Knowledge shared by our community

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

Running Engineering Teams Across Different Time Zones

Companies are increasingly relying on distributed teams, which requires a great deal of communication and deliberation. There are three different time zones situations -- fully remote, hub, and mixed model -- each requiring a different approach. Companies should assign one feature per hub, structure processes around reality, and understand the weight of the remote part. Remote teams bring benefits such as faster and easier hiring and cost reduction.

What You Need To Know When Scaling Rapidly

Rapid scaling of a startup requires a lot of effort, strong cash flow, and knowledge. Knowing who and when to hire and how to structure the organization is a challenge. Securing funding is the first step, and then building a pipeline of potential hires. As the company grows, the engineering team must be structured properly to ensure success. Expectations must be clear and transparent, and the engineering leader must maintain touchpoints with the team.

Balancing Waterfall Hardware Roadmaps with Agile Software Development

This article discusses the process of transitioning from an agile approach to a more methodical approach to product development for a driverless robo-taxi company. The company had to integrate with the company that acquired them, and it took a lot of buy-in from the company and a painful year to make the transition. The company eventually moved towards a user-driven waterfall direction, but it took gradual introduction and buy-in from the company. The transition ultimately put the company in a much better place.

Change Is A Necessity For Growth, But Should Be Approached Thoughtfully

A startup had accumulated a lot of technical debt due to not being up to date on industry standards and engineering best practices. To increase developer productivity and velocity, a shared component library was proposed, but there was disagreement between two senior engineers on how to build it. After understanding the underlying reasons for the disagreement, a two-on-one meeting was held to come to a consensus. It was concluded that both sides needed to give something to gain something, and the team was empowered to make the right choices. Change is costly, but it is important to strike a balance and be truthful when explaining the impact and cost of the problem and the solution.

Distributed Teams: A Lesson In Expectations, Connection, and Inclusion

In order to build distributed teams across multiple locations, the author implemented a café discussion, encouraged conversations around personal experiences, created an “always hangout”, introduced standups, and created a “parking lot” time. Additionally, the author created a paper trail of conversations, formalized the patterns of growth, and learned the cost of distributed teams and the importance of being intentional. These changes have helped the teams to be better connected and have a better understanding of the changes.

Sticking Your Own Fork In The Road

A friend asked for career advice on whether to be an individual contributor or a manager. The speaker shared his own experience of switching from a career in finance to a Ph.D. in machine learning, and the lessons he learned from it. He encourages others to take risks and follow their passions, and to not forget the life learnings they have acquired. He also suggests looking into functional programming as a great way to build systems.

Important Lessons In Building Machine Learning

At Target, a team of data scientists and engineers was tasked with bringing machine learning into many areas of the business. To bridge the gap between data scientists and their business partners, the team leader organized how they communicate when collaborating with other parts of the company. He established four questions to ask when beginning a project: what are we building, what data sources are we going to use, how do we improve the model, and what is the model architecture going to be? This approach helped the team communicate with all the different parties involved in building the machine learning technology and sped up development tremendously.

Being a Proactive New Manager

This article discusses the challenges faced by a software engineer who transitioned into a management role. The author outlines the steps they took to build trust with their team, set boundaries with their skip-level manager, and gain knowledge of the team's broader portfolio. They also discuss the importance of having a 30-60-90 plan, being honest with their manager, and understanding the team's mission and objectives. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the importance of gaining the trust of their direct reports in order to be successful.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

Inclusive Template for Company-Wide Decision Making

This article discusses the problems that led to the creation of a template for decision-making processes in a singular setting. The template includes the decision options, problems to be solved, decision to be taken, person responsible for making the final decision, teams that depend on the decision, people to be consulted, and people to be informed. The template has been beneficial for distributed teams, as it allows them to enter at any time for an up to date evaluation of things. It has also removed pressure from product managers and design heads, as the one being held accountable can be less involved.

Managing Remote Teams

Working remotely can be difficult, but establishing a relationship and trust with remote employees is key. To do this, it is important to have ‘water cooler’ sessions, create a summit, keep remote employees informed, make small talk, and invest in growth plans. Additionally, it is important to make sure remote employees are heard in meetings and feel appreciated with small gifts. Finally, being vulnerable and human can make you more relatable and help foster ideas for further growth.

How to Communicate with a Team Based in a Different Location

June implemented a work from home policy but many of the team was still working in the office. To stay in contact with product and engineering leaders and keep direct reports connected, the manager got buy-in from everyone at the company, traveled to the office every quarter, over-communicated, and uncomplicated video calls. Lessons learned included starting the conversation early, disseminating decisions quickly, meeting in person every 6-8 weeks, and replacing in-person conversations with asynchronous updates. Standups were ditched and video calls were simplified to eliminate technology problems.

Establishing A Career Path Is More Then Copy and Pasting

The joint director at Payfit was tasked with creating a career path for the company. After researching models from other companies, they realized that they needed to build their own career path that was tailored to the company's maturity level. They created a framework with six layers and two axes to cover individual contributions and management. They also included personality traits in the framework to make it collaborative. They also established a development discussion to separate career growth from individual skill development. Finally, they created a PowerPoint presentation to explain the career path and the steps to growth.

A Framework To Get Your Next Promotion

This article discusses how to effectively manage one's career in order to get ahead. It explains that one should understand their job expectations, their boss's expectations, and build a network of supportive people. It also emphasizes the importance of being thoughtful and genuine when building relationships.

