Knowledge shared by our community

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

How to Achieve Alignment Across the Organization

Organizational alignment is essential for any organization to succeed, but it is especially difficult for larger companies. To achieve alignment, companies must have annual goals that are revised every six months, and a mission and values that provide guidance and evaluation criteria. Additionally, meetings should start by repeating the goals, and the message should be continuously repeated, revised, and reiterated. Misalignment usually occurs in middle management, so it is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

How to Improve Diversity in the Workplace

This article discusses the importance of diversity in the workplace and the challenges of improving diversity. It outlines the steps taken to increase diversity, such as going to schools with a significant minority presence and including members of underrepresented minorities on the interview panel. It also highlights the importance of creating a culture of inclusion and providing adequate support for self-emergent networks. Finally, it emphasizes the need to separate business and fun time to ensure inclusion.

Cloud Migration: A Journey In Visibility, Communication, & Regulation

A cloud transformation was needed to address the problems caused by an architectural decision to create independent “stacks” of systems for each development feature. This had resulted in hundreds of systems that needed to be managed, draining infrastructure resources. A three-step plan was proposed to present the largely unknown problem to a few hundred people, deal with the concerns of the development teams, and introduce cloud capabilities into the organization. The key lesson learned was that when dealing with complexity, teams need to be empowered to solve the problems and communication channels need to be opened up.

Organizing Engineering To Optimize Performance

This is a story about the implementation of DevOps practices in an organization of 70 people. The author created a new org chart and adopted Kanban as a methodology to organize and identify the different classes of service. They also created project teams with the capability of delivering across functions for incoming tickets. After six to nine months of setting up, communicating, and getting teams on board, the reorganization went live and they started to reap the benefits. The author also learned the importance of looking after the people and involving them in the change, as well as the need to monitor after launching to sustain the change.

Why You Should Listen to Your Customer Support Team

The customer support team informed the billing and subscription team of an issue with refunds for customers purchasing services through Paypal. After realizing the magnitude of the issue, the teams worked together to fix the bug and create tools and metrics to detect underlying organizational problems. The collaboration between the teams resulted in a greater impact and highlighted the importance of customer support in providing context and data to engineers.

Making Some Hard Decisions About a Geographically Split Team

The team was struggling to manage a broad set of internal tools and stakeholders were unhappy with the lack of progress. To address the issues, the manager had coffee chats with the engineers, evaluated the roadmap, and encouraged the team to prioritize tasks. The team was split between two offices, so the manager proposed moving everyone to Seattle. After discussing the pros and cons, the manager agreed and the team was relocated. The stakeholders were initially disappointed but eventually appreciated the team's efforts. The manager learned the importance of commitment, collaboration, and respect.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

How to Achieve Alignment Across the Organization

Organizational alignment is essential for any organization to succeed, but it is especially difficult for larger companies. To achieve alignment, companies must have annual goals that are revised every six months, and a mission and values that provide guidance and evaluation criteria. Additionally, meetings should start by repeating the goals, and the message should be continuously repeated, revised, and reiterated. Misalignment usually occurs in middle management, so it is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

How to Improve Diversity in the Workplace

This article discusses the importance of diversity in the workplace and the challenges of improving diversity. It outlines the steps taken to increase diversity, such as going to schools with a significant minority presence and including members of underrepresented minorities on the interview panel. It also highlights the importance of creating a culture of inclusion and providing adequate support for self-emergent networks. Finally, it emphasizes the need to separate business and fun time to ensure inclusion.

Cloud Migration: A Journey In Visibility, Communication, & Regulation

A cloud transformation was needed to address the problems caused by an architectural decision to create independent “stacks” of systems for each development feature. This had resulted in hundreds of systems that needed to be managed, draining infrastructure resources. A three-step plan was proposed to present the largely unknown problem to a few hundred people, deal with the concerns of the development teams, and introduce cloud capabilities into the organization. The key lesson learned was that when dealing with complexity, teams need to be empowered to solve the problems and communication channels need to be opened up.

