Knowledge shared by our community

How Do You Handle an Underperforming Employee

As a manager, it is important to look for patterns of inefficiency when dealing with underperformance. Open conversations should be had with employees, and expectations should be clearly communicated. Firing should be a last resort, and managers should approach the situation with empathy and care. Follow up should be done to ensure that expectations are being met.

How to Prevent a Single Point of Failure

In the Bay Area, where people are constantly considering changing their careers, a single point of failure problem can arise when one person accumulates significant institutional and technical knowledge and then leaves or takes a break. To prevent this problem, processes such as documentation, collaboration, and motivation should be implemented. Additionally, when a single point of failure situation arises, extracting as much information as possible and re-engineering the system without the person's input can help mitigate the risk.

Communicating and Maintaining Alignment Across Different Time Zones

This article discusses the challenges of achieving alignment across different time zones, such as limited time overlap and cultural and language differences. To address this, the team established 'golden hours' for critical collaboration, migrated part of their work to collaboration platforms, and instituted rules for meetings such as having an agenda and circulating it 24 hours in advance. Additionally, they documented decisions and actions taken in meetings to avoid having to repeat them. Lessons learned include that meetings should be kept short and focused, and that simple tools are often the most helpful for collaboration.

Scaling a Product Across Multiple Markets

Scaling a product across multiple markets presents a challenge of balancing localization needs in each market and global scale. To successfully do this, organizations should localize from day one, get regional sponsorship, rally around shared goals, ask if requests will solve their most important goals, solve for their most difficult markets first, find common regional pain points, and refactor their product. Additionally, different skills are required from a PM perspective, documentation becomes increasingly important, and testing becomes more important. Finally, scaling across many markets is an opportunity to improve the core product back in the original market.

Securing a Big Leap Buy-In

This article outlines the steps taken to gain board-level buy-in for a product initiative, including identifying a committed sponsor, understanding the key drivers for different executives, and having multiple 'big leap' bets or experiments running simultaneously. It also provides lessons learned, such as over-communicating with the sponsor and delegates throughout the process, and being prepared to promote the product from the moment it starts gaining traction.

The Importance of Allocating Time for Self-Reflection

A Director of Engineering realized they were stagnating in their role and decided to take action by seeking advice from mentors, reading, and reshuffling their calendar to free up time for more hands-on work. After realizing that reading and blocking time was not enough, they changed roles and went back to a more IC role, eventually finding more happiness. Through this experience, they learned the importance of self-reflection, listening to oneself, and understanding that roles can differ greatly from company to company.

How to Approach Service Refactoring

This article discusses the challenges of identifying and tackling tech debt in a limited time and resource environment. It outlines two approaches taken to address the issue, the first being to disperse the effort among teams, which was unsuccessful. The second approach was to identify a few top initiatives and streamline focus on the top three to five that were the most important. This approach was successful, and the article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of team chemistry and mapping dependencies beforehand.

Practice Makes Perfect: How to Run a Game Day

This article discusses the problem of giving engineers more autonomy to control and deploy their services to production. It then outlines the actions taken to address this issue, such as providing access to monitoring tools, onboarding and advanced training, and running game days to simulate failure and test system responses. Finally, it highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of the human aspect, the need to look for solutions from different perspectives, the value of the feedback loop, and the fun and challenge of chaos engineering.

Make Hard Time Easier -- Work With a Sponsor

When the company needed to bring in a more experienced CTO, the Product Development team, including the author, had to go through a difficult transition. The author was able to recruit a technical advisor as the new CTO, and through their relationship, the author was able to learn valuable lessons about asking for and listening to feedback, challenging and disagreeing with their manager, and using what they learned to help turn their next manager into a sponsor.

First-Time Managers: An Answer for a Solid Organizational Structure

After taking over management responsibilities of an organization, the leadership team had to research best practices, talk to advisors, and explore different organizational models to create a new structure. They gathered feedback from the team and had the managerial candidates meet the team members. They also provided support and training for the new managers, but many ended up returning to their IC roles. To make better choices, the leader needs to better assess people’s motivation, capabilities, and commitment, and create a safe environment for people to take risks and fail.

Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs

This article outlines the steps taken to reduce cloud computing costs for an organization. It highlights the importance of understanding the problem, creating visibility into costs, developing a cost reduction roadmap, creating a tiger team to focus on cost reduction, and collaborating with other departments to reduce costs. It also emphasizes the importance of leading by example, understanding the correlation between cost and reliability, and the need for ongoing effort to maintain cost reduction.

What I Learned From A Huge Automation Initiative

A talented Tech Lead and experienced Product team had been working on an automation initiative for over a year that could save millions of dollars for the company, but it had not taken off. An engineering leader who understood both Machine Learning and Software Development was brought in to shift the ML team's focus from research-oriented to production-oriented development. The team adopted a "Rapid Prototyping" model and committed to action and planning around it. Lessons learned included that failure is a great teacher, good enough is good enough, and cutting through management layers is sometimes necessary.

API Migration: A Story of Confidence, Clear Goal, and Focus

This project was a migration from Google App Engine to Kubernetes, which was taking over two years and facing multiple delays and setbacks. The leadership was considering canceling the project, but the author stepped in and made himself personally accountable. He set clear and precise milestones, took risks, cleaned up the backlog, and tracked progress with a progress bar. He also communicated progress and results to the rest of the company, and inspired the team to work hard. Through this, he was able to successfully complete the project and save the company over $1M in infrastructure costs. The lessons learned from this project include rebuilding confidence and morale, taking accountability, breaking down large projects into smaller parts, having a proof of concept, and having a clear measure of value.

Use Design Sprints to Improve Your Product

A team of 35 engineers, 5 PMs, and a DevOps team were tasked with building a new product in the energy utility space, but none of them had any domain product context. To solve this problem, the team implemented design sprints in order to plan and deliver their work more effectively. This required introducing the concept, piloting with teams, and applying the lessons learned. Additionally, pre-mortems were used to identify potential issues and all team members were encouraged to be open and vulnerable during meetings.

Dealing With an Inter-Team Conflict

A product team and an infrastructure team were having tension due to the product team taking shortcuts in the codebase. The product team leader had to escalate the issue and evoke empathy from both sides to understand each other's perspectives. A meeting was held with a presentation to explain the business case and why the shortcuts were necessary. A shared sense of ownership was instilled and the tension was resolved. The lesson learned was to include empathy in core values and to look for empathetic people to partner with.