Employer Branding Strategy for Engineering

Taxfix, a company with an internal Employer Branding Manager, has mapped out the process for engineering to build a strong employer brand. This includes understanding the problem, the user journey, value proposition, and relevant topics. The strategy should then be applied to create an action plan and iterated upon. Employer Branding is not a one-off project and should be treated like a product.

Managing Layoffs Due to Financial Constraints

When a business is facing financial constraints, it is important to understand the constraints and make decisions that will help the company survive. This may include cutting costs, shutting down certain products, and laying off employees. It is important to be transparent and proactive in communicating the situation to the team, and to create personalized exit strategies for those who are leaving. It is also important to be business smart and take the opportunity to learn about the financial side of the business.

Team Kickoff Exercises

This article outlines the steps a leader should take to quickly get a team up to speed after an acquisition or when working with a new partner. These steps include gathering context, identifying goals, scheduling an off-site kickoff event, introducing team members, presenting the business context, creating a long-term roadmap, establishing a team vision and mission, and providing support and feedback. The article also provides lessons learned from the author's experience.

Where is your True North Star?

A head of product struggled to figure out how to create team incentives that worked alongside individual incentives. To solve this problem, they initiated a product analytics project to measure the true value of their product as perceived by customers. This allowed them to prioritize work according to the North Star metric and to raise awareness and visibility on the freemium components of their product suite. This process requires executive support and cultural adjustments, but is worth the effort.

Proactive Alerting System

In order to be customer obsessed and manage customer escalations, a head of product created an infrastructure that monitored customer deployments and gave them a score. This enabled proactive communication on emerging issues and allowed the team to solve problems before the customer was aware of them. Lessons learned included reducing time to awareness, engaging stakeholders, and focusing on both drops and surges.

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

Running Engineering Teams Across Different Time Zones

Companies are increasingly relying on distributed teams, which requires a great deal of communication and deliberation. There are three different time zones situations -- fully remote, hub, and mixed model -- each requiring a different approach. Companies should assign one feature per hub, structure processes around reality, and understand the weight of the remote part. Remote teams bring benefits such as faster and easier hiring and cost reduction.

What You Need To Know When Scaling Rapidly

Rapid scaling of a startup requires a lot of effort, strong cash flow, and knowledge. Knowing who and when to hire and how to structure the organization is a challenge. Securing funding is the first step, and then building a pipeline of potential hires. As the company grows, the engineering team must be structured properly to ensure success. Expectations must be clear and transparent, and the engineering leader must maintain touchpoints with the team.

Balancing Waterfall Hardware Roadmaps with Agile Software Development

This article discusses the process of transitioning from an agile approach to a more methodical approach to product development for a driverless robo-taxi company. The company had to integrate with the company that acquired them, and it took a lot of buy-in from the company and a painful year to make the transition. The company eventually moved towards a user-driven waterfall direction, but it took gradual introduction and buy-in from the company. The transition ultimately put the company in a much better place.

Change Is A Necessity For Growth, But Should Be Approached Thoughtfully

A startup had accumulated a lot of technical debt due to not being up to date on industry standards and engineering best practices. To increase developer productivity and velocity, a shared component library was proposed, but there was disagreement between two senior engineers on how to build it. After understanding the underlying reasons for the disagreement, a two-on-one meeting was held to come to a consensus. It was concluded that both sides needed to give something to gain something, and the team was empowered to make the right choices. Change is costly, but it is important to strike a balance and be truthful when explaining the impact and cost of the problem and the solution.

Distributed Teams: A Lesson In Expectations, Connection, and Inclusion

In order to build distributed teams across multiple locations, the author implemented a café discussion, encouraged conversations around personal experiences, created an “always hangout”, introduced standups, and created a “parking lot” time. Additionally, the author created a paper trail of conversations, formalized the patterns of growth, and learned the cost of distributed teams and the importance of being intentional. These changes have helped the teams to be better connected and have a better understanding of the changes.

Sticking Your Own Fork In The Road

A friend asked for career advice on whether to be an individual contributor or a manager. The speaker shared his own experience of switching from a career in finance to a Ph.D. in machine learning, and the lessons he learned from it. He encourages others to take risks and follow their passions, and to not forget the life learnings they have acquired. He also suggests looking into functional programming as a great way to build systems.

Important Lessons In Building Machine Learning

At Target, a team of data scientists and engineers was tasked with bringing machine learning into many areas of the business. To bridge the gap between data scientists and their business partners, the team leader organized how they communicate when collaborating with other parts of the company. He established four questions to ask when beginning a project: what are we building, what data sources are we going to use, how do we improve the model, and what is the model architecture going to be? This approach helped the team communicate with all the different parties involved in building the machine learning technology and sped up development tremendously.

Being a Proactive New Manager

This article discusses the challenges faced by a software engineer who transitioned into a management role. The author outlines the steps they took to build trust with their team, set boundaries with their skip-level manager, and gain knowledge of the team's broader portfolio. They also discuss the importance of having a 30-60-90 plan, being honest with their manager, and understanding the team's mission and objectives. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the importance of gaining the trust of their direct reports in order to be successful.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

Inclusive Template for Company-Wide Decision Making

This article discusses the problems that led to the creation of a template for decision-making processes in a singular setting. The template includes the decision options, problems to be solved, decision to be taken, person responsible for making the final decision, teams that depend on the decision, people to be consulted, and people to be informed. The template has been beneficial for distributed teams, as it allows them to enter at any time for an up to date evaluation of things. It has also removed pressure from product managers and design heads, as the one being held accountable can be less involved.