Organizing Engineering To Optimize Performance

This is a story about the implementation of DevOps practices in an organization of 70 people. The author created a new org chart and adopted Kanban as a methodology to organize and identify the different classes of service. They also created project teams with the capability of delivering across functions for incoming tickets. After six to nine months of setting up, communicating, and getting teams on board, the reorganization went live and they started to reap the benefits. The author also learned the importance of looking after the people and involving them in the change, as well as the need to monitor after launching to sustain the change.

Why You Should Listen to Your Customer Support Team

The customer support team informed the billing and subscription team of an issue with refunds for customers purchasing services through Paypal. After realizing the magnitude of the issue, the teams worked together to fix the bug and create tools and metrics to detect underlying organizational problems. The collaboration between the teams resulted in a greater impact and highlighted the importance of customer support in providing context and data to engineers.

Making Some Hard Decisions About a Geographically Split Team

The team was struggling to manage a broad set of internal tools and stakeholders were unhappy with the lack of progress. To address the issues, the manager had coffee chats with the engineers, evaluated the roadmap, and encouraged the team to prioritize tasks. The team was split between two offices, so the manager proposed moving everyone to Seattle. After discussing the pros and cons, the manager agreed and the team was relocated. The stakeholders were initially disappointed but eventually appreciated the team's efforts. The manager learned the importance of commitment, collaboration, and respect.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

How to Achieve Alignment Across the Organization

Organizational alignment is essential for any organization to succeed, but it is especially difficult for larger companies. To achieve alignment, companies must have annual goals that are revised every six months, and a mission and values that provide guidance and evaluation criteria. Additionally, meetings should start by repeating the goals, and the message should be continuously repeated, revised, and reiterated. Misalignment usually occurs in middle management, so it is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

How to Improve Diversity in the Workplace

This article discusses the importance of diversity in the workplace and the challenges of improving diversity. It outlines the steps taken to increase diversity, such as going to schools with a significant minority presence and including members of underrepresented minorities on the interview panel. It also highlights the importance of creating a culture of inclusion and providing adequate support for self-emergent networks. Finally, it emphasizes the need to separate business and fun time to ensure inclusion.

Cloud Migration: A Journey In Visibility, Communication, & Regulation

A cloud transformation was needed to address the problems caused by an architectural decision to create independent “stacks” of systems for each development feature. This had resulted in hundreds of systems that needed to be managed, draining infrastructure resources. A three-step plan was proposed to present the largely unknown problem to a few hundred people, deal with the concerns of the development teams, and introduce cloud capabilities into the organization. The key lesson learned was that when dealing with complexity, teams need to be empowered to solve the problems and communication channels need to be opened up.

Organizing Engineering To Optimize Performance

This is a story about the implementation of DevOps practices in an organization of 70 people. The author created a new org chart and adopted Kanban as a methodology to organize and identify the different classes of service. They also created project teams with the capability of delivering across functions for incoming tickets. After six to nine months of setting up, communicating, and getting teams on board, the reorganization went live and they started to reap the benefits. The author also learned the importance of looking after the people and involving them in the change, as well as the need to monitor after launching to sustain the change.

Why You Should Listen to Your Customer Support Team

The customer support team informed the billing and subscription team of an issue with refunds for customers purchasing services through Paypal. After realizing the magnitude of the issue, the teams worked together to fix the bug and create tools and metrics to detect underlying organizational problems. The collaboration between the teams resulted in a greater impact and highlighted the importance of customer support in providing context and data to engineers.

