Knowledge shared by our community

Handling a Mistake - Adopting a New Workflow

After a company acquisition, the business asked the engineering team to adopt a new workflow. The team agreed without fully understanding the consequences, and soon found themselves struggling with global Sprints and a 14-step workflow. To solve the issues, the team condensed the workflow to 7 steps and returned to a more familiar process, resulting in improved morale and productivity. The VP of Engineering learned the lesson to always vet new adaptations and to own up to mistakes.

An Acquisition Across Time Zones

After a company acquisition, the experts of the product had to transfer their knowledge while continuing to create features and product sets across 4 time zones. To optimize velocity per Sprint, they implemented on-site visits, a weekly progress meeting, a technical Scrum of Scrums, and delegation to engineering leaders. Lessons learned included finding ways to maximize overlap hours, front loading meetings, and coming with solutions instead of problems.

Cultivating a Relationship Between Collocated and Remote Teams

This article outlines the steps taken to maintain a successful working relationship between a US-based company and a business services team based in Pune, India. The author took three approaches to ensure trust and connectedness between the two teams: working agreements, eliciting technical excellence, and company culture. Working agreements included treating the remote team the same as the collocated team, communication, and decision autonomy. Technical excellence was achieved by getting the remote team involved in the same activities as the US team and encouraging cross-commitment across the stack. Company culture was promoted through video calls, visits, company swag, and hackathons. The result was a diverse team with similar sets of practices and a low turnover rate.

Helping Engineers Transition from an IC to a Manager Role

When faced with the challenge of quickly scaling his engineering team at Facebook, the author had two options: hire an engineering manager from outside, or transition strong individual contributors to a manager role. He chose the latter, creating a well-structured process and trial period to evaluate and transition them. He has since used this process for many years, resulting in successful engineering leaders at various tech companies.

What We Learned From Running Open Spaces

In order to create a culture of learning and development in a fast-paced tech environment, an open space session was introduced. This session is driven by the participants and is governed by four principles and one rule. Over time, a variety of topics have been discussed, from technical to leadership and emotional intelligence. It is important to regularly schedule open spaces and remind engineers of their importance. Open spaces are not silver bullets, but they do increase engagement, productivity, and innovation.

Some Ideas for Breaking Down Silos In Your Organization

Silos can be a sign of a highly-productive team, but can also create a lack of cross-team communication, conflicts, and turf wars. To break down silos, a company can give employees a choice on where to work, create team charters, and hold an expo. This helps to break down silos, seed best practices, and engage employees. Additionally, it has been found that engineers want a challenge and that placing people in their first or second preference team increases employee engagement and general happiness.

Recruitment and Interview Rotas: the Engineers’ Way

An engineering manager was looking for ways to simplify the hiring process, which was time-consuming and disruptive to their work. The engineers took ownership of the process and created a team to self-select who would attend interviews each Monday. They also created a tool to allow for emergency interviews and a Slack channel for short-notice changes. This gave them a sense of ownership and encouraged proactivity, initiative, and responsibility.

Celebrating Learning from Failure

This article discusses how a company responded to a mistake made by one of their developers, and how they used it as an opportunity to create a culture that embraces failure and encourages risk-taking. The company implemented a "5 Whys approach" to understand the root cause of the problem, and created an award to celebrate the biggest mistake. They also published the story as an artifact to promote their values and as a recruiting tool. This article highlights the importance of blameless culture and the value of embracing failure as part of the learning experience.

Some Useful Tips for Decoupling Releases and Deployments

The engineering team set a goal to get closer to continuous deployment, but the tooling and processes in place were a blocker. To solve this, the team mapped out their current processes and tools, including CI/CD, Jira workflow, feature toggling, and release notes. They also implemented a feature toggling system and adopted it by the engineering team. The new system allowed for increased deployments, faster reverts, and better release planning. Change management was hard for customers and internally, so it was important to communicate the changes clearly. The main concern was cleaning up old flags, but this was viewed as an inevitable trade-off.

A New Job as a VP of Engineering: A Lesson in Trust and Collaboration

In his first three to six months as VP of Engineering at a new company, the author took a deliberate approach to earn respect and build trust. He observed, listened, and talked to people to understand the team, processes, strengths, and risks. He then created a roadmap to address key issues, communicated it to the team, and delegated initiatives to team leads. He also relied on data to measure impact and provide visibility on progress. His approach was to move fast, get feedback, and introduce changes with a caring approach.

Too Many Direct Reports

The author joined a small company eight years ago and, as the product scaled and more customers were acquired, the team grew and the author ended up with 20 direct reports spread across four teams. This was overwhelming and time-consuming, so the author took it upon themselves to drive the change and create a structure to groom people from IC to management. They mapped their responsibilities, wrote down role descriptions, advertised the roles internally, and provided thorough feedback to candidates. The author was able to take a step back and become more strategically oriented, and found immense enjoyment in coaching managers and being part of their personal and professional growth. They learned that if they see a problem, they should try to fix it and not wait for their managers to do that for them, and that investing in their own people is important.

Prioritizing Tech Work vs. Product Work: The Incomplete Story

Tech teams often grumble about not having enough time to do tech work and tech debt piling up, leading to scalability issues and increased cycle time. Leaders should document tech work that needs to be done, prioritize it using the RICE framework, and provide context to the product team. Product and tech teams need to be aligned and if tensions arise, leaders should not be afraid to ask for help.

Asynchronous Written Communication: How to Make It Work

As teams scale up and remote work becomes more common, asynchronous writing processes are needed to facilitate collaboration. A structure should be followed when writing, including context, key challenges, principles, proposals, alternative options, objectives, and references. Once the initial draft is completed, it should be distributed widely and discussed. Finally, a call should be booked to debate and decide on the best option. Writing allows for a comprehensive paper trail, allows everyone to express their opinion, sharpens focus, and cuts out noise.

Deciding on a New Manager: What Really Matters

When selecting a new Engineering Manager, it is important to set clear expectations and consider both internal and external candidates. Interviews should be conducted to assess the candidates and the decision should be based on the expectations outlined in the job description. It is important to ensure that the candidate is comfortable with the transition to a managerial role and that they have the necessary support to do so. Finally, use this as an opportunity to identify potential candidates internally and help them grow into the role.

When Shared Ownership Means No Ownership

This article discusses the importance of defining and documenting ownership of services within an organization. It outlines the steps to creating a visual map of service ownership, creating supporting documents, and assessing how services are distributed across teams. It also emphasizes the need for clarity and purpose in order to drive new features and maintenance of existing services. Finally, it suggests that clear ownership works well as part of an internal open-source model.