Managing Remote Teams

Working remotely can be difficult, but establishing a relationship and trust with remote employees is key. To do this, it is important to have ‘water cooler’ sessions, create a summit, keep remote employees informed, make small talk, and invest in growth plans. Additionally, it is important to make sure remote employees are heard in meetings and feel appreciated with small gifts. Finally, being vulnerable and human can make you more relatable and help foster ideas for further growth.

How to Communicate with a Team Based in a Different Location

June implemented a work from home policy but many of the team was still working in the office. To stay in contact with product and engineering leaders and keep direct reports connected, the manager got buy-in from everyone at the company, traveled to the office every quarter, over-communicated, and uncomplicated video calls. Lessons learned included starting the conversation early, disseminating decisions quickly, meeting in person every 6-8 weeks, and replacing in-person conversations with asynchronous updates. Standups were ditched and video calls were simplified to eliminate technology problems.

Establishing A Career Path Is More Then Copy and Pasting

The joint director at Payfit was tasked with creating a career path for the company. After researching models from other companies, they realized that they needed to build their own career path that was tailored to the company's maturity level. They created a framework with six layers and two axes to cover individual contributions and management. They also included personality traits in the framework to make it collaborative. They also established a development discussion to separate career growth from individual skill development. Finally, they created a PowerPoint presentation to explain the career path and the steps to growth.

A Framework To Get Your Next Promotion

This article discusses how to effectively manage one's career in order to get ahead. It explains that one should understand their job expectations, their boss's expectations, and build a network of supportive people. It also emphasizes the importance of being thoughtful and genuine when building relationships.

Employer Branding Strategy for Engineering

Taxfix, a company with an internal Employer Branding Manager, has mapped out the process for engineering to build a strong employer brand. This includes understanding the problem, the user journey, value proposition, and relevant topics. The strategy should then be applied to create an action plan and iterated upon. Employer Branding is not a one-off project and should be treated like a product.

Managing Layoffs Due to Financial Constraints

When a business is facing financial constraints, it is important to understand the constraints and make decisions that will help the company survive. This may include cutting costs, shutting down certain products, and laying off employees. It is important to be transparent and proactive in communicating the situation to the team, and to create personalized exit strategies for those who are leaving. It is also important to be business smart and take the opportunity to learn about the financial side of the business.

Team Kickoff Exercises

This article outlines the steps a leader should take to quickly get a team up to speed after an acquisition or when working with a new partner. These steps include gathering context, identifying goals, scheduling an off-site kickoff event, introducing team members, presenting the business context, creating a long-term roadmap, establishing a team vision and mission, and providing support and feedback. The article also provides lessons learned from the author's experience.

Where is your True North Star?

A head of product struggled to figure out how to create team incentives that worked alongside individual incentives. To solve this problem, they initiated a product analytics project to measure the true value of their product as perceived by customers. This allowed them to prioritize work according to the North Star metric and to raise awareness and visibility on the freemium components of their product suite. This process requires executive support and cultural adjustments, but is worth the effort.

Proactive Alerting System

In order to be customer obsessed and manage customer escalations, a head of product created an infrastructure that monitored customer deployments and gave them a score. This enabled proactive communication on emerging issues and allowed the team to solve problems before the customer was aware of them. Lessons learned included reducing time to awareness, engaging stakeholders, and focusing on both drops and surges.

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

Running Engineering Teams Across Different Time Zones

Companies are increasingly relying on distributed teams, which requires a great deal of communication and deliberation. There are three different time zones situations -- fully remote, hub, and mixed model -- each requiring a different approach. Companies should assign one feature per hub, structure processes around reality, and understand the weight of the remote part. Remote teams bring benefits such as faster and easier hiring and cost reduction.

What You Need To Know When Scaling Rapidly

Rapid scaling of a startup requires a lot of effort, strong cash flow, and knowledge. Knowing who and when to hire and how to structure the organization is a challenge. Securing funding is the first step, and then building a pipeline of potential hires. As the company grows, the engineering team must be structured properly to ensure success. Expectations must be clear and transparent, and the engineering leader must maintain touchpoints with the team.

Balancing Waterfall Hardware Roadmaps with Agile Software Development

This article discusses the process of transitioning from an agile approach to a more methodical approach to product development for a driverless robo-taxi company. The company had to integrate with the company that acquired them, and it took a lot of buy-in from the company and a painful year to make the transition. The company eventually moved towards a user-driven waterfall direction, but it took gradual introduction and buy-in from the company. The transition ultimately put the company in a much better place.

Change Is A Necessity For Growth, But Should Be Approached Thoughtfully

A startup had accumulated a lot of technical debt due to not being up to date on industry standards and engineering best practices. To increase developer productivity and velocity, a shared component library was proposed, but there was disagreement between two senior engineers on how to build it. After understanding the underlying reasons for the disagreement, a two-on-one meeting was held to come to a consensus. It was concluded that both sides needed to give something to gain something, and the team was empowered to make the right choices. Change is costly, but it is important to strike a balance and be truthful when explaining the impact and cost of the problem and the solution.