Reorganizing the Geographically Split Teams

This manager inherited a team that needed to scale quickly, but the organizational structure was hindering progress. To solve the problem, the manager restructured the teams to be self-sufficient and enabled them to autonomously build one section of the website. Additionally, the manager implemented a cultural intervention to restore trust between the teams in different geographies. The lessons learned from this experience were that teams should be given autonomy and product managers should be included in any restructuring.

How to Spark Innovation in Your Team

A team of engineers was stuck in a repetitive mode of work and the manager wanted to shake things up. After a failed brainstorming session, the manager set up a meeting with a release engineering company to gain insight into their process. After the meeting, the team was inspired to make changes and automate operations, leading to shorter lead times and a transformation of the team from 100% operational to 50% operational and 50% R&D. The manager learned the importance of reaching out for help and leveraging a network to exchange ideas.

Managing and Supporting Remote Teams - From an All-Remote Company

Gitlab is a large all-remote company with 1,300 employees in nearly all timezones. To manage a team of 12 over 8 timezones, the company has implemented asynchronous communication practices such as publishing notes and content before meetings, recording meetings, and taking detailed notes. In cases where decisions need to be made or quick communication is needed, multi-modal communication is used. To prevent burnout, it is important to set expectations on when people should be available and to not communicate ideas during non-work hours.

How to Effectively Communicate on Slack

After receiving feedback from users, a leader devised a framework for using Slack that was recommended company-wide. This framework included using public channels instead of direct messages, using threads to reduce noise, and using standup notes to document progress. After 3 months of iteration, the framework was adopted and proved to be effective for the organization.

Improving Collaboration Between Engineering and Product Across Time Zones

After an acquisition, the company faced a delivery problem due to the lack of Product Managers and the time zone difference between them and the engineering team. To solve this, engineering leadership took on multiple roles such as product, analytics, and project management. They also proposed a daily standup and additional time for PMs to communicate and transfer information. Through preplanning and pregrooming, the team was able to align their business and company values and work towards one goal.

How Do You Handle an Underperforming Employee

As a manager, it is important to look for patterns of inefficiency when dealing with underperformance. Open conversations should be had with employees, and expectations should be clearly communicated. Firing should be a last resort, and managers should approach the situation with empathy and care. Follow up should be done to ensure that expectations are being met.

How to Prevent a Single Point of Failure

In the Bay Area, where people are constantly considering changing their careers, a single point of failure problem can arise when one person accumulates significant institutional and technical knowledge and then leaves or takes a break. To prevent this problem, processes such as documentation, collaboration, and motivation should be implemented. Additionally, when a single point of failure situation arises, extracting as much information as possible and re-engineering the system without the person's input can help mitigate the risk.

Communicating and Maintaining Alignment Across Different Time Zones

This article discusses the challenges of achieving alignment across different time zones, such as limited time overlap and cultural and language differences. To address this, the team established 'golden hours' for critical collaboration, migrated part of their work to collaboration platforms, and instituted rules for meetings such as having an agenda and circulating it 24 hours in advance. Additionally, they documented decisions and actions taken in meetings to avoid having to repeat them. Lessons learned include that meetings should be kept short and focused, and that simple tools are often the most helpful for collaboration.

Scaling a Product Across Multiple Markets

Scaling a product across multiple markets presents a challenge of balancing localization needs in each market and global scale. To successfully do this, organizations should localize from day one, get regional sponsorship, rally around shared goals, ask if requests will solve their most important goals, solve for their most difficult markets first, find common regional pain points, and refactor their product. Additionally, different skills are required from a PM perspective, documentation becomes increasingly important, and testing becomes more important. Finally, scaling across many markets is an opportunity to improve the core product back in the original market.

Securing a Big Leap Buy-In

This article outlines the steps taken to gain board-level buy-in for a product initiative, including identifying a committed sponsor, understanding the key drivers for different executives, and having multiple 'big leap' bets or experiments running simultaneously. It also provides lessons learned, such as over-communicating with the sponsor and delegates throughout the process, and being prepared to promote the product from the moment it starts gaining traction.

The Importance of Allocating Time for Self-Reflection

A Director of Engineering realized they were stagnating in their role and decided to take action by seeking advice from mentors, reading, and reshuffling their calendar to free up time for more hands-on work. After realizing that reading and blocking time was not enough, they changed roles and went back to a more IC role, eventually finding more happiness. Through this experience, they learned the importance of self-reflection, listening to oneself, and understanding that roles can differ greatly from company to company.

How to Approach Service Refactoring

This article discusses the challenges of identifying and tackling tech debt in a limited time and resource environment. It outlines two approaches taken to address the issue, the first being to disperse the effort among teams, which was unsuccessful. The second approach was to identify a few top initiatives and streamline focus on the top three to five that were the most important. This approach was successful, and the article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of team chemistry and mapping dependencies beforehand.

Practice Makes Perfect: How to Run a Game Day

This article discusses the problem of giving engineers more autonomy to control and deploy their services to production. It then outlines the actions taken to address this issue, such as providing access to monitoring tools, onboarding and advanced training, and running game days to simulate failure and test system responses. Finally, it highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of the human aspect, the need to look for solutions from different perspectives, the value of the feedback loop, and the fun and challenge of chaos engineering.

Make Hard Time Easier -- Work With a Sponsor

When the company needed to bring in a more experienced CTO, the Product Development team, including the author, had to go through a difficult transition. The author was able to recruit a technical advisor as the new CTO, and through their relationship, the author was able to learn valuable lessons about asking for and listening to feedback, challenging and disagreeing with their manager, and using what they learned to help turn their next manager into a sponsor.

First-Time Managers: An Answer for a Solid Organizational Structure

After taking over management responsibilities of an organization, the leadership team had to research best practices, talk to advisors, and explore different organizational models to create a new structure. They gathered feedback from the team and had the managerial candidates meet the team members. They also provided support and training for the new managers, but many ended up returning to their IC roles. To make better choices, the leader needs to better assess people’s motivation, capabilities, and commitment, and create a safe environment for people to take risks and fail.

Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs

This article outlines the steps taken to reduce cloud computing costs for an organization. It highlights the importance of understanding the problem, creating visibility into costs, developing a cost reduction roadmap, creating a tiger team to focus on cost reduction, and collaborating with other departments to reduce costs. It also emphasizes the importance of leading by example, understanding the correlation between cost and reliability, and the need for ongoing effort to maintain cost reduction.

What I Learned From A Huge Automation Initiative

A talented Tech Lead and experienced Product team had been working on an automation initiative for over a year that could save millions of dollars for the company, but it had not taken off. An engineering leader who understood both Machine Learning and Software Development was brought in to shift the ML team's focus from research-oriented to production-oriented development. The team adopted a "Rapid Prototyping" model and committed to action and planning around it. Lessons learned included that failure is a great teacher, good enough is good enough, and cutting through management layers is sometimes necessary.

API Migration: A Story of Confidence, Clear Goal, and Focus

This project was a migration from Google App Engine to Kubernetes, which was taking over two years and facing multiple delays and setbacks. The leadership was considering canceling the project, but the author stepped in and made himself personally accountable. He set clear and precise milestones, took risks, cleaned up the backlog, and tracked progress with a progress bar. He also communicated progress and results to the rest of the company, and inspired the team to work hard. Through this, he was able to successfully complete the project and save the company over $1M in infrastructure costs. The lessons learned from this project include rebuilding confidence and morale, taking accountability, breaking down large projects into smaller parts, having a proof of concept, and having a clear measure of value.

Use Design Sprints to Improve Your Product

A team of 35 engineers, 5 PMs, and a DevOps team were tasked with building a new product in the energy utility space, but none of them had any domain product context. To solve this problem, the team implemented design sprints in order to plan and deliver their work more effectively. This required introducing the concept, piloting with teams, and applying the lessons learned. Additionally, pre-mortems were used to identify potential issues and all team members were encouraged to be open and vulnerable during meetings.

Dealing With an Inter-Team Conflict

A product team and an infrastructure team were having tension due to the product team taking shortcuts in the codebase. The product team leader had to escalate the issue and evoke empathy from both sides to understand each other's perspectives. A meeting was held with a presentation to explain the business case and why the shortcuts were necessary. A shared sense of ownership was instilled and the tension was resolved. The lesson learned was to include empathy in core values and to look for empathetic people to partner with.

Reorganizing the Geographically Split Teams

This manager inherited a team that needed to scale quickly, but the organizational structure was hindering progress. To solve the problem, the manager restructured the teams to be self-sufficient and enabled them to autonomously build one section of the website. Additionally, the manager implemented a cultural intervention to restore trust between the teams in different geographies. The lessons learned from this experience were that teams should be given autonomy and product managers should be included in any restructuring.

How to Spark Innovation in Your Team

A team of engineers was stuck in a repetitive mode of work and the manager wanted to shake things up. After a failed brainstorming session, the manager set up a meeting with a release engineering company to gain insight into their process. After the meeting, the team was inspired to make changes and automate operations, leading to shorter lead times and a transformation of the team from 100% operational to 50% operational and 50% R&D. The manager learned the importance of reaching out for help and leveraging a network to exchange ideas.

Managing and Supporting Remote Teams - From an All-Remote Company

Gitlab is a large all-remote company with 1,300 employees in nearly all timezones. To manage a team of 12 over 8 timezones, the company has implemented asynchronous communication practices such as publishing notes and content before meetings, recording meetings, and taking detailed notes. In cases where decisions need to be made or quick communication is needed, multi-modal communication is used. To prevent burnout, it is important to set expectations on when people should be available and to not communicate ideas during non-work hours.

How to Effectively Communicate on Slack

After receiving feedback from users, a leader devised a framework for using Slack that was recommended company-wide. This framework included using public channels instead of direct messages, using threads to reduce noise, and using standup notes to document progress. After 3 months of iteration, the framework was adopted and proved to be effective for the organization.

Improving Collaboration Between Engineering and Product Across Time Zones

After an acquisition, the company faced a delivery problem due to the lack of Product Managers and the time zone difference between them and the engineering team. To solve this, engineering leadership took on multiple roles such as product, analytics, and project management. They also proposed a daily standup and additional time for PMs to communicate and transfer information. Through preplanning and pregrooming, the team was able to align their business and company values and work towards one goal.

How Do You Handle an Underperforming Employee

As a manager, it is important to look for patterns of inefficiency when dealing with underperformance. Open conversations should be had with employees, and expectations should be clearly communicated. Firing should be a last resort, and managers should approach the situation with empathy and care. Follow up should be done to ensure that expectations are being met.

How to Prevent a Single Point of Failure

In the Bay Area, where people are constantly considering changing their careers, a single point of failure problem can arise when one person accumulates significant institutional and technical knowledge and then leaves or takes a break. To prevent this problem, processes such as documentation, collaboration, and motivation should be implemented. Additionally, when a single point of failure situation arises, extracting as much information as possible and re-engineering the system without the person's input can help mitigate the risk.

Communicating and Maintaining Alignment Across Different Time Zones

This article discusses the challenges of achieving alignment across different time zones, such as limited time overlap and cultural and language differences. To address this, the team established 'golden hours' for critical collaboration, migrated part of their work to collaboration platforms, and instituted rules for meetings such as having an agenda and circulating it 24 hours in advance. Additionally, they documented decisions and actions taken in meetings to avoid having to repeat them. Lessons learned include that meetings should be kept short and focused, and that simple tools are often the most helpful for collaboration.

Scaling a Product Across Multiple Markets

Scaling a product across multiple markets presents a challenge of balancing localization needs in each market and global scale. To successfully do this, organizations should localize from day one, get regional sponsorship, rally around shared goals, ask if requests will solve their most important goals, solve for their most difficult markets first, find common regional pain points, and refactor their product. Additionally, different skills are required from a PM perspective, documentation becomes increasingly important, and testing becomes more important. Finally, scaling across many markets is an opportunity to improve the core product back in the original market.

Securing a Big Leap Buy-In

This article outlines the steps taken to gain board-level buy-in for a product initiative, including identifying a committed sponsor, understanding the key drivers for different executives, and having multiple 'big leap' bets or experiments running simultaneously. It also provides lessons learned, such as over-communicating with the sponsor and delegates throughout the process, and being prepared to promote the product from the moment it starts gaining traction.