Why Psychological Safety Is More Important Than Ever During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

In response to the transition to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the author has implemented regular 15-minute sync up meetings with their skip level associates to maintain a connection and provide a platform for employees to voice their concerns. The author has also implemented non-work-related activities to encourage bonding and create a trustful and supportive environment. Through these measures, the author has learned the importance of interacting with employees to create a connection of trust and a safe space for them to share their concerns.

Start With the Customer and Work Backwards

In 2012, a startup was founded to create a Guest Relationship Management (GRM) tool for service-based businesses like restaurants. The main concern was to create an optimized set of questions that incorporated all the critical metrics for the feedback template, while also making it quick and easy for customers to fill out. Through customer research and listening to their needs, the survey was tailored and optimized to be just the right-size, and was a huge success. The lessons learned from this experience were to always build customer-centric, easy-to-use solutions that solve the customers’ problems, and to look beyond what customers believe they see and look at their hidden needs and deeper goals.

How to Identify Root Cause of an Application Failure

After joining a new company, the author was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of an API outage with 25+ downstream services. To solve this problem, the author built an application dependency discovery, reporting, and management tool to monitor and analyze application logs for errors. This tool was able to quickly identify the failing services and alert the responsible person. The author is now working on a machine learning algorithm to anticipate potential problems and send proactive alerts. The author's experience has taught them to challenge the status quo and take bold steps to solve problems.

Strategizing Arguments Using Scoring Grids

Product leaders must find a way to come to a consensus on initiatives while taking into account the company strategy. To do this, scoring grids can be used to remove opinion and create data to make sense of. This helps to remove emotion and opinion from arguments and allows for a set of strategic priorities to be established. Additionally, engineers can provide scores for the level of complexity involved in building things and the CEO can be given a column to score initiatives, allowing them to justify their dreams in the context of the scores.

Machine Learning as a Skill Set

After 15 years of coding, the author invested their personal time and curiosity into machine learning, realizing that computers can infer and guess from large amounts of data in ways humans cannot. This inspired them to understand and leverage the technology to build great products, and they encourage others to appreciate the difference between a rules-based system and an example-based system.

Handling a Mistake - Adopting a New Workflow

After a company acquisition, the business asked the engineering team to adopt a new workflow. The team agreed without fully understanding the consequences, and soon found themselves struggling with global Sprints and a 14-step workflow. To solve the issues, the team condensed the workflow to 7 steps and returned to a more familiar process, resulting in improved morale and productivity. The VP of Engineering learned the lesson to always vet new adaptations and to own up to mistakes.

An Acquisition Across Time Zones

After a company acquisition, the experts of the product had to transfer their knowledge while continuing to create features and product sets across 4 time zones. To optimize velocity per Sprint, they implemented on-site visits, a weekly progress meeting, a technical Scrum of Scrums, and delegation to engineering leaders. Lessons learned included finding ways to maximize overlap hours, front loading meetings, and coming with solutions instead of problems.

Cultivating a Relationship Between Collocated and Remote Teams

This article outlines the steps taken to maintain a successful working relationship between a US-based company and a business services team based in Pune, India. The author took three approaches to ensure trust and connectedness between the two teams: working agreements, eliciting technical excellence, and company culture. Working agreements included treating the remote team the same as the collocated team, communication, and decision autonomy. Technical excellence was achieved by getting the remote team involved in the same activities as the US team and encouraging cross-commitment across the stack. Company culture was promoted through video calls, visits, company swag, and hackathons. The result was a diverse team with similar sets of practices and a low turnover rate.

Helping Engineers Transition from an IC to a Manager Role

When faced with the challenge of quickly scaling his engineering team at Facebook, the author had two options: hire an engineering manager from outside, or transition strong individual contributors to a manager role. He chose the latter, creating a well-structured process and trial period to evaluate and transition them. He has since used this process for many years, resulting in successful engineering leaders at various tech companies.

What We Learned From Running Open Spaces

In order to create a culture of learning and development in a fast-paced tech environment, an open space session was introduced. This session is driven by the participants and is governed by four principles and one rule. Over time, a variety of topics have been discussed, from technical to leadership and emotional intelligence. It is important to regularly schedule open spaces and remind engineers of their importance. Open spaces are not silver bullets, but they do increase engagement, productivity, and innovation.

Some Ideas for Breaking Down Silos In Your Organization

Silos can be a sign of a highly-productive team, but can also create a lack of cross-team communication, conflicts, and turf wars. To break down silos, a company can give employees a choice on where to work, create team charters, and hold an expo. This helps to break down silos, seed best practices, and engage employees. Additionally, it has been found that engineers want a challenge and that placing people in their first or second preference team increases employee engagement and general happiness.

Recruitment and Interview Rotas: the Engineers’ Way

An engineering manager was looking for ways to simplify the hiring process, which was time-consuming and disruptive to their work. The engineers took ownership of the process and created a team to self-select who would attend interviews each Monday. They also created a tool to allow for emergency interviews and a Slack channel for short-notice changes. This gave them a sense of ownership and encouraged proactivity, initiative, and responsibility.

Celebrating Learning from Failure

This article discusses how a company responded to a mistake made by one of their developers, and how they used it as an opportunity to create a culture that embraces failure and encourages risk-taking. The company implemented a "5 Whys approach" to understand the root cause of the problem, and created an award to celebrate the biggest mistake. They also published the story as an artifact to promote their values and as a recruiting tool. This article highlights the importance of blameless culture and the value of embracing failure as part of the learning experience.

Some Useful Tips for Decoupling Releases and Deployments

The engineering team set a goal to get closer to continuous deployment, but the tooling and processes in place were a blocker. To solve this, the team mapped out their current processes and tools, including CI/CD, Jira workflow, feature toggling, and release notes. They also implemented a feature toggling system and adopted it by the engineering team. The new system allowed for increased deployments, faster reverts, and better release planning. Change management was hard for customers and internally, so it was important to communicate the changes clearly. The main concern was cleaning up old flags, but this was viewed as an inevitable trade-off.

A New Job as a VP of Engineering: A Lesson in Trust and Collaboration

In his first three to six months as VP of Engineering at a new company, the author took a deliberate approach to earn respect and build trust. He observed, listened, and talked to people to understand the team, processes, strengths, and risks. He then created a roadmap to address key issues, communicated it to the team, and delegated initiatives to team leads. He also relied on data to measure impact and provide visibility on progress. His approach was to move fast, get feedback, and introduce changes with a caring approach.