Distributed Teams: A Lesson In Expectations, Connection, and Inclusion

In order to build distributed teams across multiple locations, the author implemented a café discussion, encouraged conversations around personal experiences, created an “always hangout”, introduced standups, and created a “parking lot” time. Additionally, the author created a paper trail of conversations, formalized the patterns of growth, and learned the cost of distributed teams and the importance of being intentional. These changes have helped the teams to be better connected and have a better understanding of the changes.

Sticking Your Own Fork In The Road

A friend asked for career advice on whether to be an individual contributor or a manager. The speaker shared his own experience of switching from a career in finance to a Ph.D. in machine learning, and the lessons he learned from it. He encourages others to take risks and follow their passions, and to not forget the life learnings they have acquired. He also suggests looking into functional programming as a great way to build systems.

Important Lessons In Building Machine Learning

At Target, a team of data scientists and engineers was tasked with bringing machine learning into many areas of the business. To bridge the gap between data scientists and their business partners, the team leader organized how they communicate when collaborating with other parts of the company. He established four questions to ask when beginning a project: what are we building, what data sources are we going to use, how do we improve the model, and what is the model architecture going to be? This approach helped the team communicate with all the different parties involved in building the machine learning technology and sped up development tremendously.

Being a Proactive New Manager

This article discusses the challenges faced by a software engineer who transitioned into a management role. The author outlines the steps they took to build trust with their team, set boundaries with their skip-level manager, and gain knowledge of the team's broader portfolio. They also discuss the importance of having a 30-60-90 plan, being honest with their manager, and understanding the team's mission and objectives. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the importance of gaining the trust of their direct reports in order to be successful.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

Inclusive Template for Company-Wide Decision Making

This article discusses the problems that led to the creation of a template for decision-making processes in a singular setting. The template includes the decision options, problems to be solved, decision to be taken, person responsible for making the final decision, teams that depend on the decision, people to be consulted, and people to be informed. The template has been beneficial for distributed teams, as it allows them to enter at any time for an up to date evaluation of things. It has also removed pressure from product managers and design heads, as the one being held accountable can be less involved.

Managing Remote Teams

Working remotely can be difficult, but establishing a relationship and trust with remote employees is key. To do this, it is important to have ‘water cooler’ sessions, create a summit, keep remote employees informed, make small talk, and invest in growth plans. Additionally, it is important to make sure remote employees are heard in meetings and feel appreciated with small gifts. Finally, being vulnerable and human can make you more relatable and help foster ideas for further growth.

How to Communicate with a Team Based in a Different Location

June implemented a work from home policy but many of the team was still working in the office. To stay in contact with product and engineering leaders and keep direct reports connected, the manager got buy-in from everyone at the company, traveled to the office every quarter, over-communicated, and uncomplicated video calls. Lessons learned included starting the conversation early, disseminating decisions quickly, meeting in person every 6-8 weeks, and replacing in-person conversations with asynchronous updates. Standups were ditched and video calls were simplified to eliminate technology problems.

Establishing A Career Path Is More Then Copy and Pasting

The joint director at Payfit was tasked with creating a career path for the company. After researching models from other companies, they realized that they needed to build their own career path that was tailored to the company's maturity level. They created a framework with six layers and two axes to cover individual contributions and management. They also included personality traits in the framework to make it collaborative. They also established a development discussion to separate career growth from individual skill development. Finally, they created a PowerPoint presentation to explain the career path and the steps to growth.

A Framework To Get Your Next Promotion

This article discusses how to effectively manage one's career in order to get ahead. It explains that one should understand their job expectations, their boss's expectations, and build a network of supportive people. It also emphasizes the importance of being thoughtful and genuine when building relationships.

Employer Branding Strategy for Engineering

Taxfix, a company with an internal Employer Branding Manager, has mapped out the process for engineering to build a strong employer brand. This includes understanding the problem, the user journey, value proposition, and relevant topics. The strategy should then be applied to create an action plan and iterated upon. Employer Branding is not a one-off project and should be treated like a product.

Managing Layoffs Due to Financial Constraints

When a business is facing financial constraints, it is important to understand the constraints and make decisions that will help the company survive. This may include cutting costs, shutting down certain products, and laying off employees. It is important to be transparent and proactive in communicating the situation to the team, and to create personalized exit strategies for those who are leaving. It is also important to be business smart and take the opportunity to learn about the financial side of the business.

Team Kickoff Exercises

This article outlines the steps a leader should take to quickly get a team up to speed after an acquisition or when working with a new partner. These steps include gathering context, identifying goals, scheduling an off-site kickoff event, introducing team members, presenting the business context, creating a long-term roadmap, establishing a team vision and mission, and providing support and feedback. The article also provides lessons learned from the author's experience.

Where is your True North Star?

A head of product struggled to figure out how to create team incentives that worked alongside individual incentives. To solve this problem, they initiated a product analytics project to measure the true value of their product as perceived by customers. This allowed them to prioritize work according to the North Star metric and to raise awareness and visibility on the freemium components of their product suite. This process requires executive support and cultural adjustments, but is worth the effort.

Proactive Alerting System

In order to be customer obsessed and manage customer escalations, a head of product created an infrastructure that monitored customer deployments and gave them a score. This enabled proactive communication on emerging issues and allowed the team to solve problems before the customer was aware of them. Lessons learned included reducing time to awareness, engaging stakeholders, and focusing on both drops and surges.

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

Running Engineering Teams Across Different Time Zones

Companies are increasingly relying on distributed teams, which requires a great deal of communication and deliberation. There are three different time zones situations -- fully remote, hub, and mixed model -- each requiring a different approach. Companies should assign one feature per hub, structure processes around reality, and understand the weight of the remote part. Remote teams bring benefits such as faster and easier hiring and cost reduction.

