can manage people, not capabilities.

Balancing Multiple Assignments: Determine What Is "Important" in Each of Them

As a senior engineer, the author was tasked with leading a large initiative while managing their regular day-to-day responsibilities. To ensure the success of the project, the author identified the skills and competencies of the team members, identified the critical things to get right, and worked closely with the Product Manager. The author also selectively attended meetings and worked on writing the design doc and reviewing the implementation. Through this process, the author learned to prioritize their time and be available for the team, while also ensuring that the most complex parts of the project were solved correctly.

The Power of Documentation Seen Through the Lens of a Manager

This article discusses the importance of comprehensive, reliable, and accessible documentation for managers to ensure consistency and alignment across the company. The author provides insight into the actions taken to create and maintain documentation, such as creating templates, reading documentation daily, and using tools that encourage team collaboration. The article also highlights the importance of providing a framework for documentation to help engineers grow in their careers and transfer knowledge to their colleagues.

Managing an Engineer’s Career Development in a Fast-Paced Environment

Managers play a critical role in the career development of engineers, especially in startups where job roles and departments are not well-defined. To ensure engineers are productive and happy, managers should customize one-on-ones to the engineer's preferences, set SMART objectives, and allow engineers to pursue their own projects. Managers should also listen to engineers to understand their preferences and clarify leadership and management roles to avoid confusion.

Ramping-Up a New Person

This article outlines a checklist of ramp-up activities to ensure successful onboarding of a new person. These activities include having a framework in place, setting clear expectations, having regular check-ins, documenting everything, tracking progress, delegating onboarding tasks, and keeping communication channels accessible. At the end of the six months introductory period, a small celebration is held and information about a successful onboarding is sent out to the whole company. The article also highlights the importance of having a functional and meaningful structure and setting clear expectations to ensure successful onboarding.

Delivering Negative Feedback Effectively

As a leader, delivering negative feedback can be difficult and uncomfortable. However, it is important to provide constructive criticism and help people improve their performance or behavior. To do this, it is important to approach the situation with curiosity and compassion and to focus on the business side of the problem. It is also important to provide clear expectations and ensure accountability. With this approach, it is possible to navigate uncomfortable situations and help people become successful.

A New Promotion Guidelines: A Road To Fairness

In order to ensure fairness and transparency in the promotion process, new guidelines were created to provide measurable and actionable items for employees to fulfill. The engineering leadership team had to be aligned on the values they wanted to follow and the scrutiny of who they would promote. The new guidelines allowed managers to objectively evaluate the goals that had been clearly defined in advance and ensure fairness of the process.

Transitioning From an IC To a Manager: A Hybrid Role Perspective

A manager was asked to provide analytic support and manage a team, including a remote employee, but there was no framework in place to support the hybrid role. The manager discussed the problem with their boss and proposed a solution that included delegating some of their work to other members of the team. The manager learned that it is important to ensure clarity in roles and to be fair when delegating work.

Prioritizing Happiness vs. Pursuing Happiness

When deciding to move to San Francisco, the author created a framework to evaluate different rational choices and prioritize their lifestyle, learning, and personal growth. This framework helped them to maximize their happiness and be disciplined about it. The author learned the importance of self- and social awareness when making decisions, and to be mindful of other people's boundaries.

Five Useful Tips for Emerging Leaders

This article provides five key tips for emerging leaders to help them set their goals, navigate their careers, and excel in their leadership roles. These tips include self-growth, self-awareness, vulnerability, managing up, and being a good listener. Self-growth involves doing a gap analysis on one's skill set and creating a career plan. Self-awareness is understanding one's values, passions, aspirations, reactions, and impact on others. Vulnerability is being open about mistakes and showing humility and teachability. Managing up is clarifying expectations with one's manager. Being a good listener is key to making people feel cared for and heard.

Managing Up: A Lesson in Clarifying the Expectations

As a new VP at AdKnowledge, the author was overwhelmed with the responsibilities and challenges of managing an entire Engineering Organization. To succeed, the author got to know their boss, peers, and reports, and kept an eye outside the company. Lessons learned included knowing the boss's success metrics, understanding the business, relating to peers, and representing the department.