The Importance of Allocating Time for Self-Reflection

A Director of Engineering realized they were stagnating in their role and decided to take action by seeking advice from mentors, reading, and reshuffling their calendar to free up time for more hands-on work. After realizing that reading and blocking time was not enough, they changed roles and went back to a more IC role, eventually finding more happiness. Through this experience, they learned the importance of self-reflection, listening to oneself, and understanding that roles can differ greatly from company to company.

How to Approach Service Refactoring

This article discusses the challenges of identifying and tackling tech debt in a limited time and resource environment. It outlines two approaches taken to address the issue, the first being to disperse the effort among teams, which was unsuccessful. The second approach was to identify a few top initiatives and streamline focus on the top three to five that were the most important. This approach was successful, and the article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of team chemistry and mapping dependencies beforehand.

Practice Makes Perfect: How to Run a Game Day

This article discusses the problem of giving engineers more autonomy to control and deploy their services to production. It then outlines the actions taken to address this issue, such as providing access to monitoring tools, onboarding and advanced training, and running game days to simulate failure and test system responses. Finally, it highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of the human aspect, the need to look for solutions from different perspectives, the value of the feedback loop, and the fun and challenge of chaos engineering.

Make Hard Time Easier -- Work With a Sponsor

When the company needed to bring in a more experienced CTO, the Product Development team, including the author, had to go through a difficult transition. The author was able to recruit a technical advisor as the new CTO, and through their relationship, the author was able to learn valuable lessons about asking for and listening to feedback, challenging and disagreeing with their manager, and using what they learned to help turn their next manager into a sponsor.

First-Time Managers: An Answer for a Solid Organizational Structure

After taking over management responsibilities of an organization, the leadership team had to research best practices, talk to advisors, and explore different organizational models to create a new structure. They gathered feedback from the team and had the managerial candidates meet the team members. They also provided support and training for the new managers, but many ended up returning to their IC roles. To make better choices, the leader needs to better assess people’s motivation, capabilities, and commitment, and create a safe environment for people to take risks and fail.

Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs

This article outlines the steps taken to reduce cloud computing costs for an organization. It highlights the importance of understanding the problem, creating visibility into costs, developing a cost reduction roadmap, creating a tiger team to focus on cost reduction, and collaborating with other departments to reduce costs. It also emphasizes the importance of leading by example, understanding the correlation between cost and reliability, and the need for ongoing effort to maintain cost reduction.

What I Learned From A Huge Automation Initiative

A talented Tech Lead and experienced Product team had been working on an automation initiative for over a year that could save millions of dollars for the company, but it had not taken off. An engineering leader who understood both Machine Learning and Software Development was brought in to shift the ML team's focus from research-oriented to production-oriented development. The team adopted a "Rapid Prototyping" model and committed to action and planning around it. Lessons learned included that failure is a great teacher, good enough is good enough, and cutting through management layers is sometimes necessary.

API Migration: A Story of Confidence, Clear Goal, and Focus

This project was a migration from Google App Engine to Kubernetes, which was taking over two years and facing multiple delays and setbacks. The leadership was considering canceling the project, but the author stepped in and made himself personally accountable. He set clear and precise milestones, took risks, cleaned up the backlog, and tracked progress with a progress bar. He also communicated progress and results to the rest of the company, and inspired the team to work hard. Through this, he was able to successfully complete the project and save the company over $1M in infrastructure costs. The lessons learned from this project include rebuilding confidence and morale, taking accountability, breaking down large projects into smaller parts, having a proof of concept, and having a clear measure of value.

Use Design Sprints to Improve Your Product

A team of 35 engineers, 5 PMs, and a DevOps team were tasked with building a new product in the energy utility space, but none of them had any domain product context. To solve this problem, the team implemented design sprints in order to plan and deliver their work more effectively. This required introducing the concept, piloting with teams, and applying the lessons learned. Additionally, pre-mortems were used to identify potential issues and all team members were encouraged to be open and vulnerable during meetings.

Dealing With an Inter-Team Conflict

A product team and an infrastructure team were having tension due to the product team taking shortcuts in the codebase. The product team leader had to escalate the issue and evoke empathy from both sides to understand each other's perspectives. A meeting was held with a presentation to explain the business case and why the shortcuts were necessary. A shared sense of ownership was instilled and the tension was resolved. The lesson learned was to include empathy in core values and to look for empathetic people to partner with.

Reorganizing the Geographically Split Teams

This manager inherited a team that needed to scale quickly, but the organizational structure was hindering progress. To solve the problem, the manager restructured the teams to be self-sufficient and enabled them to autonomously build one section of the website. Additionally, the manager implemented a cultural intervention to restore trust between the teams in different geographies. The lessons learned from this experience were that teams should be given autonomy and product managers should be included in any restructuring.

How to Spark Innovation in Your Team

A team of engineers was stuck in a repetitive mode of work and the manager wanted to shake things up. After a failed brainstorming session, the manager set up a meeting with a release engineering company to gain insight into their process. After the meeting, the team was inspired to make changes and automate operations, leading to shorter lead times and a transformation of the team from 100% operational to 50% operational and 50% R&D. The manager learned the importance of reaching out for help and leveraging a network to exchange ideas.

Managing and Supporting Remote Teams - From an All-Remote Company

Gitlab is a large all-remote company with 1,300 employees in nearly all timezones. To manage a team of 12 over 8 timezones, the company has implemented asynchronous communication practices such as publishing notes and content before meetings, recording meetings, and taking detailed notes. In cases where decisions need to be made or quick communication is needed, multi-modal communication is used. To prevent burnout, it is important to set expectations on when people should be available and to not communicate ideas during non-work hours.

How to Effectively Communicate on Slack

After receiving feedback from users, a leader devised a framework for using Slack that was recommended company-wide. This framework included using public channels instead of direct messages, using threads to reduce noise, and using standup notes to document progress. After 3 months of iteration, the framework was adopted and proved to be effective for the organization.

Improving Collaboration Between Engineering and Product Across Time Zones

After an acquisition, the company faced a delivery problem due to the lack of Product Managers and the time zone difference between them and the engineering team. To solve this, engineering leadership took on multiple roles such as product, analytics, and project management. They also proposed a daily standup and additional time for PMs to communicate and transfer information. Through preplanning and pregrooming, the team was able to align their business and company values and work towards one goal.