What You Need To Know When Scaling Rapidly

Rapid scaling of a startup requires a lot of effort, strong cash flow, and knowledge. Knowing who and when to hire and how to structure the organization is a challenge. Securing funding is the first step, and then building a pipeline of potential hires. As the company grows, the engineering team must be structured properly to ensure success. Expectations must be clear and transparent, and the engineering leader must maintain touchpoints with the team.

Balancing Waterfall Hardware Roadmaps with Agile Software Development

This article discusses the process of transitioning from an agile approach to a more methodical approach to product development for a driverless robo-taxi company. The company had to integrate with the company that acquired them, and it took a lot of buy-in from the company and a painful year to make the transition. The company eventually moved towards a user-driven waterfall direction, but it took gradual introduction and buy-in from the company. The transition ultimately put the company in a much better place.

Change Is A Necessity For Growth, But Should Be Approached Thoughtfully

A startup had accumulated a lot of technical debt due to not being up to date on industry standards and engineering best practices. To increase developer productivity and velocity, a shared component library was proposed, but there was disagreement between two senior engineers on how to build it. After understanding the underlying reasons for the disagreement, a two-on-one meeting was held to come to a consensus. It was concluded that both sides needed to give something to gain something, and the team was empowered to make the right choices. Change is costly, but it is important to strike a balance and be truthful when explaining the impact and cost of the problem and the solution.

Distributed Teams: A Lesson In Expectations, Connection, and Inclusion

In order to build distributed teams across multiple locations, the author implemented a café discussion, encouraged conversations around personal experiences, created an “always hangout”, introduced standups, and created a “parking lot” time. Additionally, the author created a paper trail of conversations, formalized the patterns of growth, and learned the cost of distributed teams and the importance of being intentional. These changes have helped the teams to be better connected and have a better understanding of the changes.

Sticking Your Own Fork In The Road

A friend asked for career advice on whether to be an individual contributor or a manager. The speaker shared his own experience of switching from a career in finance to a Ph.D. in machine learning, and the lessons he learned from it. He encourages others to take risks and follow their passions, and to not forget the life learnings they have acquired. He also suggests looking into functional programming as a great way to build systems.

Important Lessons In Building Machine Learning

At Target, a team of data scientists and engineers was tasked with bringing machine learning into many areas of the business. To bridge the gap between data scientists and their business partners, the team leader organized how they communicate when collaborating with other parts of the company. He established four questions to ask when beginning a project: what are we building, what data sources are we going to use, how do we improve the model, and what is the model architecture going to be? This approach helped the team communicate with all the different parties involved in building the machine learning technology and sped up development tremendously.

Being a Proactive New Manager

This article discusses the challenges faced by a software engineer who transitioned into a management role. The author outlines the steps they took to build trust with their team, set boundaries with their skip-level manager, and gain knowledge of the team's broader portfolio. They also discuss the importance of having a 30-60-90 plan, being honest with their manager, and understanding the team's mission and objectives. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the importance of gaining the trust of their direct reports in order to be successful.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

Inclusive Template for Company-Wide Decision Making

This article discusses the problems that led to the creation of a template for decision-making processes in a singular setting. The template includes the decision options, problems to be solved, decision to be taken, person responsible for making the final decision, teams that depend on the decision, people to be consulted, and people to be informed. The template has been beneficial for distributed teams, as it allows them to enter at any time for an up to date evaluation of things. It has also removed pressure from product managers and design heads, as the one being held accountable can be less involved.

Managing Remote Teams

Working remotely can be difficult, but establishing a relationship and trust with remote employees is key. To do this, it is important to have ‘water cooler’ sessions, create a summit, keep remote employees informed, make small talk, and invest in growth plans. Additionally, it is important to make sure remote employees are heard in meetings and feel appreciated with small gifts. Finally, being vulnerable and human can make you more relatable and help foster ideas for further growth.

How to Communicate with a Team Based in a Different Location

June implemented a work from home policy but many of the team was still working in the office. To stay in contact with product and engineering leaders and keep direct reports connected, the manager got buy-in from everyone at the company, traveled to the office every quarter, over-communicated, and uncomplicated video calls. Lessons learned included starting the conversation early, disseminating decisions quickly, meeting in person every 6-8 weeks, and replacing in-person conversations with asynchronous updates. Standups were ditched and video calls were simplified to eliminate technology problems.

Establishing A Career Path Is More Then Copy and Pasting

The joint director at Payfit was tasked with creating a career path for the company. After researching models from other companies, they realized that they needed to build their own career path that was tailored to the company's maturity level. They created a framework with six layers and two axes to cover individual contributions and management. They also included personality traits in the framework to make it collaborative. They also established a development discussion to separate career growth from individual skill development. Finally, they created a PowerPoint presentation to explain the career path and the steps to growth.

A Framework To Get Your Next Promotion

This article discusses how to effectively manage one's career in order to get ahead. It explains that one should understand their job expectations, their boss's expectations, and build a network of supportive people. It also emphasizes the importance of being thoughtful and genuine when building relationships.

Employer Branding Strategy for Engineering

Taxfix, a company with an internal Employer Branding Manager, has mapped out the process for engineering to build a strong employer brand. This includes understanding the problem, the user journey, value proposition, and relevant topics. The strategy should then be applied to create an action plan and iterated upon. Employer Branding is not a one-off project and should be treated like a product.