How to Build an Effective Development Team From Scratch

This article describes the process of building and scaling two development teams of one or two engineers to 10+ engineers. The author incorporated best practices and values into the team's foundation, such as changing code safely, having a clean commit history, owning knowledge, and having good documentation. The author also automated verification and defined a code review code of conduct to ensure the team conformed to the highest standards. Finally, the author provided administrative rights for the team contributors to push their code into production. The lessons learned from this process include having well-defined guidelines, using a ”bot” for code reviews, and understanding that all rules don't apply to every subteam.

Building an Efficient Data Science Team While Still Being Agile

This article discusses the challenges of implementing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for data science projects. It identifies three key problems: timeboxing, reviews, and incorporating SDLC best practices. Solutions are proposed for each problem, such as using a Kanban board for timeboxing, analytical reviews for evaluation, and peer programming for best practices. The article also emphasizes the importance of being open-minded and learning from SDLC.

Deciding If a Management Is the Right Career Path for You

An engineer who wanted to stay on the technical route was asked to try out management. After struggling to juggle between too many things, they took management training and read books and articles about management. This helped them to adjust their management style to each individual on the team, ask the right questions, and become more comfortable with silence during one-on-ones. They learned that what made them an accomplished IC won't make them a good manager and that there are fewer opportunities for principal engineers than for managers.

Influencing People and Getting Your Items Into Their Backlog

A senior IC was interested in having teams work on reliability-related initiatives but lacked engineers to make it a reality. To make his case, he analyzed data, tailored his message to different audiences, and proposed solutions in iterative steps. He learned to align his goals with the organization's planning cadence, tie improvements to business outcomes and customer needs, talk to stakeholders separately, not leave anyone out, and make himself available.

Networking As an Introverted Engineer

An introvert engineer shares how they overcame their fear of networking and built the largest community for WomenInAI. They redefined networking to mean talking to people, learning from people, and helping people, and developed empathy for others. They also share tips on how to maximize their social battery life, such as scheduling time for themselves before and after meetings, and rescheduling if they are socially fatigued.

Staying Productive: A Resource-Rich Cheat Sheet You Will Ever Need

Productivity is a highly valued metric in the modern workplace, and there are many tools and processes available to help individuals become and stay productive. Eight areas of life have been identified where productivity can be improved, such as setting goals, making to-do lists, timeboxing, unboxing time, optimizing tasks, staying focused, feeling inspired, and reviewing progress. It is important to experiment with different tools and processes to find what works best for you, and to remember to take breaks and not become over-obsessed with productivity.

Building an Exponential High-Performing Team

When starting a business, it is important to build a diverse team with different skill sets, backgrounds, knowledge, vision, and preferences. This will enable the team to try new technologies, modify processes quickly, and choose from a variety of perspectives. It is also important to think about duplicating roles as the team grows, and to mix up senior and junior employees, corporate and startup people, and extroverts and introverts. The lesson learned is to look for diversity that can generate more added value instead of hiring like-minded people.

Handing the Team Over To a New Manager

When transitioning a team to a new manager, it is important to be transparent and available to the team, while also avoiding micromanaging and ambiguity. The process should be broken down into three phases: pre-handover, handover, and post-handover. During the pre-handover phase, it is important to transfer operational and personnel knowledge and address any insecurities the team may have. During the handover phase, the transition should be as short as possible and the new manager should be publicly announced. During the post-handover phase, the former manager should check in with the team from a distance and address any issues the new manager may be having.

Skip-Level One-On-Ones: Skip Them of Keep Them?

A leader was struggling with too many reports and decided to hire new managers. To avoid undermining their authority, the leader canceled one-on-ones with their direct reports and instead introduced the Open Doors, a voluntary event that allowed them to stay close to their engineers without taking up too much time. Through this, the leader was able to identify potential problems in their early stages and stay connected with their team.

Growing Engineering Organization: One Step At a Time

This article discusses the challenges faced by a manager when their engineering team rapidly scaled from seven to thirty people. The manager initially tried to manage everything by themselves, but soon realized they needed to delegate responsibilities and hire managers. They developed an organizational structure that included roles and responsibilities and received feedback from their employees. They also followed the MECE principle and avoided managing dependencies. The article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of thinking about the organizational structure in advance, structuring teams by their expertise, and hiring managers who can manage people, not capabilities.

Balancing Multiple Assignments: Determine What Is "Important" in Each of Them

As a senior engineer, the author was tasked with leading a large initiative while managing their regular day-to-day responsibilities. To ensure the success of the project, the author identified the skills and competencies of the team members, identified the critical things to get right, and worked closely with the Product Manager. The author also selectively attended meetings and worked on writing the design doc and reviewing the implementation. Through this process, the author learned to prioritize their time and be available for the team, while also ensuring that the most complex parts of the project were solved correctly.