Too Many Direct Reports

The author joined a small company eight years ago and, as the product scaled and more customers were acquired, the team grew and the author ended up with 20 direct reports spread across four teams. This was overwhelming and time-consuming, so the author took it upon themselves to drive the change and create a structure to groom people from IC to management. They mapped their responsibilities, wrote down role descriptions, advertised the roles internally, and provided thorough feedback to candidates. The author was able to take a step back and become more strategically oriented, and found immense enjoyment in coaching managers and being part of their personal and professional growth. They learned that if they see a problem, they should try to fix it and not wait for their managers to do that for them, and that investing in their own people is important.

Prioritizing Tech Work vs. Product Work: The Incomplete Story

Tech teams often grumble about not having enough time to do tech work and tech debt piling up, leading to scalability issues and increased cycle time. Leaders should document tech work that needs to be done, prioritize it using the RICE framework, and provide context to the product team. Product and tech teams need to be aligned and if tensions arise, leaders should not be afraid to ask for help.

Asynchronous Written Communication: How to Make It Work

As teams scale up and remote work becomes more common, asynchronous writing processes are needed to facilitate collaboration. A structure should be followed when writing, including context, key challenges, principles, proposals, alternative options, objectives, and references. Once the initial draft is completed, it should be distributed widely and discussed. Finally, a call should be booked to debate and decide on the best option. Writing allows for a comprehensive paper trail, allows everyone to express their opinion, sharpens focus, and cuts out noise.

Deciding on a New Manager: What Really Matters

When selecting a new Engineering Manager, it is important to set clear expectations and consider both internal and external candidates. Interviews should be conducted to assess the candidates and the decision should be based on the expectations outlined in the job description. It is important to ensure that the candidate is comfortable with the transition to a managerial role and that they have the necessary support to do so. Finally, use this as an opportunity to identify potential candidates internally and help them grow into the role.

When Shared Ownership Means No Ownership

This article discusses the importance of defining and documenting ownership of services within an organization. It outlines the steps to creating a visual map of service ownership, creating supporting documents, and assessing how services are distributed across teams. It also emphasizes the need for clarity and purpose in order to drive new features and maintenance of existing services. Finally, it suggests that clear ownership works well as part of an internal open-source model.

Why Psychological Safety Is More Important Than Ever During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

In response to the transition to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the author has implemented regular 15-minute sync up meetings with their skip level associates to maintain a connection and provide a platform for employees to voice their concerns. The author has also implemented non-work-related activities to encourage bonding and create a trustful and supportive environment. Through these measures, the author has learned the importance of interacting with employees to create a connection of trust and a safe space for them to share their concerns.

Start With the Customer and Work Backwards

In 2012, a startup was founded to create a Guest Relationship Management (GRM) tool for service-based businesses like restaurants. The main concern was to create an optimized set of questions that incorporated all the critical metrics for the feedback template, while also making it quick and easy for customers to fill out. Through customer research and listening to their needs, the survey was tailored and optimized to be just the right-size, and was a huge success. The lessons learned from this experience were to always build customer-centric, easy-to-use solutions that solve the customers’ problems, and to look beyond what customers believe they see and look at their hidden needs and deeper goals.

How to Identify Root Cause of an Application Failure

After joining a new company, the author was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of an API outage with 25+ downstream services. To solve this problem, the author built an application dependency discovery, reporting, and management tool to monitor and analyze application logs for errors. This tool was able to quickly identify the failing services and alert the responsible person. The author is now working on a machine learning algorithm to anticipate potential problems and send proactive alerts. The author's experience has taught them to challenge the status quo and take bold steps to solve problems.

Strategizing Arguments Using Scoring Grids

Product leaders must find a way to come to a consensus on initiatives while taking into account the company strategy. To do this, scoring grids can be used to remove opinion and create data to make sense of. This helps to remove emotion and opinion from arguments and allows for a set of strategic priorities to be established. Additionally, engineers can provide scores for the level of complexity involved in building things and the CEO can be given a column to score initiatives, allowing them to justify their dreams in the context of the scores.

Machine Learning as a Skill Set

After 15 years of coding, the author invested their personal time and curiosity into machine learning, realizing that computers can infer and guess from large amounts of data in ways humans cannot. This inspired them to understand and leverage the technology to build great products, and they encourage others to appreciate the difference between a rules-based system and an example-based system.

Handling a Mistake - Adopting a New Workflow

After a company acquisition, the business asked the engineering team to adopt a new workflow. The team agreed without fully understanding the consequences, and soon found themselves struggling with global Sprints and a 14-step workflow. To solve the issues, the team condensed the workflow to 7 steps and returned to a more familiar process, resulting in improved morale and productivity. The VP of Engineering learned the lesson to always vet new adaptations and to own up to mistakes.

An Acquisition Across Time Zones

After a company acquisition, the experts of the product had to transfer their knowledge while continuing to create features and product sets across 4 time zones. To optimize velocity per Sprint, they implemented on-site visits, a weekly progress meeting, a technical Scrum of Scrums, and delegation to engineering leaders. Lessons learned included finding ways to maximize overlap hours, front loading meetings, and coming with solutions instead of problems.

Cultivating a Relationship Between Collocated and Remote Teams

This article outlines the steps taken to maintain a successful working relationship between a US-based company and a business services team based in Pune, India. The author took three approaches to ensure trust and connectedness between the two teams: working agreements, eliciting technical excellence, and company culture. Working agreements included treating the remote team the same as the collocated team, communication, and decision autonomy. Technical excellence was achieved by getting the remote team involved in the same activities as the US team and encouraging cross-commitment across the stack. Company culture was promoted through video calls, visits, company swag, and hackathons. The result was a diverse team with similar sets of practices and a low turnover rate.

Helping Engineers Transition from an IC to a Manager Role

When faced with the challenge of quickly scaling his engineering team at Facebook, the author had two options: hire an engineering manager from outside, or transition strong individual contributors to a manager role. He chose the latter, creating a well-structured process and trial period to evaluate and transition them. He has since used this process for many years, resulting in successful engineering leaders at various tech companies.

What We Learned From Running Open Spaces

In order to create a culture of learning and development in a fast-paced tech environment, an open space session was introduced. This session is driven by the participants and is governed by four principles and one rule. Over time, a variety of topics have been discussed, from technical to leadership and emotional intelligence. It is important to regularly schedule open spaces and remind engineers of their importance. Open spaces are not silver bullets, but they do increase engagement, productivity, and innovation.