Managing Layoffs Due to Financial Constraints

When a business is facing financial constraints, it is important to understand the constraints and make decisions that will help the company survive. This may include cutting costs, shutting down certain products, and laying off employees. It is important to be transparent and proactive in communicating the situation to the team, and to create personalized exit strategies for those who are leaving. It is also important to be business smart and take the opportunity to learn about the financial side of the business.

Team Kickoff Exercises

This article outlines the steps a leader should take to quickly get a team up to speed after an acquisition or when working with a new partner. These steps include gathering context, identifying goals, scheduling an off-site kickoff event, introducing team members, presenting the business context, creating a long-term roadmap, establishing a team vision and mission, and providing support and feedback. The article also provides lessons learned from the author's experience.

Where is your True North Star?

A head of product struggled to figure out how to create team incentives that worked alongside individual incentives. To solve this problem, they initiated a product analytics project to measure the true value of their product as perceived by customers. This allowed them to prioritize work according to the North Star metric and to raise awareness and visibility on the freemium components of their product suite. This process requires executive support and cultural adjustments, but is worth the effort.

Proactive Alerting System

In order to be customer obsessed and manage customer escalations, a head of product created an infrastructure that monitored customer deployments and gave them a score. This enabled proactive communication on emerging issues and allowed the team to solve problems before the customer was aware of them. Lessons learned included reducing time to awareness, engaging stakeholders, and focusing on both drops and surges.

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

Running Engineering Teams Across Different Time Zones

Companies are increasingly relying on distributed teams, which requires a great deal of communication and deliberation. There are three different time zones situations -- fully remote, hub, and mixed model -- each requiring a different approach. Companies should assign one feature per hub, structure processes around reality, and understand the weight of the remote part. Remote teams bring benefits such as faster and easier hiring and cost reduction.

What You Need To Know When Scaling Rapidly

Rapid scaling of a startup requires a lot of effort, strong cash flow, and knowledge. Knowing who and when to hire and how to structure the organization is a challenge. Securing funding is the first step, and then building a pipeline of potential hires. As the company grows, the engineering team must be structured properly to ensure success. Expectations must be clear and transparent, and the engineering leader must maintain touchpoints with the team.

Balancing Waterfall Hardware Roadmaps with Agile Software Development

This article discusses the process of transitioning from an agile approach to a more methodical approach to product development for a driverless robo-taxi company. The company had to integrate with the company that acquired them, and it took a lot of buy-in from the company and a painful year to make the transition. The company eventually moved towards a user-driven waterfall direction, but it took gradual introduction and buy-in from the company. The transition ultimately put the company in a much better place.

Change Is A Necessity For Growth, But Should Be Approached Thoughtfully

A startup had accumulated a lot of technical debt due to not being up to date on industry standards and engineering best practices. To increase developer productivity and velocity, a shared component library was proposed, but there was disagreement between two senior engineers on how to build it. After understanding the underlying reasons for the disagreement, a two-on-one meeting was held to come to a consensus. It was concluded that both sides needed to give something to gain something, and the team was empowered to make the right choices. Change is costly, but it is important to strike a balance and be truthful when explaining the impact and cost of the problem and the solution.

Distributed Teams: A Lesson In Expectations, Connection, and Inclusion

In order to build distributed teams across multiple locations, the author implemented a café discussion, encouraged conversations around personal experiences, created an “always hangout”, introduced standups, and created a “parking lot” time. Additionally, the author created a paper trail of conversations, formalized the patterns of growth, and learned the cost of distributed teams and the importance of being intentional. These changes have helped the teams to be better connected and have a better understanding of the changes.

Sticking Your Own Fork In The Road

A friend asked for career advice on whether to be an individual contributor or a manager. The speaker shared his own experience of switching from a career in finance to a Ph.D. in machine learning, and the lessons he learned from it. He encourages others to take risks and follow their passions, and to not forget the life learnings they have acquired. He also suggests looking into functional programming as a great way to build systems.

Important Lessons In Building Machine Learning

At Target, a team of data scientists and engineers was tasked with bringing machine learning into many areas of the business. To bridge the gap between data scientists and their business partners, the team leader organized how they communicate when collaborating with other parts of the company. He established four questions to ask when beginning a project: what are we building, what data sources are we going to use, how do we improve the model, and what is the model architecture going to be? This approach helped the team communicate with all the different parties involved in building the machine learning technology and sped up development tremendously.

Being a Proactive New Manager

This article discusses the challenges faced by a software engineer who transitioned into a management role. The author outlines the steps they took to build trust with their team, set boundaries with their skip-level manager, and gain knowledge of the team's broader portfolio. They also discuss the importance of having a 30-60-90 plan, being honest with their manager, and understanding the team's mission and objectives. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the importance of gaining the trust of their direct reports in order to be successful.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

Inclusive Template for Company-Wide Decision Making

This article discusses the problems that led to the creation of a template for decision-making processes in a singular setting. The template includes the decision options, problems to be solved, decision to be taken, person responsible for making the final decision, teams that depend on the decision, people to be consulted, and people to be informed. The template has been beneficial for distributed teams, as it allows them to enter at any time for an up to date evaluation of things. It has also removed pressure from product managers and design heads, as the one being held accountable can be less involved.

