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How To Improve Your Diversity Hiring

In order to increase diversity in the workplace, a senior manager organized coaching sessions for diverse engineering candidates who had passed the interview stage. The sessions focused on teaching the candidates how to communicate effectively in a culturally specific setting. The results were very successful, with 75% of the coached candidates receiving offers from the company. The program was well-received by colleagues, who understood the importance of helping diverse candidates overcome cultural barriers.

How Daydreaming Can Help You With a Roadmap Planning

Creativity is an important part of engineering, but engineers are often overwhelmed with workloads that prevent them from unlocking their creative potential. To make time for creativity, one should plan two or three must-do features for the upcoming quarter, find their creative hour, and let ideas simmer over a few days or weeks. Additionally, one should find relevant input or material to help with the creative process. With these steps, engineers can create innovative solutions to problems and build awesome roadmaps.

Project Estimation Using T-Shirt Sizes

This article discusses an effective agile estimation technique for project estimation in software development, called t-shirt sizing. It involves categorizing tasks into S, M, L, and XL buckets, which can be mapped to a 1 person work week. The scale can be adjusted based on business and project needs, and there are three techniques (T1, T2, and T3) for estimating delivery dates with varying accuracy. This technique helps teams understand their velocity and plan for resources, while avoiding analysis-paralysis.

The Evolution of an Enterprise’s Architecture

This article discusses the importance of customer experience when it comes to enterprise software architecture. It outlines four key phases in the life of a startup and the corresponding architectural decisions that should be made in each phase. These phases include No Product, Minimum Viable Product, Product-Market Fit, and Growth and Scale. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the company's lifecycle in order to make the right architectural decisions. It also provides advice on how to prioritize customer feedback, use public cloud features, and develop a DevOps process.

Build Products That Your Customers Want / Build Something People Want

The organization that the author works for had a perception that the products being built weren't relevant or making a difference to customers. To address this, the author created a simple framework of three questions to be asked at weekly product design working sessions: What is the customer problem, is it an important problem, and does the solution solve the customer problem. After a few months, the team adopted the customer problem mindset and the author is now looking to graduate the framework to the next level by adding another question.

IC to CTO, Coding to Not Coding

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a CTO and founder of a startup, the author questioned whether they wanted to remain in the leadership role or return to coding. After gathering data and talking to people they respected, the author decided to stay in their C-level role and picked up side projects to satisfy their coding hunger. The lessons learned from this experience are to gather data to make the right decision, accept the shift in responsibilities, and add incremental value to the team.

Structuring a Career Ladder For a Scaling Team

This article discusses the process of creating a career ladder for a startup that grew from two people to 45 people. The author researched other companies' career ladders and modified Medium's growth framework to create the 'Moonfrog Growth Framework', which consists of seven levels and five buckets of competency. The author also learned that in the early days of a startup, it is important to focus on building a successful engineering culture, rather than worrying about a career ladder. Additionally, it is important to create a career ladder that is specific to the company and to reduce the value of titles.

Nearshoring in Argentina: This Is How We’re Doing It

This article discusses the benefits of outsourcing to Argentina, such as cultural similarities, excellent English proficiency, and geographic proximity. It also explains how the company works with clients to form long-lasting partnerships and how they prefer to work with multinationals over startups. The article emphasizes that companies should not lump together all outsourcing or offshoring experiences, as working in Argentina differs significantly from working in India.

Empowering a Small Tech Team to Take on More Responsibility

Climb Credit's CTO faced the challenge of creating a robust technology platform with a small team. To solve this problem, he empowered the team to act like product owners, created open communication channels within the company, and implemented an agile process to manage adoption. This approach enabled the team to double the number of students they could help in a single day, but also had drawbacks, such as diverting time away from core functionality.

Avoiding Product Failure Through User Demand Testing

Climb Credit wanted to understand the demand for a product that could recommend a fitting program for students given the career they are considering. To do this, CTO decided to run a hackathon-style experiment to build a prototype and test the market with limited risk. The experiment was successful and tripled conversions on the platform, allowing them to make concrete decisions based on real data. The CTO learned that it is important to check assumptions at the door and put products in front of users to get the best signal.