Some Ideas for Breaking Down Silos In Your Organization

Silos can be a sign of a highly-productive team, but can also create a lack of cross-team communication, conflicts, and turf wars. To break down silos, a company can give employees a choice on where to work, create team charters, and hold an expo. This helps to break down silos, seed best practices, and engage employees. Additionally, it has been found that engineers want a challenge and that placing people in their first or second preference team increases employee engagement and general happiness.

Recruitment and Interview Rotas: the Engineers’ Way

An engineering manager was looking for ways to simplify the hiring process, which was time-consuming and disruptive to their work. The engineers took ownership of the process and created a team to self-select who would attend interviews each Monday. They also created a tool to allow for emergency interviews and a Slack channel for short-notice changes. This gave them a sense of ownership and encouraged proactivity, initiative, and responsibility.

Celebrating Learning from Failure

This article discusses how a company responded to a mistake made by one of their developers, and how they used it as an opportunity to create a culture that embraces failure and encourages risk-taking. The company implemented a "5 Whys approach" to understand the root cause of the problem, and created an award to celebrate the biggest mistake. They also published the story as an artifact to promote their values and as a recruiting tool. This article highlights the importance of blameless culture and the value of embracing failure as part of the learning experience.

Some Useful Tips for Decoupling Releases and Deployments

The engineering team set a goal to get closer to continuous deployment, but the tooling and processes in place were a blocker. To solve this, the team mapped out their current processes and tools, including CI/CD, Jira workflow, feature toggling, and release notes. They also implemented a feature toggling system and adopted it by the engineering team. The new system allowed for increased deployments, faster reverts, and better release planning. Change management was hard for customers and internally, so it was important to communicate the changes clearly. The main concern was cleaning up old flags, but this was viewed as an inevitable trade-off.

A New Job as a VP of Engineering: A Lesson in Trust and Collaboration

In his first three to six months as VP of Engineering at a new company, the author took a deliberate approach to earn respect and build trust. He observed, listened, and talked to people to understand the team, processes, strengths, and risks. He then created a roadmap to address key issues, communicated it to the team, and delegated initiatives to team leads. He also relied on data to measure impact and provide visibility on progress. His approach was to move fast, get feedback, and introduce changes with a caring approach.

Too Many Direct Reports

The author joined a small company eight years ago and, as the product scaled and more customers were acquired, the team grew and the author ended up with 20 direct reports spread across four teams. This was overwhelming and time-consuming, so the author took it upon themselves to drive the change and create a structure to groom people from IC to management. They mapped their responsibilities, wrote down role descriptions, advertised the roles internally, and provided thorough feedback to candidates. The author was able to take a step back and become more strategically oriented, and found immense enjoyment in coaching managers and being part of their personal and professional growth. They learned that if they see a problem, they should try to fix it and not wait for their managers to do that for them, and that investing in their own people is important.

Prioritizing Tech Work vs. Product Work: The Incomplete Story

Tech teams often grumble about not having enough time to do tech work and tech debt piling up, leading to scalability issues and increased cycle time. Leaders should document tech work that needs to be done, prioritize it using the RICE framework, and provide context to the product team. Product and tech teams need to be aligned and if tensions arise, leaders should not be afraid to ask for help.

Asynchronous Written Communication: How to Make It Work

As teams scale up and remote work becomes more common, asynchronous writing processes are needed to facilitate collaboration. A structure should be followed when writing, including context, key challenges, principles, proposals, alternative options, objectives, and references. Once the initial draft is completed, it should be distributed widely and discussed. Finally, a call should be booked to debate and decide on the best option. Writing allows for a comprehensive paper trail, allows everyone to express their opinion, sharpens focus, and cuts out noise.

Deciding on a New Manager: What Really Matters

When selecting a new Engineering Manager, it is important to set clear expectations and consider both internal and external candidates. Interviews should be conducted to assess the candidates and the decision should be based on the expectations outlined in the job description. It is important to ensure that the candidate is comfortable with the transition to a managerial role and that they have the necessary support to do so. Finally, use this as an opportunity to identify potential candidates internally and help them grow into the role.

When Shared Ownership Means No Ownership

This article discusses the importance of defining and documenting ownership of services within an organization. It outlines the steps to creating a visual map of service ownership, creating supporting documents, and assessing how services are distributed across teams. It also emphasizes the need for clarity and purpose in order to drive new features and maintenance of existing services. Finally, it suggests that clear ownership works well as part of an internal open-source model.

Why Psychological Safety Is More Important Than Ever During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

In response to the transition to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the author has implemented regular 15-minute sync up meetings with their skip level associates to maintain a connection and provide a platform for employees to voice their concerns. The author has also implemented non-work-related activities to encourage bonding and create a trustful and supportive environment. Through these measures, the author has learned the importance of interacting with employees to create a connection of trust and a safe space for them to share their concerns.

Start With the Customer and Work Backwards

In 2012, a startup was founded to create a Guest Relationship Management (GRM) tool for service-based businesses like restaurants. The main concern was to create an optimized set of questions that incorporated all the critical metrics for the feedback template, while also making it quick and easy for customers to fill out. Through customer research and listening to their needs, the survey was tailored and optimized to be just the right-size, and was a huge success. The lessons learned from this experience were to always build customer-centric, easy-to-use solutions that solve the customers’ problems, and to look beyond what customers believe they see and look at their hidden needs and deeper goals.

How to Identify Root Cause of an Application Failure

After joining a new company, the author was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of an API outage with 25+ downstream services. To solve this problem, the author built an application dependency discovery, reporting, and management tool to monitor and analyze application logs for errors. This tool was able to quickly identify the failing services and alert the responsible person. The author is now working on a machine learning algorithm to anticipate potential problems and send proactive alerts. The author's experience has taught them to challenge the status quo and take bold steps to solve problems.

Strategizing Arguments Using Scoring Grids

Product leaders must find a way to come to a consensus on initiatives while taking into account the company strategy. To do this, scoring grids can be used to remove opinion and create data to make sense of. This helps to remove emotion and opinion from arguments and allows for a set of strategic priorities to be established. Additionally, engineers can provide scores for the level of complexity involved in building things and the CEO can be given a column to score initiatives, allowing them to justify their dreams in the context of the scores.

Machine Learning as a Skill Set

After 15 years of coding, the author invested their personal time and curiosity into machine learning, realizing that computers can infer and guess from large amounts of data in ways humans cannot. This inspired them to understand and leverage the technology to build great products, and they encourage others to appreciate the difference between a rules-based system and an example-based system.