How Do You Handle an Underperforming Employee

As a manager, it is important to look for patterns of inefficiency when dealing with underperformance. Open conversations should be had with employees, and expectations should be clearly communicated. Firing should be a last resort, and managers should approach the situation with empathy and care. Follow up should be done to ensure that expectations are being met.

How to Prevent a Single Point of Failure

In the Bay Area, where people are constantly considering changing their careers, a single point of failure problem can arise when one person accumulates significant institutional and technical knowledge and then leaves or takes a break. To prevent this problem, processes such as documentation, collaboration, and motivation should be implemented. Additionally, when a single point of failure situation arises, extracting as much information as possible and re-engineering the system without the person's input can help mitigate the risk.

Communicating and Maintaining Alignment Across Different Time Zones

This article discusses the challenges of achieving alignment across different time zones, such as limited time overlap and cultural and language differences. To address this, the team established 'golden hours' for critical collaboration, migrated part of their work to collaboration platforms, and instituted rules for meetings such as having an agenda and circulating it 24 hours in advance. Additionally, they documented decisions and actions taken in meetings to avoid having to repeat them. Lessons learned include that meetings should be kept short and focused, and that simple tools are often the most helpful for collaboration.

Scaling a Product Across Multiple Markets

Scaling a product across multiple markets presents a challenge of balancing localization needs in each market and global scale. To successfully do this, organizations should localize from day one, get regional sponsorship, rally around shared goals, ask if requests will solve their most important goals, solve for their most difficult markets first, find common regional pain points, and refactor their product. Additionally, different skills are required from a PM perspective, documentation becomes increasingly important, and testing becomes more important. Finally, scaling across many markets is an opportunity to improve the core product back in the original market.

Securing a Big Leap Buy-In

This article outlines the steps taken to gain board-level buy-in for a product initiative, including identifying a committed sponsor, understanding the key drivers for different executives, and having multiple 'big leap' bets or experiments running simultaneously. It also provides lessons learned, such as over-communicating with the sponsor and delegates throughout the process, and being prepared to promote the product from the moment it starts gaining traction.

The Importance of Allocating Time for Self-Reflection

A Director of Engineering realized they were stagnating in their role and decided to take action by seeking advice from mentors, reading, and reshuffling their calendar to free up time for more hands-on work. After realizing that reading and blocking time was not enough, they changed roles and went back to a more IC role, eventually finding more happiness. Through this experience, they learned the importance of self-reflection, listening to oneself, and understanding that roles can differ greatly from company to company.

How to Approach Service Refactoring

This article discusses the challenges of identifying and tackling tech debt in a limited time and resource environment. It outlines two approaches taken to address the issue, the first being to disperse the effort among teams, which was unsuccessful. The second approach was to identify a few top initiatives and streamline focus on the top three to five that were the most important. This approach was successful, and the article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of team chemistry and mapping dependencies beforehand.

Practice Makes Perfect: How to Run a Game Day

This article discusses the problem of giving engineers more autonomy to control and deploy their services to production. It then outlines the actions taken to address this issue, such as providing access to monitoring tools, onboarding and advanced training, and running game days to simulate failure and test system responses. Finally, it highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of the human aspect, the need to look for solutions from different perspectives, the value of the feedback loop, and the fun and challenge of chaos engineering.

Make Hard Time Easier -- Work With a Sponsor

When the company needed to bring in a more experienced CTO, the Product Development team, including the author, had to go through a difficult transition. The author was able to recruit a technical advisor as the new CTO, and through their relationship, the author was able to learn valuable lessons about asking for and listening to feedback, challenging and disagreeing with their manager, and using what they learned to help turn their next manager into a sponsor.

First-Time Managers: An Answer for a Solid Organizational Structure

After taking over management responsibilities of an organization, the leadership team had to research best practices, talk to advisors, and explore different organizational models to create a new structure. They gathered feedback from the team and had the managerial candidates meet the team members. They also provided support and training for the new managers, but many ended up returning to their IC roles. To make better choices, the leader needs to better assess people’s motivation, capabilities, and commitment, and create a safe environment for people to take risks and fail.

Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs

This article outlines the steps taken to reduce cloud computing costs for an organization. It highlights the importance of understanding the problem, creating visibility into costs, developing a cost reduction roadmap, creating a tiger team to focus on cost reduction, and collaborating with other departments to reduce costs. It also emphasizes the importance of leading by example, understanding the correlation between cost and reliability, and the need for ongoing effort to maintain cost reduction.

What I Learned From A Huge Automation Initiative

A talented Tech Lead and experienced Product team had been working on an automation initiative for over a year that could save millions of dollars for the company, but it had not taken off. An engineering leader who understood both Machine Learning and Software Development was brought in to shift the ML team's focus from research-oriented to production-oriented development. The team adopted a "Rapid Prototyping" model and committed to action and planning around it. Lessons learned included that failure is a great teacher, good enough is good enough, and cutting through management layers is sometimes necessary.

API Migration: A Story of Confidence, Clear Goal, and Focus

This project was a migration from Google App Engine to Kubernetes, which was taking over two years and facing multiple delays and setbacks. The leadership was considering canceling the project, but the author stepped in and made himself personally accountable. He set clear and precise milestones, took risks, cleaned up the backlog, and tracked progress with a progress bar. He also communicated progress and results to the rest of the company, and inspired the team to work hard. Through this, he was able to successfully complete the project and save the company over $1M in infrastructure costs. The lessons learned from this project include rebuilding confidence and morale, taking accountability, breaking down large projects into smaller parts, having a proof of concept, and having a clear measure of value.

Use Design Sprints to Improve Your Product

A team of 35 engineers, 5 PMs, and a DevOps team were tasked with building a new product in the energy utility space, but none of them had any domain product context. To solve this problem, the team implemented design sprints in order to plan and deliver their work more effectively. This required introducing the concept, piloting with teams, and applying the lessons learned. Additionally, pre-mortems were used to identify potential issues and all team members were encouraged to be open and vulnerable during meetings.

Dealing With an Inter-Team Conflict

A product team and an infrastructure team were having tension due to the product team taking shortcuts in the codebase. The product team leader had to escalate the issue and evoke empathy from both sides to understand each other's perspectives. A meeting was held with a presentation to explain the business case and why the shortcuts were necessary. A shared sense of ownership was instilled and the tension was resolved. The lesson learned was to include empathy in core values and to look for empathetic people to partner with.