How To Deal With Unhealthy Team Dynamics

This article discusses the importance of healthy team dynamics and how to achieve it. A workshop was convened to discuss each person's KPIs, and each team member was asked to reflect on the team's role and contribution to the business. Through this process, the team was able to reach a consensus on KPIs, which was an important reference point. The article also highlights the importance of these workshops, as well as the challenges of organizing them regularly.

Establishing Communication in a Growing Engineering and Product Team

The company had difficulty regulating communication between engineering and product teams due to different locations. To fix this, they introduced daily stand-ups, weekly demos and planning, bi-weekly engineering and product staff meetings, monthly OKR reviews, and quarterly Recap and Launch Days. They learned that communication needs to be operational, consistent, and tailored to the user profile.

Product Organization Structure in a Growing Company

In order to speed up the process and increase efficiency, a company restructured their organization by creating four larger units of 10-20 people, each managed by a senior engineering manager and a product manager. This allowed for more ambitious projects to be taken on, and for smaller issues to be solved within the unit without having to seek help from others. It also fostered a sense of freedom and flexibility, and engineers were able to take on more ambitious skills.

On Building Impactful Teams

A manager took over a poorly performing team and was able to turn it around in three months by eliminating unnecessary deliverables, restructuring team meetings and planning, and adding resources. The team was able to deliver on the late project and hit the goal of achieving a single OKR. The manager also provided extra feedback and support to the previous manager who returned to an IC role. The lessons learned were that it is important to identify and aggressively go after the most important goals and to provide value to the business.

Crisis Situation? You Have More Time to Act Than You Think.

In the face of a crisis, the author took a more practical approach and used the time available to assess the situation, talk to people, and make the best decision possible. This allowed the company to ship on schedule and taught the author the importance of taking the time to assess before acting.

Dream Big, Be Incremental

When an engineering leader at a startup company had to take over teams with no direct expertise, they took action to ensure the teams would stay together and to define clear boundaries. They also identified team leaders with expertise and built rapport with them to understand their decisions. The leader learned that it is important to understand what the team should be doing, to come together around a deliverable, and to enact change incrementally.

Modifying Recruiting, Interviewing, and Hiring Processes According to City Size

The author was tasked with the mission of stacking up an engineering team in a much smaller city than they were used to. To do this, they had to redesign the interview process to fit the smaller city and create a solid selling pitch. Over the course of six months, they personally phone screened, interviewed, and sold around 300 candidates, growing the team from 1 person to 30 people. The author learned that it is important to figure out what makes you unique and pitch that to your candidates, and to get the help of a technical recruiter.

Necessary Skills of a Product Manager

As a product manager, the author has found that technical skills are not necessary for their role, as they are more focused on understanding the user and their problems. They have found that building relationships with engineers and asking questions is a useful way to demonstrate credibility. However, for certain roles, such as at Stripe, technical skills are necessary as the users are developers.

Generating Problem Statements as Part of the Design Process

At my previous job, the company was growing and the backlog of things to be built was increasing. To address this, I suggested repositioning the conversation to be about problem statements and assigning impact and confidence scores to them. This approach would help align management and stakeholders, and create a creative space for teams to come up with unique solutions based on the actual problems.

Laying Off an Unmotivated Engineer

The CTO of a startup had to hire quickly after the R&D team left. He hired a senior engineer who was experienced and came from a good background, but after a year he became unmotivated. The CTO had one-on-one conversations with him to try to re-engage him, but eventually they decided to part ways. The CTO gave him a recommendation despite his lack of motivation, and learned that sometimes burning people out is necessary to keep the business running, but should be used cautiously.

How To Improve Your Diversity Hiring

In order to increase diversity in the workplace, a senior manager organized coaching sessions for diverse engineering candidates who had passed the interview stage. The sessions focused on teaching the candidates how to communicate effectively in a culturally specific setting. The results were very successful, with 75% of the coached candidates receiving offers from the company. The program was well-received by colleagues, who understood the importance of helping diverse candidates overcome cultural barriers.