Handling a Mistake - Adopting a New Workflow

After a company acquisition, the business asked the engineering team to adopt a new workflow. The team agreed without fully understanding the consequences, and soon found themselves struggling with global Sprints and a 14-step workflow. To solve the issues, the team condensed the workflow to 7 steps and returned to a more familiar process, resulting in improved morale and productivity. The VP of Engineering learned the lesson to always vet new adaptations and to own up to mistakes.

An Acquisition Across Time Zones

After a company acquisition, the experts of the product had to transfer their knowledge while continuing to create features and product sets across 4 time zones. To optimize velocity per Sprint, they implemented on-site visits, a weekly progress meeting, a technical Scrum of Scrums, and delegation to engineering leaders. Lessons learned included finding ways to maximize overlap hours, front loading meetings, and coming with solutions instead of problems.

Cultivating a Relationship Between Collocated and Remote Teams

This article outlines the steps taken to maintain a successful working relationship between a US-based company and a business services team based in Pune, India. The author took three approaches to ensure trust and connectedness between the two teams: working agreements, eliciting technical excellence, and company culture. Working agreements included treating the remote team the same as the collocated team, communication, and decision autonomy. Technical excellence was achieved by getting the remote team involved in the same activities as the US team and encouraging cross-commitment across the stack. Company culture was promoted through video calls, visits, company swag, and hackathons. The result was a diverse team with similar sets of practices and a low turnover rate.

Helping Engineers Transition from an IC to a Manager Role

When faced with the challenge of quickly scaling his engineering team at Facebook, the author had two options: hire an engineering manager from outside, or transition strong individual contributors to a manager role. He chose the latter, creating a well-structured process and trial period to evaluate and transition them. He has since used this process for many years, resulting in successful engineering leaders at various tech companies.

What We Learned From Running Open Spaces

In order to create a culture of learning and development in a fast-paced tech environment, an open space session was introduced. This session is driven by the participants and is governed by four principles and one rule. Over time, a variety of topics have been discussed, from technical to leadership and emotional intelligence. It is important to regularly schedule open spaces and remind engineers of their importance. Open spaces are not silver bullets, but they do increase engagement, productivity, and innovation.

Some Ideas for Breaking Down Silos In Your Organization

Silos can be a sign of a highly-productive team, but can also create a lack of cross-team communication, conflicts, and turf wars. To break down silos, a company can give employees a choice on where to work, create team charters, and hold an expo. This helps to break down silos, seed best practices, and engage employees. Additionally, it has been found that engineers want a challenge and that placing people in their first or second preference team increases employee engagement and general happiness.

Recruitment and Interview Rotas: the Engineers’ Way

An engineering manager was looking for ways to simplify the hiring process, which was time-consuming and disruptive to their work. The engineers took ownership of the process and created a team to self-select who would attend interviews each Monday. They also created a tool to allow for emergency interviews and a Slack channel for short-notice changes. This gave them a sense of ownership and encouraged proactivity, initiative, and responsibility.

Celebrating Learning from Failure

This article discusses how a company responded to a mistake made by one of their developers, and how they used it as an opportunity to create a culture that embraces failure and encourages risk-taking. The company implemented a "5 Whys approach" to understand the root cause of the problem, and created an award to celebrate the biggest mistake. They also published the story as an artifact to promote their values and as a recruiting tool. This article highlights the importance of blameless culture and the value of embracing failure as part of the learning experience.

Some Useful Tips for Decoupling Releases and Deployments

The engineering team set a goal to get closer to continuous deployment, but the tooling and processes in place were a blocker. To solve this, the team mapped out their current processes and tools, including CI/CD, Jira workflow, feature toggling, and release notes. They also implemented a feature toggling system and adopted it by the engineering team. The new system allowed for increased deployments, faster reverts, and better release planning. Change management was hard for customers and internally, so it was important to communicate the changes clearly. The main concern was cleaning up old flags, but this was viewed as an inevitable trade-off.

A New Job as a VP of Engineering: A Lesson in Trust and Collaboration

In his first three to six months as VP of Engineering at a new company, the author took a deliberate approach to earn respect and build trust. He observed, listened, and talked to people to understand the team, processes, strengths, and risks. He then created a roadmap to address key issues, communicated it to the team, and delegated initiatives to team leads. He also relied on data to measure impact and provide visibility on progress. His approach was to move fast, get feedback, and introduce changes with a caring approach.

Too Many Direct Reports

The author joined a small company eight years ago and, as the product scaled and more customers were acquired, the team grew and the author ended up with 20 direct reports spread across four teams. This was overwhelming and time-consuming, so the author took it upon themselves to drive the change and create a structure to groom people from IC to management. They mapped their responsibilities, wrote down role descriptions, advertised the roles internally, and provided thorough feedback to candidates. The author was able to take a step back and become more strategically oriented, and found immense enjoyment in coaching managers and being part of their personal and professional growth. They learned that if they see a problem, they should try to fix it and not wait for their managers to do that for them, and that investing in their own people is important.

Prioritizing Tech Work vs. Product Work: The Incomplete Story

Tech teams often grumble about not having enough time to do tech work and tech debt piling up, leading to scalability issues and increased cycle time. Leaders should document tech work that needs to be done, prioritize it using the RICE framework, and provide context to the product team. Product and tech teams need to be aligned and if tensions arise, leaders should not be afraid to ask for help.

Asynchronous Written Communication: How to Make It Work

As teams scale up and remote work becomes more common, asynchronous writing processes are needed to facilitate collaboration. A structure should be followed when writing, including context, key challenges, principles, proposals, alternative options, objectives, and references. Once the initial draft is completed, it should be distributed widely and discussed. Finally, a call should be booked to debate and decide on the best option. Writing allows for a comprehensive paper trail, allows everyone to express their opinion, sharpens focus, and cuts out noise.

Deciding on a New Manager: What Really Matters

When selecting a new Engineering Manager, it is important to set clear expectations and consider both internal and external candidates. Interviews should be conducted to assess the candidates and the decision should be based on the expectations outlined in the job description. It is important to ensure that the candidate is comfortable with the transition to a managerial role and that they have the necessary support to do so. Finally, use this as an opportunity to identify potential candidates internally and help them grow into the role.

When Shared Ownership Means No Ownership

This article discusses the importance of defining and documenting ownership of services within an organization. It outlines the steps to creating a visual map of service ownership, creating supporting documents, and assessing how services are distributed across teams. It also emphasizes the need for clarity and purpose in order to drive new features and maintenance of existing services. Finally, it suggests that clear ownership works well as part of an internal open-source model.