Making Some Hard Decisions About a Geographically Split Team

The team was struggling to manage a broad set of internal tools and stakeholders were unhappy with the lack of progress. To address the issues, the manager had coffee chats with the engineers, evaluated the roadmap, and encouraged the team to prioritize tasks. The team was split between two offices, so the manager proposed moving everyone to Seattle. After discussing the pros and cons, the manager agreed and the team was relocated. The stakeholders were initially disappointed but eventually appreciated the team's efforts. The manager learned the importance of commitment, collaboration, and respect.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

How to Achieve Alignment Across the Organization

Organizational alignment is essential for any organization to succeed, but it is especially difficult for larger companies. To achieve alignment, companies must have annual goals that are revised every six months, and a mission and values that provide guidance and evaluation criteria. Additionally, meetings should start by repeating the goals, and the message should be continuously repeated, revised, and reiterated. Misalignment usually occurs in middle management, so it is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

How to Improve Diversity in the Workplace

This article discusses the importance of diversity in the workplace and the challenges of improving diversity. It outlines the steps taken to increase diversity, such as going to schools with a significant minority presence and including members of underrepresented minorities on the interview panel. It also highlights the importance of creating a culture of inclusion and providing adequate support for self-emergent networks. Finally, it emphasizes the need to separate business and fun time to ensure inclusion.

Cloud Migration: A Journey In Visibility, Communication, & Regulation

A cloud transformation was needed to address the problems caused by an architectural decision to create independent “stacks” of systems for each development feature. This had resulted in hundreds of systems that needed to be managed, draining infrastructure resources. A three-step plan was proposed to present the largely unknown problem to a few hundred people, deal with the concerns of the development teams, and introduce cloud capabilities into the organization. The key lesson learned was that when dealing with complexity, teams need to be empowered to solve the problems and communication channels need to be opened up.

Organizing Engineering To Optimize Performance

This is a story about the implementation of DevOps practices in an organization of 70 people. The author created a new org chart and adopted Kanban as a methodology to organize and identify the different classes of service. They also created project teams with the capability of delivering across functions for incoming tickets. After six to nine months of setting up, communicating, and getting teams on board, the reorganization went live and they started to reap the benefits. The author also learned the importance of looking after the people and involving them in the change, as well as the need to monitor after launching to sustain the change.

Why You Should Listen to Your Customer Support Team

The customer support team informed the billing and subscription team of an issue with refunds for customers purchasing services through Paypal. After realizing the magnitude of the issue, the teams worked together to fix the bug and create tools and metrics to detect underlying organizational problems. The collaboration between the teams resulted in a greater impact and highlighted the importance of customer support in providing context and data to engineers.

Making Some Hard Decisions About a Geographically Split Team

The team was struggling to manage a broad set of internal tools and stakeholders were unhappy with the lack of progress. To address the issues, the manager had coffee chats with the engineers, evaluated the roadmap, and encouraged the team to prioritize tasks. The team was split between two offices, so the manager proposed moving everyone to Seattle. After discussing the pros and cons, the manager agreed and the team was relocated. The stakeholders were initially disappointed but eventually appreciated the team's efforts. The manager learned the importance of commitment, collaboration, and respect.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

How to Achieve Alignment Across the Organization

Organizational alignment is essential for any organization to succeed, but it is especially difficult for larger companies. To achieve alignment, companies must have annual goals that are revised every six months, and a mission and values that provide guidance and evaluation criteria. Additionally, meetings should start by repeating the goals, and the message should be continuously repeated, revised, and reiterated. Misalignment usually occurs in middle management, so it is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

How to Improve Diversity in the Workplace

This article discusses the importance of diversity in the workplace and the challenges of improving diversity. It outlines the steps taken to increase diversity, such as going to schools with a significant minority presence and including members of underrepresented minorities on the interview panel. It also highlights the importance of creating a culture of inclusion and providing adequate support for self-emergent networks. Finally, it emphasizes the need to separate business and fun time to ensure inclusion.

Cloud Migration: A Journey In Visibility, Communication, & Regulation

A cloud transformation was needed to address the problems caused by an architectural decision to create independent “stacks” of systems for each development feature. This had resulted in hundreds of systems that needed to be managed, draining infrastructure resources. A three-step plan was proposed to present the largely unknown problem to a few hundred people, deal with the concerns of the development teams, and introduce cloud capabilities into the organization. The key lesson learned was that when dealing with complexity, teams need to be empowered to solve the problems and communication channels need to be opened up.