How Daydreaming Can Help You With a Roadmap Planning

Creativity is an important part of engineering, but engineers are often overwhelmed with workloads that prevent them from unlocking their creative potential. To make time for creativity, one should plan two or three must-do features for the upcoming quarter, find their creative hour, and let ideas simmer over a few days or weeks. Additionally, one should find relevant input or material to help with the creative process. With these steps, engineers can create innovative solutions to problems and build awesome roadmaps.

Project Estimation Using T-Shirt Sizes

This article discusses an effective agile estimation technique for project estimation in software development, called t-shirt sizing. It involves categorizing tasks into S, M, L, and XL buckets, which can be mapped to a 1 person work week. The scale can be adjusted based on business and project needs, and there are three techniques (T1, T2, and T3) for estimating delivery dates with varying accuracy. This technique helps teams understand their velocity and plan for resources, while avoiding analysis-paralysis.

The Evolution of an Enterprise’s Architecture

This article discusses the importance of customer experience when it comes to enterprise software architecture. It outlines four key phases in the life of a startup and the corresponding architectural decisions that should be made in each phase. These phases include No Product, Minimum Viable Product, Product-Market Fit, and Growth and Scale. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the company's lifecycle in order to make the right architectural decisions. It also provides advice on how to prioritize customer feedback, use public cloud features, and develop a DevOps process.

Build Products That Your Customers Want / Build Something People Want

The organization that the author works for had a perception that the products being built weren't relevant or making a difference to customers. To address this, the author created a simple framework of three questions to be asked at weekly product design working sessions: What is the customer problem, is it an important problem, and does the solution solve the customer problem. After a few months, the team adopted the customer problem mindset and the author is now looking to graduate the framework to the next level by adding another question.

IC to CTO, Coding to Not Coding

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a CTO and founder of a startup, the author questioned whether they wanted to remain in the leadership role or return to coding. After gathering data and talking to people they respected, the author decided to stay in their C-level role and picked up side projects to satisfy their coding hunger. The lessons learned from this experience are to gather data to make the right decision, accept the shift in responsibilities, and add incremental value to the team.

Structuring a Career Ladder For a Scaling Team

This article discusses the process of creating a career ladder for a startup that grew from two people to 45 people. The author researched other companies' career ladders and modified Medium's growth framework to create the 'Moonfrog Growth Framework', which consists of seven levels and five buckets of competency. The author also learned that in the early days of a startup, it is important to focus on building a successful engineering culture, rather than worrying about a career ladder. Additionally, it is important to create a career ladder that is specific to the company and to reduce the value of titles.

Nearshoring in Argentina: This Is How We’re Doing It

This article discusses the benefits of outsourcing to Argentina, such as cultural similarities, excellent English proficiency, and geographic proximity. It also explains how the company works with clients to form long-lasting partnerships and how they prefer to work with multinationals over startups. The article emphasizes that companies should not lump together all outsourcing or offshoring experiences, as working in Argentina differs significantly from working in India.

Empowering a Small Tech Team to Take on More Responsibility

Climb Credit's CTO faced the challenge of creating a robust technology platform with a small team. To solve this problem, he empowered the team to act like product owners, created open communication channels within the company, and implemented an agile process to manage adoption. This approach enabled the team to double the number of students they could help in a single day, but also had drawbacks, such as diverting time away from core functionality.

Avoiding Product Failure Through User Demand Testing

Climb Credit wanted to understand the demand for a product that could recommend a fitting program for students given the career they are considering. To do this, CTO decided to run a hackathon-style experiment to build a prototype and test the market with limited risk. The experiment was successful and tripled conversions on the platform, allowing them to make concrete decisions based on real data. The CTO learned that it is important to check assumptions at the door and put products in front of users to get the best signal.

How To Deal With Unhealthy Team Dynamics

This article discusses the importance of healthy team dynamics and how to achieve it. A workshop was convened to discuss each person's KPIs, and each team member was asked to reflect on the team's role and contribution to the business. Through this process, the team was able to reach a consensus on KPIs, which was an important reference point. The article also highlights the importance of these workshops, as well as the challenges of organizing them regularly.

Establishing Communication in a Growing Engineering and Product Team

The company had difficulty regulating communication between engineering and product teams due to different locations. To fix this, they introduced daily stand-ups, weekly demos and planning, bi-weekly engineering and product staff meetings, monthly OKR reviews, and quarterly Recap and Launch Days. They learned that communication needs to be operational, consistent, and tailored to the user profile.