Why Psychological Safety Is More Important Than Ever During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

In response to the transition to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the author has implemented regular 15-minute sync up meetings with their skip level associates to maintain a connection and provide a platform for employees to voice their concerns. The author has also implemented non-work-related activities to encourage bonding and create a trustful and supportive environment. Through these measures, the author has learned the importance of interacting with employees to create a connection of trust and a safe space for them to share their concerns.

Start With the Customer and Work Backwards

In 2012, a startup was founded to create a Guest Relationship Management (GRM) tool for service-based businesses like restaurants. The main concern was to create an optimized set of questions that incorporated all the critical metrics for the feedback template, while also making it quick and easy for customers to fill out. Through customer research and listening to their needs, the survey was tailored and optimized to be just the right-size, and was a huge success. The lessons learned from this experience were to always build customer-centric, easy-to-use solutions that solve the customers’ problems, and to look beyond what customers believe they see and look at their hidden needs and deeper goals.

How to Identify Root Cause of an Application Failure

After joining a new company, the author was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of an API outage with 25+ downstream services. To solve this problem, the author built an application dependency discovery, reporting, and management tool to monitor and analyze application logs for errors. This tool was able to quickly identify the failing services and alert the responsible person. The author is now working on a machine learning algorithm to anticipate potential problems and send proactive alerts. The author's experience has taught them to challenge the status quo and take bold steps to solve problems.

Strategizing Arguments Using Scoring Grids

Product leaders must find a way to come to a consensus on initiatives while taking into account the company strategy. To do this, scoring grids can be used to remove opinion and create data to make sense of. This helps to remove emotion and opinion from arguments and allows for a set of strategic priorities to be established. Additionally, engineers can provide scores for the level of complexity involved in building things and the CEO can be given a column to score initiatives, allowing them to justify their dreams in the context of the scores.

Machine Learning as a Skill Set

After 15 years of coding, the author invested their personal time and curiosity into machine learning, realizing that computers can infer and guess from large amounts of data in ways humans cannot. This inspired them to understand and leverage the technology to build great products, and they encourage others to appreciate the difference between a rules-based system and an example-based system.

Handling a Mistake - Adopting a New Workflow

After a company acquisition, the business asked the engineering team to adopt a new workflow. The team agreed without fully understanding the consequences, and soon found themselves struggling with global Sprints and a 14-step workflow. To solve the issues, the team condensed the workflow to 7 steps and returned to a more familiar process, resulting in improved morale and productivity. The VP of Engineering learned the lesson to always vet new adaptations and to own up to mistakes.

An Acquisition Across Time Zones

After a company acquisition, the experts of the product had to transfer their knowledge while continuing to create features and product sets across 4 time zones. To optimize velocity per Sprint, they implemented on-site visits, a weekly progress meeting, a technical Scrum of Scrums, and delegation to engineering leaders. Lessons learned included finding ways to maximize overlap hours, front loading meetings, and coming with solutions instead of problems.

Cultivating a Relationship Between Collocated and Remote Teams

This article outlines the steps taken to maintain a successful working relationship between a US-based company and a business services team based in Pune, India. The author took three approaches to ensure trust and connectedness between the two teams: working agreements, eliciting technical excellence, and company culture. Working agreements included treating the remote team the same as the collocated team, communication, and decision autonomy. Technical excellence was achieved by getting the remote team involved in the same activities as the US team and encouraging cross-commitment across the stack. Company culture was promoted through video calls, visits, company swag, and hackathons. The result was a diverse team with similar sets of practices and a low turnover rate.

Helping Engineers Transition from an IC to a Manager Role

When faced with the challenge of quickly scaling his engineering team at Facebook, the author had two options: hire an engineering manager from outside, or transition strong individual contributors to a manager role. He chose the latter, creating a well-structured process and trial period to evaluate and transition them. He has since used this process for many years, resulting in successful engineering leaders at various tech companies.

What We Learned From Running Open Spaces

In order to create a culture of learning and development in a fast-paced tech environment, an open space session was introduced. This session is driven by the participants and is governed by four principles and one rule. Over time, a variety of topics have been discussed, from technical to leadership and emotional intelligence. It is important to regularly schedule open spaces and remind engineers of their importance. Open spaces are not silver bullets, but they do increase engagement, productivity, and innovation.

Some Ideas for Breaking Down Silos In Your Organization

Silos can be a sign of a highly-productive team, but can also create a lack of cross-team communication, conflicts, and turf wars. To break down silos, a company can give employees a choice on where to work, create team charters, and hold an expo. This helps to break down silos, seed best practices, and engage employees. Additionally, it has been found that engineers want a challenge and that placing people in their first or second preference team increases employee engagement and general happiness.

Recruitment and Interview Rotas: the Engineers’ Way

An engineering manager was looking for ways to simplify the hiring process, which was time-consuming and disruptive to their work. The engineers took ownership of the process and created a team to self-select who would attend interviews each Monday. They also created a tool to allow for emergency interviews and a Slack channel for short-notice changes. This gave them a sense of ownership and encouraged proactivity, initiative, and responsibility.

Celebrating Learning from Failure

This article discusses how a company responded to a mistake made by one of their developers, and how they used it as an opportunity to create a culture that embraces failure and encourages risk-taking. The company implemented a "5 Whys approach" to understand the root cause of the problem, and created an award to celebrate the biggest mistake. They also published the story as an artifact to promote their values and as a recruiting tool. This article highlights the importance of blameless culture and the value of embracing failure as part of the learning experience.

Some Useful Tips for Decoupling Releases and Deployments

The engineering team set a goal to get closer to continuous deployment, but the tooling and processes in place were a blocker. To solve this, the team mapped out their current processes and tools, including CI/CD, Jira workflow, feature toggling, and release notes. They also implemented a feature toggling system and adopted it by the engineering team. The new system allowed for increased deployments, faster reverts, and better release planning. Change management was hard for customers and internally, so it was important to communicate the changes clearly. The main concern was cleaning up old flags, but this was viewed as an inevitable trade-off.

A New Job as a VP of Engineering: A Lesson in Trust and Collaboration

In his first three to six months as VP of Engineering at a new company, the author took a deliberate approach to earn respect and build trust. He observed, listened, and talked to people to understand the team, processes, strengths, and risks. He then created a roadmap to address key issues, communicated it to the team, and delegated initiatives to team leads. He also relied on data to measure impact and provide visibility on progress. His approach was to move fast, get feedback, and introduce changes with a caring approach.