The Power of Documentation Seen Through the Lens of a Manager

This article discusses the importance of comprehensive, reliable, and accessible documentation for managers to ensure consistency and alignment across the company. The author provides insight into the actions taken to create and maintain documentation, such as creating templates, reading documentation daily, and using tools that encourage team collaboration. The article also highlights the importance of providing a framework for documentation to help engineers grow in their careers and transfer knowledge to their colleagues.

Managing an Engineer’s Career Development in a Fast-Paced Environment

Managers play a critical role in the career development of engineers, especially in startups where job roles and departments are not well-defined. To ensure engineers are productive and happy, managers should customize one-on-ones to the engineer's preferences, set SMART objectives, and allow engineers to pursue their own projects. Managers should also listen to engineers to understand their preferences and clarify leadership and management roles to avoid confusion.

Ramping-Up a New Person

This article outlines a checklist of ramp-up activities to ensure successful onboarding of a new person. These activities include having a framework in place, setting clear expectations, having regular check-ins, documenting everything, tracking progress, delegating onboarding tasks, and keeping communication channels accessible. At the end of the six months introductory period, a small celebration is held and information about a successful onboarding is sent out to the whole company. The article also highlights the importance of having a functional and meaningful structure and setting clear expectations to ensure successful onboarding.

Delivering Negative Feedback Effectively

As a leader, delivering negative feedback can be difficult and uncomfortable. However, it is important to provide constructive criticism and help people improve their performance or behavior. To do this, it is important to approach the situation with curiosity and compassion and to focus on the business side of the problem. It is also important to provide clear expectations and ensure accountability. With this approach, it is possible to navigate uncomfortable situations and help people become successful.

A New Promotion Guidelines: A Road To Fairness

In order to ensure fairness and transparency in the promotion process, new guidelines were created to provide measurable and actionable items for employees to fulfill. The engineering leadership team had to be aligned on the values they wanted to follow and the scrutiny of who they would promote. The new guidelines allowed managers to objectively evaluate the goals that had been clearly defined in advance and ensure fairness of the process.

Transitioning From an IC To a Manager: A Hybrid Role Perspective

A manager was asked to provide analytic support and manage a team, including a remote employee, but there was no framework in place to support the hybrid role. The manager discussed the problem with their boss and proposed a solution that included delegating some of their work to other members of the team. The manager learned that it is important to ensure clarity in roles and to be fair when delegating work.

Prioritizing Happiness vs. Pursuing Happiness

When deciding to move to San Francisco, the author created a framework to evaluate different rational choices and prioritize their lifestyle, learning, and personal growth. This framework helped them to maximize their happiness and be disciplined about it. The author learned the importance of self- and social awareness when making decisions, and to be mindful of other people's boundaries.

Five Useful Tips for Emerging Leaders

This article provides five key tips for emerging leaders to help them set their goals, navigate their careers, and excel in their leadership roles. These tips include self-growth, self-awareness, vulnerability, managing up, and being a good listener. Self-growth involves doing a gap analysis on one's skill set and creating a career plan. Self-awareness is understanding one's values, passions, aspirations, reactions, and impact on others. Vulnerability is being open about mistakes and showing humility and teachability. Managing up is clarifying expectations with one's manager. Being a good listener is key to making people feel cared for and heard.

Managing Up: A Lesson in Clarifying the Expectations

As a new VP at AdKnowledge, the author was overwhelmed with the responsibilities and challenges of managing an entire Engineering Organization. To succeed, the author got to know their boss, peers, and reports, and kept an eye outside the company. Lessons learned included knowing the boss's success metrics, understanding the business, relating to peers, and representing the department.

How to Build an Effective Development Team From Scratch

This article describes the process of building and scaling two development teams of one or two engineers to 10+ engineers. The author incorporated best practices and values into the team's foundation, such as changing code safely, having a clean commit history, owning knowledge, and having good documentation. The author also automated verification and defined a code review code of conduct to ensure the team conformed to the highest standards. Finally, the author provided administrative rights for the team contributors to push their code into production. The lessons learned from this process include having well-defined guidelines, using a ”bot” for code reviews, and understanding that all rules don't apply to every subteam.