Product Organization Structure in a Growing Company

In order to speed up the process and increase efficiency, a company restructured their organization by creating four larger units of 10-20 people, each managed by a senior engineering manager and a product manager. This allowed for more ambitious projects to be taken on, and for smaller issues to be solved within the unit without having to seek help from others. It also fostered a sense of freedom and flexibility, and engineers were able to take on more ambitious skills.

On Building Impactful Teams

A manager took over a poorly performing team and was able to turn it around in three months by eliminating unnecessary deliverables, restructuring team meetings and planning, and adding resources. The team was able to deliver on the late project and hit the goal of achieving a single OKR. The manager also provided extra feedback and support to the previous manager who returned to an IC role. The lessons learned were that it is important to identify and aggressively go after the most important goals and to provide value to the business.

Crisis Situation? You Have More Time to Act Than You Think.

In the face of a crisis, the author took a more practical approach and used the time available to assess the situation, talk to people, and make the best decision possible. This allowed the company to ship on schedule and taught the author the importance of taking the time to assess before acting.

Dream Big, Be Incremental

When an engineering leader at a startup company had to take over teams with no direct expertise, they took action to ensure the teams would stay together and to define clear boundaries. They also identified team leaders with expertise and built rapport with them to understand their decisions. The leader learned that it is important to understand what the team should be doing, to come together around a deliverable, and to enact change incrementally.

Modifying Recruiting, Interviewing, and Hiring Processes According to City Size

The author was tasked with the mission of stacking up an engineering team in a much smaller city than they were used to. To do this, they had to redesign the interview process to fit the smaller city and create a solid selling pitch. Over the course of six months, they personally phone screened, interviewed, and sold around 300 candidates, growing the team from 1 person to 30 people. The author learned that it is important to figure out what makes you unique and pitch that to your candidates, and to get the help of a technical recruiter.

Necessary Skills of a Product Manager

As a product manager, the author has found that technical skills are not necessary for their role, as they are more focused on understanding the user and their problems. They have found that building relationships with engineers and asking questions is a useful way to demonstrate credibility. However, for certain roles, such as at Stripe, technical skills are necessary as the users are developers.

Generating Problem Statements as Part of the Design Process

At my previous job, the company was growing and the backlog of things to be built was increasing. To address this, I suggested repositioning the conversation to be about problem statements and assigning impact and confidence scores to them. This approach would help align management and stakeholders, and create a creative space for teams to come up with unique solutions based on the actual problems.

Laying Off an Unmotivated Engineer

The CTO of a startup had to hire quickly after the R&D team left. He hired a senior engineer who was experienced and came from a good background, but after a year he became unmotivated. The CTO had one-on-one conversations with him to try to re-engage him, but eventually they decided to part ways. The CTO gave him a recommendation despite his lack of motivation, and learned that sometimes burning people out is necessary to keep the business running, but should be used cautiously.

How To Improve Your Diversity Hiring

In order to increase diversity in the workplace, a senior manager organized coaching sessions for diverse engineering candidates who had passed the interview stage. The sessions focused on teaching the candidates how to communicate effectively in a culturally specific setting. The results were very successful, with 75% of the coached candidates receiving offers from the company. The program was well-received by colleagues, who understood the importance of helping diverse candidates overcome cultural barriers.

How Daydreaming Can Help You With a Roadmap Planning

Creativity is an important part of engineering, but engineers are often overwhelmed with workloads that prevent them from unlocking their creative potential. To make time for creativity, one should plan two or three must-do features for the upcoming quarter, find their creative hour, and let ideas simmer over a few days or weeks. Additionally, one should find relevant input or material to help with the creative process. With these steps, engineers can create innovative solutions to problems and build awesome roadmaps.

Project Estimation Using T-Shirt Sizes

This article discusses an effective agile estimation technique for project estimation in software development, called t-shirt sizing. It involves categorizing tasks into S, M, L, and XL buckets, which can be mapped to a 1 person work week. The scale can be adjusted based on business and project needs, and there are three techniques (T1, T2, and T3) for estimating delivery dates with varying accuracy. This technique helps teams understand their velocity and plan for resources, while avoiding analysis-paralysis.