Too Many Direct Reports

The author joined a small company eight years ago and, as the product scaled and more customers were acquired, the team grew and the author ended up with 20 direct reports spread across four teams. This was overwhelming and time-consuming, so the author took it upon themselves to drive the change and create a structure to groom people from IC to management. They mapped their responsibilities, wrote down role descriptions, advertised the roles internally, and provided thorough feedback to candidates. The author was able to take a step back and become more strategically oriented, and found immense enjoyment in coaching managers and being part of their personal and professional growth. They learned that if they see a problem, they should try to fix it and not wait for their managers to do that for them, and that investing in their own people is important.

Prioritizing Tech Work vs. Product Work: The Incomplete Story

Tech teams often grumble about not having enough time to do tech work and tech debt piling up, leading to scalability issues and increased cycle time. Leaders should document tech work that needs to be done, prioritize it using the RICE framework, and provide context to the product team. Product and tech teams need to be aligned and if tensions arise, leaders should not be afraid to ask for help.

Asynchronous Written Communication: How to Make It Work

As teams scale up and remote work becomes more common, asynchronous writing processes are needed to facilitate collaboration. A structure should be followed when writing, including context, key challenges, principles, proposals, alternative options, objectives, and references. Once the initial draft is completed, it should be distributed widely and discussed. Finally, a call should be booked to debate and decide on the best option. Writing allows for a comprehensive paper trail, allows everyone to express their opinion, sharpens focus, and cuts out noise.

Deciding on a New Manager: What Really Matters

When selecting a new Engineering Manager, it is important to set clear expectations and consider both internal and external candidates. Interviews should be conducted to assess the candidates and the decision should be based on the expectations outlined in the job description. It is important to ensure that the candidate is comfortable with the transition to a managerial role and that they have the necessary support to do so. Finally, use this as an opportunity to identify potential candidates internally and help them grow into the role.

When Shared Ownership Means No Ownership

This article discusses the importance of defining and documenting ownership of services within an organization. It outlines the steps to creating a visual map of service ownership, creating supporting documents, and assessing how services are distributed across teams. It also emphasizes the need for clarity and purpose in order to drive new features and maintenance of existing services. Finally, it suggests that clear ownership works well as part of an internal open-source model.

Why Psychological Safety Is More Important Than Ever During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

In response to the transition to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the author has implemented regular 15-minute sync up meetings with their skip level associates to maintain a connection and provide a platform for employees to voice their concerns. The author has also implemented non-work-related activities to encourage bonding and create a trustful and supportive environment. Through these measures, the author has learned the importance of interacting with employees to create a connection of trust and a safe space for them to share their concerns.

Start With the Customer and Work Backwards

In 2012, a startup was founded to create a Guest Relationship Management (GRM) tool for service-based businesses like restaurants. The main concern was to create an optimized set of questions that incorporated all the critical metrics for the feedback template, while also making it quick and easy for customers to fill out. Through customer research and listening to their needs, the survey was tailored and optimized to be just the right-size, and was a huge success. The lessons learned from this experience were to always build customer-centric, easy-to-use solutions that solve the customers’ problems, and to look beyond what customers believe they see and look at their hidden needs and deeper goals.

How to Identify Root Cause of an Application Failure

After joining a new company, the author was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of an API outage with 25+ downstream services. To solve this problem, the author built an application dependency discovery, reporting, and management tool to monitor and analyze application logs for errors. This tool was able to quickly identify the failing services and alert the responsible person. The author is now working on a machine learning algorithm to anticipate potential problems and send proactive alerts. The author's experience has taught them to challenge the status quo and take bold steps to solve problems.

Strategizing Arguments Using Scoring Grids

Product leaders must find a way to come to a consensus on initiatives while taking into account the company strategy. To do this, scoring grids can be used to remove opinion and create data to make sense of. This helps to remove emotion and opinion from arguments and allows for a set of strategic priorities to be established. Additionally, engineers can provide scores for the level of complexity involved in building things and the CEO can be given a column to score initiatives, allowing them to justify their dreams in the context of the scores.

Machine Learning as a Skill Set

After 15 years of coding, the author invested their personal time and curiosity into machine learning, realizing that computers can infer and guess from large amounts of data in ways humans cannot. This inspired them to understand and leverage the technology to build great products, and they encourage others to appreciate the difference between a rules-based system and an example-based system.

Handling a Mistake - Adopting a New Workflow

After a company acquisition, the business asked the engineering team to adopt a new workflow. The team agreed without fully understanding the consequences, and soon found themselves struggling with global Sprints and a 14-step workflow. To solve the issues, the team condensed the workflow to 7 steps and returned to a more familiar process, resulting in improved morale and productivity. The VP of Engineering learned the lesson to always vet new adaptations and to own up to mistakes.

An Acquisition Across Time Zones

After a company acquisition, the experts of the product had to transfer their knowledge while continuing to create features and product sets across 4 time zones. To optimize velocity per Sprint, they implemented on-site visits, a weekly progress meeting, a technical Scrum of Scrums, and delegation to engineering leaders. Lessons learned included finding ways to maximize overlap hours, front loading meetings, and coming with solutions instead of problems.

Cultivating a Relationship Between Collocated and Remote Teams

This article outlines the steps taken to maintain a successful working relationship between a US-based company and a business services team based in Pune, India. The author took three approaches to ensure trust and connectedness between the two teams: working agreements, eliciting technical excellence, and company culture. Working agreements included treating the remote team the same as the collocated team, communication, and decision autonomy. Technical excellence was achieved by getting the remote team involved in the same activities as the US team and encouraging cross-commitment across the stack. Company culture was promoted through video calls, visits, company swag, and hackathons. The result was a diverse team with similar sets of practices and a low turnover rate.

Helping Engineers Transition from an IC to a Manager Role

When faced with the challenge of quickly scaling his engineering team at Facebook, the author had two options: hire an engineering manager from outside, or transition strong individual contributors to a manager role. He chose the latter, creating a well-structured process and trial period to evaluate and transition them. He has since used this process for many years, resulting in successful engineering leaders at various tech companies.

What We Learned From Running Open Spaces

In order to create a culture of learning and development in a fast-paced tech environment, an open space session was introduced. This session is driven by the participants and is governed by four principles and one rule. Over time, a variety of topics have been discussed, from technical to leadership and emotional intelligence. It is important to regularly schedule open spaces and remind engineers of their importance. Open spaces are not silver bullets, but they do increase engagement, productivity, and innovation.