Building an Efficient Data Science Team While Still Being Agile

This article discusses the challenges of implementing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for data science projects. It identifies three key problems: timeboxing, reviews, and incorporating SDLC best practices. Solutions are proposed for each problem, such as using a Kanban board for timeboxing, analytical reviews for evaluation, and peer programming for best practices. The article also emphasizes the importance of being open-minded and learning from SDLC.

Deciding If a Management Is the Right Career Path for You

An engineer who wanted to stay on the technical route was asked to try out management. After struggling to juggle between too many things, they took management training and read books and articles about management. This helped them to adjust their management style to each individual on the team, ask the right questions, and become more comfortable with silence during one-on-ones. They learned that what made them an accomplished IC won't make them a good manager and that there are fewer opportunities for principal engineers than for managers.

Influencing People and Getting Your Items Into Their Backlog

A senior IC was interested in having teams work on reliability-related initiatives but lacked engineers to make it a reality. To make his case, he analyzed data, tailored his message to different audiences, and proposed solutions in iterative steps. He learned to align his goals with the organization's planning cadence, tie improvements to business outcomes and customer needs, talk to stakeholders separately, not leave anyone out, and make himself available.

Networking As an Introverted Engineer

An introvert engineer shares how they overcame their fear of networking and built the largest community for WomenInAI. They redefined networking to mean talking to people, learning from people, and helping people, and developed empathy for others. They also share tips on how to maximize their social battery life, such as scheduling time for themselves before and after meetings, and rescheduling if they are socially fatigued.

Staying Productive: A Resource-Rich Cheat Sheet You Will Ever Need

Productivity is a highly valued metric in the modern workplace, and there are many tools and processes available to help individuals become and stay productive. Eight areas of life have been identified where productivity can be improved, such as setting goals, making to-do lists, timeboxing, unboxing time, optimizing tasks, staying focused, feeling inspired, and reviewing progress. It is important to experiment with different tools and processes to find what works best for you, and to remember to take breaks and not become over-obsessed with productivity.

Building an Exponential High-Performing Team

When starting a business, it is important to build a diverse team with different skill sets, backgrounds, knowledge, vision, and preferences. This will enable the team to try new technologies, modify processes quickly, and choose from a variety of perspectives. It is also important to think about duplicating roles as the team grows, and to mix up senior and junior employees, corporate and startup people, and extroverts and introverts. The lesson learned is to look for diversity that can generate more added value instead of hiring like-minded people.

Handing the Team Over To a New Manager

When transitioning a team to a new manager, it is important to be transparent and available to the team, while also avoiding micromanaging and ambiguity. The process should be broken down into three phases: pre-handover, handover, and post-handover. During the pre-handover phase, it is important to transfer operational and personnel knowledge and address any insecurities the team may have. During the handover phase, the transition should be as short as possible and the new manager should be publicly announced. During the post-handover phase, the former manager should check in with the team from a distance and address any issues the new manager may be having.

Skip-Level One-On-Ones: Skip Them of Keep Them?

A leader was struggling with too many reports and decided to hire new managers. To avoid undermining their authority, the leader canceled one-on-ones with their direct reports and instead introduced the Open Doors, a voluntary event that allowed them to stay close to their engineers without taking up too much time. Through this, the leader was able to identify potential problems in their early stages and stay connected with their team.

Growing Engineering Organization: One Step At a Time

This article discusses the challenges faced by a manager when their engineering team rapidly scaled from seven to thirty people. The manager initially tried to manage everything by themselves, but soon realized they needed to delegate responsibilities and hire managers. They developed an organizational structure that included roles and responsibilities and received feedback from their employees. They also followed the MECE principle and avoided managing dependencies. The article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of thinking about the organizational structure in advance, structuring teams by their expertise, and hiring managers who can manage people, not capabilities.

Balancing Multiple Assignments: Determine What Is "Important" in Each of Them

As a senior engineer, the author was tasked with leading a large initiative while managing their regular day-to-day responsibilities. To ensure the success of the project, the author identified the skills and competencies of the team members, identified the critical things to get right, and worked closely with the Product Manager. The author also selectively attended meetings and worked on writing the design doc and reviewing the implementation. Through this process, the author learned to prioritize their time and be available for the team, while also ensuring that the most complex parts of the project were solved correctly.