Managing Remote Teams

Working remotely can be difficult, but establishing a relationship and trust with remote employees is key. To do this, it is important to have ‘water cooler’ sessions, create a summit, keep remote employees informed, make small talk, and invest in growth plans. Additionally, it is important to make sure remote employees are heard in meetings and feel appreciated with small gifts. Finally, being vulnerable and human can make you more relatable and help foster ideas for further growth.

How to Communicate with a Team Based in a Different Location

June implemented a work from home policy but many of the team was still working in the office. To stay in contact with product and engineering leaders and keep direct reports connected, the manager got buy-in from everyone at the company, traveled to the office every quarter, over-communicated, and uncomplicated video calls. Lessons learned included starting the conversation early, disseminating decisions quickly, meeting in person every 6-8 weeks, and replacing in-person conversations with asynchronous updates. Standups were ditched and video calls were simplified to eliminate technology problems.

Establishing A Career Path Is More Then Copy and Pasting

The joint director at Payfit was tasked with creating a career path for the company. After researching models from other companies, they realized that they needed to build their own career path that was tailored to the company's maturity level. They created a framework with six layers and two axes to cover individual contributions and management. They also included personality traits in the framework to make it collaborative. They also established a development discussion to separate career growth from individual skill development. Finally, they created a PowerPoint presentation to explain the career path and the steps to growth.

A Framework To Get Your Next Promotion

This article discusses how to effectively manage one's career in order to get ahead. It explains that one should understand their job expectations, their boss's expectations, and build a network of supportive people. It also emphasizes the importance of being thoughtful and genuine when building relationships.

Employer Branding Strategy for Engineering

Taxfix, a company with an internal Employer Branding Manager, has mapped out the process for engineering to build a strong employer brand. This includes understanding the problem, the user journey, value proposition, and relevant topics. The strategy should then be applied to create an action plan and iterated upon. Employer Branding is not a one-off project and should be treated like a product.

Managing Layoffs Due to Financial Constraints

When a business is facing financial constraints, it is important to understand the constraints and make decisions that will help the company survive. This may include cutting costs, shutting down certain products, and laying off employees. It is important to be transparent and proactive in communicating the situation to the team, and to create personalized exit strategies for those who are leaving. It is also important to be business smart and take the opportunity to learn about the financial side of the business.

Team Kickoff Exercises

This article outlines the steps a leader should take to quickly get a team up to speed after an acquisition or when working with a new partner. These steps include gathering context, identifying goals, scheduling an off-site kickoff event, introducing team members, presenting the business context, creating a long-term roadmap, establishing a team vision and mission, and providing support and feedback. The article also provides lessons learned from the author's experience.

Where is your True North Star?

A head of product struggled to figure out how to create team incentives that worked alongside individual incentives. To solve this problem, they initiated a product analytics project to measure the true value of their product as perceived by customers. This allowed them to prioritize work according to the North Star metric and to raise awareness and visibility on the freemium components of their product suite. This process requires executive support and cultural adjustments, but is worth the effort.

Proactive Alerting System

In order to be customer obsessed and manage customer escalations, a head of product created an infrastructure that monitored customer deployments and gave them a score. This enabled proactive communication on emerging issues and allowed the team to solve problems before the customer was aware of them. Lessons learned included reducing time to awareness, engaging stakeholders, and focusing on both drops and surges.

Implementing a Clear Promotion Process in a Growing Company

This article discusses the challenges a company faced when trying to promote employees in a systematic way across all leadership. To address this, the company created an engineering ladder and a promotion readiness document to provide clarity on expectations for everyone. This system opened up honest conversations between individuals and their managers, and it was so successful that other departments adopted similar approaches. As a result, people felt more inspired to challenge themselves and go after certain things.

Running Engineering Teams Across Different Time Zones

Companies are increasingly relying on distributed teams, which requires a great deal of communication and deliberation. There are three different time zones situations -- fully remote, hub, and mixed model -- each requiring a different approach. Companies should assign one feature per hub, structure processes around reality, and understand the weight of the remote part. Remote teams bring benefits such as faster and easier hiring and cost reduction.

What You Need To Know When Scaling Rapidly

Rapid scaling of a startup requires a lot of effort, strong cash flow, and knowledge. Knowing who and when to hire and how to structure the organization is a challenge. Securing funding is the first step, and then building a pipeline of potential hires. As the company grows, the engineering team must be structured properly to ensure success. Expectations must be clear and transparent, and the engineering leader must maintain touchpoints with the team.

Balancing Waterfall Hardware Roadmaps with Agile Software Development

This article discusses the process of transitioning from an agile approach to a more methodical approach to product development for a driverless robo-taxi company. The company had to integrate with the company that acquired them, and it took a lot of buy-in from the company and a painful year to make the transition. The company eventually moved towards a user-driven waterfall direction, but it took gradual introduction and buy-in from the company. The transition ultimately put the company in a much better place.

Change Is A Necessity For Growth, But Should Be Approached Thoughtfully

A startup had accumulated a lot of technical debt due to not being up to date on industry standards and engineering best practices. To increase developer productivity and velocity, a shared component library was proposed, but there was disagreement between two senior engineers on how to build it. After understanding the underlying reasons for the disagreement, a two-on-one meeting was held to come to a consensus. It was concluded that both sides needed to give something to gain something, and the team was empowered to make the right choices. Change is costly, but it is important to strike a balance and be truthful when explaining the impact and cost of the problem and the solution.