Reorganizing the Geographically Split Teams

This manager inherited a team that needed to scale quickly, but the organizational structure was hindering progress. To solve the problem, the manager restructured the teams to be self-sufficient and enabled them to autonomously build one section of the website. Additionally, the manager implemented a cultural intervention to restore trust between the teams in different geographies. The lessons learned from this experience were that teams should be given autonomy and product managers should be included in any restructuring.

How to Spark Innovation in Your Team

A team of engineers was stuck in a repetitive mode of work and the manager wanted to shake things up. After a failed brainstorming session, the manager set up a meeting with a release engineering company to gain insight into their process. After the meeting, the team was inspired to make changes and automate operations, leading to shorter lead times and a transformation of the team from 100% operational to 50% operational and 50% R&D. The manager learned the importance of reaching out for help and leveraging a network to exchange ideas.

Managing and Supporting Remote Teams - From an All-Remote Company

Gitlab is a large all-remote company with 1,300 employees in nearly all timezones. To manage a team of 12 over 8 timezones, the company has implemented asynchronous communication practices such as publishing notes and content before meetings, recording meetings, and taking detailed notes. In cases where decisions need to be made or quick communication is needed, multi-modal communication is used. To prevent burnout, it is important to set expectations on when people should be available and to not communicate ideas during non-work hours.

How to Effectively Communicate on Slack

After receiving feedback from users, a leader devised a framework for using Slack that was recommended company-wide. This framework included using public channels instead of direct messages, using threads to reduce noise, and using standup notes to document progress. After 3 months of iteration, the framework was adopted and proved to be effective for the organization.

Improving Collaboration Between Engineering and Product Across Time Zones

After an acquisition, the company faced a delivery problem due to the lack of Product Managers and the time zone difference between them and the engineering team. To solve this, engineering leadership took on multiple roles such as product, analytics, and project management. They also proposed a daily standup and additional time for PMs to communicate and transfer information. Through preplanning and pregrooming, the team was able to align their business and company values and work towards one goal.

How Do You Handle an Underperforming Employee

As a manager, it is important to look for patterns of inefficiency when dealing with underperformance. Open conversations should be had with employees, and expectations should be clearly communicated. Firing should be a last resort, and managers should approach the situation with empathy and care. Follow up should be done to ensure that expectations are being met.

How to Prevent a Single Point of Failure

In the Bay Area, where people are constantly considering changing their careers, a single point of failure problem can arise when one person accumulates significant institutional and technical knowledge and then leaves or takes a break. To prevent this problem, processes such as documentation, collaboration, and motivation should be implemented. Additionally, when a single point of failure situation arises, extracting as much information as possible and re-engineering the system without the person's input can help mitigate the risk.

Communicating and Maintaining Alignment Across Different Time Zones

This article discusses the challenges of achieving alignment across different time zones, such as limited time overlap and cultural and language differences. To address this, the team established 'golden hours' for critical collaboration, migrated part of their work to collaboration platforms, and instituted rules for meetings such as having an agenda and circulating it 24 hours in advance. Additionally, they documented decisions and actions taken in meetings to avoid having to repeat them. Lessons learned include that meetings should be kept short and focused, and that simple tools are often the most helpful for collaboration.

Scaling a Product Across Multiple Markets

Scaling a product across multiple markets presents a challenge of balancing localization needs in each market and global scale. To successfully do this, organizations should localize from day one, get regional sponsorship, rally around shared goals, ask if requests will solve their most important goals, solve for their most difficult markets first, find common regional pain points, and refactor their product. Additionally, different skills are required from a PM perspective, documentation becomes increasingly important, and testing becomes more important. Finally, scaling across many markets is an opportunity to improve the core product back in the original market.

Securing a Big Leap Buy-In

This article outlines the steps taken to gain board-level buy-in for a product initiative, including identifying a committed sponsor, understanding the key drivers for different executives, and having multiple 'big leap' bets or experiments running simultaneously. It also provides lessons learned, such as over-communicating with the sponsor and delegates throughout the process, and being prepared to promote the product from the moment it starts gaining traction.

The Importance of Allocating Time for Self-Reflection

A Director of Engineering realized they were stagnating in their role and decided to take action by seeking advice from mentors, reading, and reshuffling their calendar to free up time for more hands-on work. After realizing that reading and blocking time was not enough, they changed roles and went back to a more IC role, eventually finding more happiness. Through this experience, they learned the importance of self-reflection, listening to oneself, and understanding that roles can differ greatly from company to company.

How to Approach Service Refactoring

This article discusses the challenges of identifying and tackling tech debt in a limited time and resource environment. It outlines two approaches taken to address the issue, the first being to disperse the effort among teams, which was unsuccessful. The second approach was to identify a few top initiatives and streamline focus on the top three to five that were the most important. This approach was successful, and the article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of team chemistry and mapping dependencies beforehand.

Practice Makes Perfect: How to Run a Game Day

This article discusses the problem of giving engineers more autonomy to control and deploy their services to production. It then outlines the actions taken to address this issue, such as providing access to monitoring tools, onboarding and advanced training, and running game days to simulate failure and test system responses. Finally, it highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of the human aspect, the need to look for solutions from different perspectives, the value of the feedback loop, and the fun and challenge of chaos engineering.

Make Hard Time Easier -- Work With a Sponsor

When the company needed to bring in a more experienced CTO, the Product Development team, including the author, had to go through a difficult transition. The author was able to recruit a technical advisor as the new CTO, and through their relationship, the author was able to learn valuable lessons about asking for and listening to feedback, challenging and disagreeing with their manager, and using what they learned to help turn their next manager into a sponsor.

First-Time Managers: An Answer for a Solid Organizational Structure

After taking over management responsibilities of an organization, the leadership team had to research best practices, talk to advisors, and explore different organizational models to create a new structure. They gathered feedback from the team and had the managerial candidates meet the team members. They also provided support and training for the new managers, but many ended up returning to their IC roles. To make better choices, the leader needs to better assess people’s motivation, capabilities, and commitment, and create a safe environment for people to take risks and fail.

Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs

This article outlines the steps taken to reduce cloud computing costs for an organization. It highlights the importance of understanding the problem, creating visibility into costs, developing a cost reduction roadmap, creating a tiger team to focus on cost reduction, and collaborating with other departments to reduce costs. It also emphasizes the importance of leading by example, understanding the correlation between cost and reliability, and the need for ongoing effort to maintain cost reduction.

What I Learned From A Huge Automation Initiative

A talented Tech Lead and experienced Product team had been working on an automation initiative for over a year that could save millions of dollars for the company, but it had not taken off. An engineering leader who understood both Machine Learning and Software Development was brought in to shift the ML team's focus from research-oriented to production-oriented development. The team adopted a "Rapid Prototyping" model and committed to action and planning around it. Lessons learned included that failure is a great teacher, good enough is good enough, and cutting through management layers is sometimes necessary.

API Migration: A Story of Confidence, Clear Goal, and Focus

This project was a migration from Google App Engine to Kubernetes, which was taking over two years and facing multiple delays and setbacks. The leadership was considering canceling the project, but the author stepped in and made himself personally accountable. He set clear and precise milestones, took risks, cleaned up the backlog, and tracked progress with a progress bar. He also communicated progress and results to the rest of the company, and inspired the team to work hard. Through this, he was able to successfully complete the project and save the company over $1M in infrastructure costs. The lessons learned from this project include rebuilding confidence and morale, taking accountability, breaking down large projects into smaller parts, having a proof of concept, and having a clear measure of value.

Use Design Sprints to Improve Your Product

A team of 35 engineers, 5 PMs, and a DevOps team were tasked with building a new product in the energy utility space, but none of them had any domain product context. To solve this problem, the team implemented design sprints in order to plan and deliver their work more effectively. This required introducing the concept, piloting with teams, and applying the lessons learned. Additionally, pre-mortems were used to identify potential issues and all team members were encouraged to be open and vulnerable during meetings.

Dealing With an Inter-Team Conflict

A product team and an infrastructure team were having tension due to the product team taking shortcuts in the codebase. The product team leader had to escalate the issue and evoke empathy from both sides to understand each other's perspectives. A meeting was held with a presentation to explain the business case and why the shortcuts were necessary. A shared sense of ownership was instilled and the tension was resolved. The lesson learned was to include empathy in core values and to look for empathetic people to partner with.

Reorganizing the Geographically Split Teams

This manager inherited a team that needed to scale quickly, but the organizational structure was hindering progress. To solve the problem, the manager restructured the teams to be self-sufficient and enabled them to autonomously build one section of the website. Additionally, the manager implemented a cultural intervention to restore trust between the teams in different geographies. The lessons learned from this experience were that teams should be given autonomy and product managers should be included in any restructuring.

How to Spark Innovation in Your Team

A team of engineers was stuck in a repetitive mode of work and the manager wanted to shake things up. After a failed brainstorming session, the manager set up a meeting with a release engineering company to gain insight into their process. After the meeting, the team was inspired to make changes and automate operations, leading to shorter lead times and a transformation of the team from 100% operational to 50% operational and 50% R&D. The manager learned the importance of reaching out for help and leveraging a network to exchange ideas.

Managing and Supporting Remote Teams - From an All-Remote Company

Gitlab is a large all-remote company with 1,300 employees in nearly all timezones. To manage a team of 12 over 8 timezones, the company has implemented asynchronous communication practices such as publishing notes and content before meetings, recording meetings, and taking detailed notes. In cases where decisions need to be made or quick communication is needed, multi-modal communication is used. To prevent burnout, it is important to set expectations on when people should be available and to not communicate ideas during non-work hours.

How to Effectively Communicate on Slack

After receiving feedback from users, a leader devised a framework for using Slack that was recommended company-wide. This framework included using public channels instead of direct messages, using threads to reduce noise, and using standup notes to document progress. After 3 months of iteration, the framework was adopted and proved to be effective for the organization.

Improving Collaboration Between Engineering and Product Across Time Zones

After an acquisition, the company faced a delivery problem due to the lack of Product Managers and the time zone difference between them and the engineering team. To solve this, engineering leadership took on multiple roles such as product, analytics, and project management. They also proposed a daily standup and additional time for PMs to communicate and transfer information. Through preplanning and pregrooming, the team was able to align their business and company values and work towards one goal.

How Do You Handle an Underperforming Employee

As a manager, it is important to look for patterns of inefficiency when dealing with underperformance. Open conversations should be had with employees, and expectations should be clearly communicated. Firing should be a last resort, and managers should approach the situation with empathy and care. Follow up should be done to ensure that expectations are being met.

How to Prevent a Single Point of Failure

In the Bay Area, where people are constantly considering changing their careers, a single point of failure problem can arise when one person accumulates significant institutional and technical knowledge and then leaves or takes a break. To prevent this problem, processes such as documentation, collaboration, and motivation should be implemented. Additionally, when a single point of failure situation arises, extracting as much information as possible and re-engineering the system without the person's input can help mitigate the risk.

Communicating and Maintaining Alignment Across Different Time Zones

This article discusses the challenges of achieving alignment across different time zones, such as limited time overlap and cultural and language differences. To address this, the team established 'golden hours' for critical collaboration, migrated part of their work to collaboration platforms, and instituted rules for meetings such as having an agenda and circulating it 24 hours in advance. Additionally, they documented decisions and actions taken in meetings to avoid having to repeat them. Lessons learned include that meetings should be kept short and focused, and that simple tools are often the most helpful for collaboration.

Scaling a Product Across Multiple Markets

Scaling a product across multiple markets presents a challenge of balancing localization needs in each market and global scale. To successfully do this, organizations should localize from day one, get regional sponsorship, rally around shared goals, ask if requests will solve their most important goals, solve for their most difficult markets first, find common regional pain points, and refactor their product. Additionally, different skills are required from a PM perspective, documentation becomes increasingly important, and testing becomes more important. Finally, scaling across many markets is an opportunity to improve the core product back in the original market.

Securing a Big Leap Buy-In

This article outlines the steps taken to gain board-level buy-in for a product initiative, including identifying a committed sponsor, understanding the key drivers for different executives, and having multiple 'big leap' bets or experiments running simultaneously. It also provides lessons learned, such as over-communicating with the sponsor and delegates throughout the process, and being prepared to promote the product from the moment it starts gaining traction.