The Power of Documentation Seen Through the Lens of a Manager

This article discusses the importance of comprehensive, reliable, and accessible documentation for managers to ensure consistency and alignment across the company. The author provides insight into the actions taken to create and maintain documentation, such as creating templates, reading documentation daily, and using tools that encourage team collaboration. The article also highlights the importance of providing a framework for documentation to help engineers grow in their careers and transfer knowledge to their colleagues.

Managing an Engineer’s Career Development in a Fast-Paced Environment

Managers play a critical role in the career development of engineers, especially in startups where job roles and departments are not well-defined. To ensure engineers are productive and happy, managers should customize one-on-ones to the engineer's preferences, set SMART objectives, and allow engineers to pursue their own projects. Managers should also listen to engineers to understand their preferences and clarify leadership and management roles to avoid confusion.

Ramping-Up a New Person

This article outlines a checklist of ramp-up activities to ensure successful onboarding of a new person. These activities include having a framework in place, setting clear expectations, having regular check-ins, documenting everything, tracking progress, delegating onboarding tasks, and keeping communication channels accessible. At the end of the six months introductory period, a small celebration is held and information about a successful onboarding is sent out to the whole company. The article also highlights the importance of having a functional and meaningful structure and setting clear expectations to ensure successful onboarding.

Delivering Negative Feedback Effectively

As a leader, delivering negative feedback can be difficult and uncomfortable. However, it is important to provide constructive criticism and help people improve their performance or behavior. To do this, it is important to approach the situation with curiosity and compassion and to focus on the business side of the problem. It is also important to provide clear expectations and ensure accountability. With this approach, it is possible to navigate uncomfortable situations and help people become successful.

A New Promotion Guidelines: A Road To Fairness

In order to ensure fairness and transparency in the promotion process, new guidelines were created to provide measurable and actionable items for employees to fulfill. The engineering leadership team had to be aligned on the values they wanted to follow and the scrutiny of who they would promote. The new guidelines allowed managers to objectively evaluate the goals that had been clearly defined in advance and ensure fairness of the process.

Transitioning From an IC To a Manager: A Hybrid Role Perspective

A manager was asked to provide analytic support and manage a team, including a remote employee, but there was no framework in place to support the hybrid role. The manager discussed the problem with their boss and proposed a solution that included delegating some of their work to other members of the team. The manager learned that it is important to ensure clarity in roles and to be fair when delegating work.

Prioritizing Happiness vs. Pursuing Happiness

When deciding to move to San Francisco, the author created a framework to evaluate different rational choices and prioritize their lifestyle, learning, and personal growth. This framework helped them to maximize their happiness and be disciplined about it. The author learned the importance of self- and social awareness when making decisions, and to be mindful of other people's boundaries.

Five Useful Tips for Emerging Leaders

This article provides five key tips for emerging leaders to help them set their goals, navigate their careers, and excel in their leadership roles. These tips include self-growth, self-awareness, vulnerability, managing up, and being a good listener. Self-growth involves doing a gap analysis on one's skill set and creating a career plan. Self-awareness is understanding one's values, passions, aspirations, reactions, and impact on others. Vulnerability is being open about mistakes and showing humility and teachability. Managing up is clarifying expectations with one's manager. Being a good listener is key to making people feel cared for and heard.

Managing Up: A Lesson in Clarifying the Expectations

As a new VP at AdKnowledge, the author was overwhelmed with the responsibilities and challenges of managing an entire Engineering Organization. To succeed, the author got to know their boss, peers, and reports, and kept an eye outside the company. Lessons learned included knowing the boss's success metrics, understanding the business, relating to peers, and representing the department.

How to Build an Effective Development Team From Scratch

This article describes the process of building and scaling two development teams of one or two engineers to 10+ engineers. The author incorporated best practices and values into the team's foundation, such as changing code safely, having a clean commit history, owning knowledge, and having good documentation. The author also automated verification and defined a code review code of conduct to ensure the team conformed to the highest standards. Finally, the author provided administrative rights for the team contributors to push their code into production. The lessons learned from this process include having well-defined guidelines, using a ”bot” for code reviews, and understanding that all rules don't apply to every subteam.

Building an Efficient Data Science Team While Still Being Agile

This article discusses the challenges of implementing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for data science projects. It identifies three key problems: timeboxing, reviews, and incorporating SDLC best practices. Solutions are proposed for each problem, such as using a Kanban board for timeboxing, analytical reviews for evaluation, and peer programming for best practices. The article also emphasizes the importance of being open-minded and learning from SDLC.