Some Ideas for Breaking Down Silos In Your Organization

Silos can be a sign of a highly-productive team, but can also create a lack of cross-team communication, conflicts, and turf wars. To break down silos, a company can give employees a choice on where to work, create team charters, and hold an expo. This helps to break down silos, seed best practices, and engage employees. Additionally, it has been found that engineers want a challenge and that placing people in their first or second preference team increases employee engagement and general happiness.

Recruitment and Interview Rotas: the Engineers’ Way

An engineering manager was looking for ways to simplify the hiring process, which was time-consuming and disruptive to their work. The engineers took ownership of the process and created a team to self-select who would attend interviews each Monday. They also created a tool to allow for emergency interviews and a Slack channel for short-notice changes. This gave them a sense of ownership and encouraged proactivity, initiative, and responsibility.

Celebrating Learning from Failure

This article discusses how a company responded to a mistake made by one of their developers, and how they used it as an opportunity to create a culture that embraces failure and encourages risk-taking. The company implemented a "5 Whys approach" to understand the root cause of the problem, and created an award to celebrate the biggest mistake. They also published the story as an artifact to promote their values and as a recruiting tool. This article highlights the importance of blameless culture and the value of embracing failure as part of the learning experience.

Some Useful Tips for Decoupling Releases and Deployments

The engineering team set a goal to get closer to continuous deployment, but the tooling and processes in place were a blocker. To solve this, the team mapped out their current processes and tools, including CI/CD, Jira workflow, feature toggling, and release notes. They also implemented a feature toggling system and adopted it by the engineering team. The new system allowed for increased deployments, faster reverts, and better release planning. Change management was hard for customers and internally, so it was important to communicate the changes clearly. The main concern was cleaning up old flags, but this was viewed as an inevitable trade-off.

A New Job as a VP of Engineering: A Lesson in Trust and Collaboration

In his first three to six months as VP of Engineering at a new company, the author took a deliberate approach to earn respect and build trust. He observed, listened, and talked to people to understand the team, processes, strengths, and risks. He then created a roadmap to address key issues, communicated it to the team, and delegated initiatives to team leads. He also relied on data to measure impact and provide visibility on progress. His approach was to move fast, get feedback, and introduce changes with a caring approach.

Too Many Direct Reports

The author joined a small company eight years ago and, as the product scaled and more customers were acquired, the team grew and the author ended up with 20 direct reports spread across four teams. This was overwhelming and time-consuming, so the author took it upon themselves to drive the change and create a structure to groom people from IC to management. They mapped their responsibilities, wrote down role descriptions, advertised the roles internally, and provided thorough feedback to candidates. The author was able to take a step back and become more strategically oriented, and found immense enjoyment in coaching managers and being part of their personal and professional growth. They learned that if they see a problem, they should try to fix it and not wait for their managers to do that for them, and that investing in their own people is important.

Prioritizing Tech Work vs. Product Work: The Incomplete Story

Tech teams often grumble about not having enough time to do tech work and tech debt piling up, leading to scalability issues and increased cycle time. Leaders should document tech work that needs to be done, prioritize it using the RICE framework, and provide context to the product team. Product and tech teams need to be aligned and if tensions arise, leaders should not be afraid to ask for help.

Asynchronous Written Communication: How to Make It Work

As teams scale up and remote work becomes more common, asynchronous writing processes are needed to facilitate collaboration. A structure should be followed when writing, including context, key challenges, principles, proposals, alternative options, objectives, and references. Once the initial draft is completed, it should be distributed widely and discussed. Finally, a call should be booked to debate and decide on the best option. Writing allows for a comprehensive paper trail, allows everyone to express their opinion, sharpens focus, and cuts out noise.

Deciding on a New Manager: What Really Matters

When selecting a new Engineering Manager, it is important to set clear expectations and consider both internal and external candidates. Interviews should be conducted to assess the candidates and the decision should be based on the expectations outlined in the job description. It is important to ensure that the candidate is comfortable with the transition to a managerial role and that they have the necessary support to do so. Finally, use this as an opportunity to identify potential candidates internally and help them grow into the role.

When Shared Ownership Means No Ownership

This article discusses the importance of defining and documenting ownership of services within an organization. It outlines the steps to creating a visual map of service ownership, creating supporting documents, and assessing how services are distributed across teams. It also emphasizes the need for clarity and purpose in order to drive new features and maintenance of existing services. Finally, it suggests that clear ownership works well as part of an internal open-source model.

Why Psychological Safety Is More Important Than Ever During the Covid-19 Pandemic?

In response to the transition to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the author has implemented regular 15-minute sync up meetings with their skip level associates to maintain a connection and provide a platform for employees to voice their concerns. The author has also implemented non-work-related activities to encourage bonding and create a trustful and supportive environment. Through these measures, the author has learned the importance of interacting with employees to create a connection of trust and a safe space for them to share their concerns.

Start With the Customer and Work Backwards

In 2012, a startup was founded to create a Guest Relationship Management (GRM) tool for service-based businesses like restaurants. The main concern was to create an optimized set of questions that incorporated all the critical metrics for the feedback template, while also making it quick and easy for customers to fill out. Through customer research and listening to their needs, the survey was tailored and optimized to be just the right-size, and was a huge success. The lessons learned from this experience were to always build customer-centric, easy-to-use solutions that solve the customers’ problems, and to look beyond what customers believe they see and look at their hidden needs and deeper goals.

How to Identify Root Cause of an Application Failure

After joining a new company, the author was faced with the challenge of identifying the root cause of an API outage with 25+ downstream services. To solve this problem, the author built an application dependency discovery, reporting, and management tool to monitor and analyze application logs for errors. This tool was able to quickly identify the failing services and alert the responsible person. The author is now working on a machine learning algorithm to anticipate potential problems and send proactive alerts. The author's experience has taught them to challenge the status quo and take bold steps to solve problems.

Strategizing Arguments Using Scoring Grids

Product leaders must find a way to come to a consensus on initiatives while taking into account the company strategy. To do this, scoring grids can be used to remove opinion and create data to make sense of. This helps to remove emotion and opinion from arguments and allows for a set of strategic priorities to be established. Additionally, engineers can provide scores for the level of complexity involved in building things and the CEO can be given a column to score initiatives, allowing them to justify their dreams in the context of the scores.

Machine Learning as a Skill Set

After 15 years of coding, the author invested their personal time and curiosity into machine learning, realizing that computers can infer and guess from large amounts of data in ways humans cannot. This inspired them to understand and leverage the technology to build great products, and they encourage others to appreciate the difference between a rules-based system and an example-based system.