Distributed Teams: A Lesson In Expectations, Connection, and Inclusion

In order to build distributed teams across multiple locations, the author implemented a café discussion, encouraged conversations around personal experiences, created an “always hangout”, introduced standups, and created a “parking lot” time. Additionally, the author created a paper trail of conversations, formalized the patterns of growth, and learned the cost of distributed teams and the importance of being intentional. These changes have helped the teams to be better connected and have a better understanding of the changes.

Sticking Your Own Fork In The Road

A friend asked for career advice on whether to be an individual contributor or a manager. The speaker shared his own experience of switching from a career in finance to a Ph.D. in machine learning, and the lessons he learned from it. He encourages others to take risks and follow their passions, and to not forget the life learnings they have acquired. He also suggests looking into functional programming as a great way to build systems.

Important Lessons In Building Machine Learning

At Target, a team of data scientists and engineers was tasked with bringing machine learning into many areas of the business. To bridge the gap between data scientists and their business partners, the team leader organized how they communicate when collaborating with other parts of the company. He established four questions to ask when beginning a project: what are we building, what data sources are we going to use, how do we improve the model, and what is the model architecture going to be? This approach helped the team communicate with all the different parties involved in building the machine learning technology and sped up development tremendously.

Being a Proactive New Manager

This article discusses the challenges faced by a software engineer who transitioned into a management role. The author outlines the steps they took to build trust with their team, set boundaries with their skip-level manager, and gain knowledge of the team's broader portfolio. They also discuss the importance of having a 30-60-90 plan, being honest with their manager, and understanding the team's mission and objectives. Ultimately, the author emphasizes the importance of gaining the trust of their direct reports in order to be successful.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

Inclusive Template for Company-Wide Decision Making

This article discusses the problems that led to the creation of a template for decision-making processes in a singular setting. The template includes the decision options, problems to be solved, decision to be taken, person responsible for making the final decision, teams that depend on the decision, people to be consulted, and people to be informed. The template has been beneficial for distributed teams, as it allows them to enter at any time for an up to date evaluation of things. It has also removed pressure from product managers and design heads, as the one being held accountable can be less involved.

Managing Remote Teams

Working remotely can be difficult, but establishing a relationship and trust with remote employees is key. To do this, it is important to have ‘water cooler’ sessions, create a summit, keep remote employees informed, make small talk, and invest in growth plans. Additionally, it is important to make sure remote employees are heard in meetings and feel appreciated with small gifts. Finally, being vulnerable and human can make you more relatable and help foster ideas for further growth.

How to Communicate with a Team Based in a Different Location

June implemented a work from home policy but many of the team was still working in the office. To stay in contact with product and engineering leaders and keep direct reports connected, the manager got buy-in from everyone at the company, traveled to the office every quarter, over-communicated, and uncomplicated video calls. Lessons learned included starting the conversation early, disseminating decisions quickly, meeting in person every 6-8 weeks, and replacing in-person conversations with asynchronous updates. Standups were ditched and video calls were simplified to eliminate technology problems.

Establishing A Career Path Is More Then Copy and Pasting

The joint director at Payfit was tasked with creating a career path for the company. After researching models from other companies, they realized that they needed to build their own career path that was tailored to the company's maturity level. They created a framework with six layers and two axes to cover individual contributions and management. They also included personality traits in the framework to make it collaborative. They also established a development discussion to separate career growth from individual skill development. Finally, they created a PowerPoint presentation to explain the career path and the steps to growth.

A Framework To Get Your Next Promotion

This article discusses how to effectively manage one's career in order to get ahead. It explains that one should understand their job expectations, their boss's expectations, and build a network of supportive people. It also emphasizes the importance of being thoughtful and genuine when building relationships.

Employer Branding Strategy for Engineering

Taxfix, a company with an internal Employer Branding Manager, has mapped out the process for engineering to build a strong employer brand. This includes understanding the problem, the user journey, value proposition, and relevant topics. The strategy should then be applied to create an action plan and iterated upon. Employer Branding is not a one-off project and should be treated like a product.

Managing Layoffs Due to Financial Constraints

When a business is facing financial constraints, it is important to understand the constraints and make decisions that will help the company survive. This may include cutting costs, shutting down certain products, and laying off employees. It is important to be transparent and proactive in communicating the situation to the team, and to create personalized exit strategies for those who are leaving. It is also important to be business smart and take the opportunity to learn about the financial side of the business.

Team Kickoff Exercises

This article outlines the steps a leader should take to quickly get a team up to speed after an acquisition or when working with a new partner. These steps include gathering context, identifying goals, scheduling an off-site kickoff event, introducing team members, presenting the business context, creating a long-term roadmap, establishing a team vision and mission, and providing support and feedback. The article also provides lessons learned from the author's experience.

Where is your True North Star?

A head of product struggled to figure out how to create team incentives that worked alongside individual incentives. To solve this problem, they initiated a product analytics project to measure the true value of their product as perceived by customers. This allowed them to prioritize work according to the North Star metric and to raise awareness and visibility on the freemium components of their product suite. This process requires executive support and cultural adjustments, but is worth the effort.

Proactive Alerting System

In order to be customer obsessed and manage customer escalations, a head of product created an infrastructure that monitored customer deployments and gave them a score. This enabled proactive communication on emerging issues and allowed the team to solve problems before the customer was aware of them. Lessons learned included reducing time to awareness, engaging stakeholders, and focusing on both drops and surges.