Organizing Engineering To Optimize Performance

This is a story about the implementation of DevOps practices in an organization of 70 people. The author created a new org chart and adopted Kanban as a methodology to organize and identify the different classes of service. They also created project teams with the capability of delivering across functions for incoming tickets. After six to nine months of setting up, communicating, and getting teams on board, the reorganization went live and they started to reap the benefits. The author also learned the importance of looking after the people and involving them in the change, as well as the need to monitor after launching to sustain the change.

Why You Should Listen to Your Customer Support Team

The customer support team informed the billing and subscription team of an issue with refunds for customers purchasing services through Paypal. After realizing the magnitude of the issue, the teams worked together to fix the bug and create tools and metrics to detect underlying organizational problems. The collaboration between the teams resulted in a greater impact and highlighted the importance of customer support in providing context and data to engineers.

Making Some Hard Decisions About a Geographically Split Team

The team was struggling to manage a broad set of internal tools and stakeholders were unhappy with the lack of progress. To address the issues, the manager had coffee chats with the engineers, evaluated the roadmap, and encouraged the team to prioritize tasks. The team was split between two offices, so the manager proposed moving everyone to Seattle. After discussing the pros and cons, the manager agreed and the team was relocated. The stakeholders were initially disappointed but eventually appreciated the team's efforts. The manager learned the importance of commitment, collaboration, and respect.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

How to Achieve Alignment Across the Organization

Organizational alignment is essential for any organization to succeed, but it is especially difficult for larger companies. To achieve alignment, companies must have annual goals that are revised every six months, and a mission and values that provide guidance and evaluation criteria. Additionally, meetings should start by repeating the goals, and the message should be continuously repeated, revised, and reiterated. Misalignment usually occurs in middle management, so it is important to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

How to Improve Diversity in the Workplace

This article discusses the importance of diversity in the workplace and the challenges of improving diversity. It outlines the steps taken to increase diversity, such as going to schools with a significant minority presence and including members of underrepresented minorities on the interview panel. It also highlights the importance of creating a culture of inclusion and providing adequate support for self-emergent networks. Finally, it emphasizes the need to separate business and fun time to ensure inclusion.

Cloud Migration: A Journey In Visibility, Communication, & Regulation

A cloud transformation was needed to address the problems caused by an architectural decision to create independent “stacks” of systems for each development feature. This had resulted in hundreds of systems that needed to be managed, draining infrastructure resources. A three-step plan was proposed to present the largely unknown problem to a few hundred people, deal with the concerns of the development teams, and introduce cloud capabilities into the organization. The key lesson learned was that when dealing with complexity, teams need to be empowered to solve the problems and communication channels need to be opened up.

Organizing Engineering To Optimize Performance

This is a story about the implementation of DevOps practices in an organization of 70 people. The author created a new org chart and adopted Kanban as a methodology to organize and identify the different classes of service. They also created project teams with the capability of delivering across functions for incoming tickets. After six to nine months of setting up, communicating, and getting teams on board, the reorganization went live and they started to reap the benefits. The author also learned the importance of looking after the people and involving them in the change, as well as the need to monitor after launching to sustain the change.

Why You Should Listen to Your Customer Support Team

The customer support team informed the billing and subscription team of an issue with refunds for customers purchasing services through Paypal. After realizing the magnitude of the issue, the teams worked together to fix the bug and create tools and metrics to detect underlying organizational problems. The collaboration between the teams resulted in a greater impact and highlighted the importance of customer support in providing context and data to engineers.

Making Some Hard Decisions About a Geographically Split Team

The team was struggling to manage a broad set of internal tools and stakeholders were unhappy with the lack of progress. To address the issues, the manager had coffee chats with the engineers, evaluated the roadmap, and encouraged the team to prioritize tasks. The team was split between two offices, so the manager proposed moving everyone to Seattle. After discussing the pros and cons, the manager agreed and the team was relocated. The stakeholders were initially disappointed but eventually appreciated the team's efforts. The manager learned the importance of commitment, collaboration, and respect.