The Importance of Allocating Time for Self-Reflection

A Director of Engineering realized they were stagnating in their role and decided to take action by seeking advice from mentors, reading, and reshuffling their calendar to free up time for more hands-on work. After realizing that reading and blocking time was not enough, they changed roles and went back to a more IC role, eventually finding more happiness. Through this experience, they learned the importance of self-reflection, listening to oneself, and understanding that roles can differ greatly from company to company.

How to Approach Service Refactoring

This article discusses the challenges of identifying and tackling tech debt in a limited time and resource environment. It outlines two approaches taken to address the issue, the first being to disperse the effort among teams, which was unsuccessful. The second approach was to identify a few top initiatives and streamline focus on the top three to five that were the most important. This approach was successful, and the article also provides lessons learned, such as the importance of team chemistry and mapping dependencies beforehand.

Practice Makes Perfect: How to Run a Game Day

This article discusses the problem of giving engineers more autonomy to control and deploy their services to production. It then outlines the actions taken to address this issue, such as providing access to monitoring tools, onboarding and advanced training, and running game days to simulate failure and test system responses. Finally, it highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of the human aspect, the need to look for solutions from different perspectives, the value of the feedback loop, and the fun and challenge of chaos engineering.

Make Hard Time Easier -- Work With a Sponsor

When the company needed to bring in a more experienced CTO, the Product Development team, including the author, had to go through a difficult transition. The author was able to recruit a technical advisor as the new CTO, and through their relationship, the author was able to learn valuable lessons about asking for and listening to feedback, challenging and disagreeing with their manager, and using what they learned to help turn their next manager into a sponsor.

First-Time Managers: An Answer for a Solid Organizational Structure

After taking over management responsibilities of an organization, the leadership team had to research best practices, talk to advisors, and explore different organizational models to create a new structure. They gathered feedback from the team and had the managerial candidates meet the team members. They also provided support and training for the new managers, but many ended up returning to their IC roles. To make better choices, the leader needs to better assess people’s motivation, capabilities, and commitment, and create a safe environment for people to take risks and fail.

Ways to Reduce Your Cloud Costs

This article outlines the steps taken to reduce cloud computing costs for an organization. It highlights the importance of understanding the problem, creating visibility into costs, developing a cost reduction roadmap, creating a tiger team to focus on cost reduction, and collaborating with other departments to reduce costs. It also emphasizes the importance of leading by example, understanding the correlation between cost and reliability, and the need for ongoing effort to maintain cost reduction.

What I Learned From A Huge Automation Initiative

A talented Tech Lead and experienced Product team had been working on an automation initiative for over a year that could save millions of dollars for the company, but it had not taken off. An engineering leader who understood both Machine Learning and Software Development was brought in to shift the ML team's focus from research-oriented to production-oriented development. The team adopted a "Rapid Prototyping" model and committed to action and planning around it. Lessons learned included that failure is a great teacher, good enough is good enough, and cutting through management layers is sometimes necessary.

API Migration: A Story of Confidence, Clear Goal, and Focus

This project was a migration from Google App Engine to Kubernetes, which was taking over two years and facing multiple delays and setbacks. The leadership was considering canceling the project, but the author stepped in and made himself personally accountable. He set clear and precise milestones, took risks, cleaned up the backlog, and tracked progress with a progress bar. He also communicated progress and results to the rest of the company, and inspired the team to work hard. Through this, he was able to successfully complete the project and save the company over $1M in infrastructure costs. The lessons learned from this project include rebuilding confidence and morale, taking accountability, breaking down large projects into smaller parts, having a proof of concept, and having a clear measure of value.

Use Design Sprints to Improve Your Product

A team of 35 engineers, 5 PMs, and a DevOps team were tasked with building a new product in the energy utility space, but none of them had any domain product context. To solve this problem, the team implemented design sprints in order to plan and deliver their work more effectively. This required introducing the concept, piloting with teams, and applying the lessons learned. Additionally, pre-mortems were used to identify potential issues and all team members were encouraged to be open and vulnerable during meetings.

Dealing With an Inter-Team Conflict

A product team and an infrastructure team were having tension due to the product team taking shortcuts in the codebase. The product team leader had to escalate the issue and evoke empathy from both sides to understand each other's perspectives. A meeting was held with a presentation to explain the business case and why the shortcuts were necessary. A shared sense of ownership was instilled and the tension was resolved. The lesson learned was to include empathy in core values and to look for empathetic people to partner with.

Reorganizing the Geographically Split Teams

This manager inherited a team that needed to scale quickly, but the organizational structure was hindering progress. To solve the problem, the manager restructured the teams to be self-sufficient and enabled them to autonomously build one section of the website. Additionally, the manager implemented a cultural intervention to restore trust between the teams in different geographies. The lessons learned from this experience were that teams should be given autonomy and product managers should be included in any restructuring.

How to Spark Innovation in Your Team

A team of engineers was stuck in a repetitive mode of work and the manager wanted to shake things up. After a failed brainstorming session, the manager set up a meeting with a release engineering company to gain insight into their process. After the meeting, the team was inspired to make changes and automate operations, leading to shorter lead times and a transformation of the team from 100% operational to 50% operational and 50% R&D. The manager learned the importance of reaching out for help and leveraging a network to exchange ideas.

Managing and Supporting Remote Teams - From an All-Remote Company

Gitlab is a large all-remote company with 1,300 employees in nearly all timezones. To manage a team of 12 over 8 timezones, the company has implemented asynchronous communication practices such as publishing notes and content before meetings, recording meetings, and taking detailed notes. In cases where decisions need to be made or quick communication is needed, multi-modal communication is used. To prevent burnout, it is important to set expectations on when people should be available and to not communicate ideas during non-work hours.

How to Effectively Communicate on Slack

After receiving feedback from users, a leader devised a framework for using Slack that was recommended company-wide. This framework included using public channels instead of direct messages, using threads to reduce noise, and using standup notes to document progress. After 3 months of iteration, the framework was adopted and proved to be effective for the organization.

Improving Collaboration Between Engineering and Product Across Time Zones

After an acquisition, the company faced a delivery problem due to the lack of Product Managers and the time zone difference between them and the engineering team. To solve this, engineering leadership took on multiple roles such as product, analytics, and project management. They also proposed a daily standup and additional time for PMs to communicate and transfer information. Through preplanning and pregrooming, the team was able to align their business and company values and work towards one goal.