The Evolution of an Enterprise’s Architecture

This article discusses the importance of customer experience when it comes to enterprise software architecture. It outlines four key phases in the life of a startup and the corresponding architectural decisions that should be made in each phase. These phases include No Product, Minimum Viable Product, Product-Market Fit, and Growth and Scale. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the company's lifecycle in order to make the right architectural decisions. It also provides advice on how to prioritize customer feedback, use public cloud features, and develop a DevOps process.

Build Products That Your Customers Want / Build Something People Want

The organization that the author works for had a perception that the products being built weren't relevant or making a difference to customers. To address this, the author created a simple framework of three questions to be asked at weekly product design working sessions: What is the customer problem, is it an important problem, and does the solution solve the customer problem. After a few months, the team adopted the customer problem mindset and the author is now looking to graduate the framework to the next level by adding another question.

IC to CTO, Coding to Not Coding

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a CTO and founder of a startup, the author questioned whether they wanted to remain in the leadership role or return to coding. After gathering data and talking to people they respected, the author decided to stay in their C-level role and picked up side projects to satisfy their coding hunger. The lessons learned from this experience are to gather data to make the right decision, accept the shift in responsibilities, and add incremental value to the team.

Structuring a Career Ladder For a Scaling Team

This article discusses the process of creating a career ladder for a startup that grew from two people to 45 people. The author researched other companies' career ladders and modified Medium's growth framework to create the 'Moonfrog Growth Framework', which consists of seven levels and five buckets of competency. The author also learned that in the early days of a startup, it is important to focus on building a successful engineering culture, rather than worrying about a career ladder. Additionally, it is important to create a career ladder that is specific to the company and to reduce the value of titles.

Nearshoring in Argentina: This Is How We’re Doing It

This article discusses the benefits of outsourcing to Argentina, such as cultural similarities, excellent English proficiency, and geographic proximity. It also explains how the company works with clients to form long-lasting partnerships and how they prefer to work with multinationals over startups. The article emphasizes that companies should not lump together all outsourcing or offshoring experiences, as working in Argentina differs significantly from working in India.

Empowering a Small Tech Team to Take on More Responsibility

Climb Credit's CTO faced the challenge of creating a robust technology platform with a small team. To solve this problem, he empowered the team to act like product owners, created open communication channels within the company, and implemented an agile process to manage adoption. This approach enabled the team to double the number of students they could help in a single day, but also had drawbacks, such as diverting time away from core functionality.

Avoiding Product Failure Through User Demand Testing

Climb Credit wanted to understand the demand for a product that could recommend a fitting program for students given the career they are considering. To do this, CTO decided to run a hackathon-style experiment to build a prototype and test the market with limited risk. The experiment was successful and tripled conversions on the platform, allowing them to make concrete decisions based on real data. The CTO learned that it is important to check assumptions at the door and put products in front of users to get the best signal.

How To Deal With Unhealthy Team Dynamics

This article discusses the importance of healthy team dynamics and how to achieve it. A workshop was convened to discuss each person's KPIs, and each team member was asked to reflect on the team's role and contribution to the business. Through this process, the team was able to reach a consensus on KPIs, which was an important reference point. The article also highlights the importance of these workshops, as well as the challenges of organizing them regularly.

Establishing Communication in a Growing Engineering and Product Team

The company had difficulty regulating communication between engineering and product teams due to different locations. To fix this, they introduced daily stand-ups, weekly demos and planning, bi-weekly engineering and product staff meetings, monthly OKR reviews, and quarterly Recap and Launch Days. They learned that communication needs to be operational, consistent, and tailored to the user profile.

Product Organization Structure in a Growing Company

In order to speed up the process and increase efficiency, a company restructured their organization by creating four larger units of 10-20 people, each managed by a senior engineering manager and a product manager. This allowed for more ambitious projects to be taken on, and for smaller issues to be solved within the unit without having to seek help from others. It also fostered a sense of freedom and flexibility, and engineers were able to take on more ambitious skills.

On Building Impactful Teams

A manager took over a poorly performing team and was able to turn it around in three months by eliminating unnecessary deliverables, restructuring team meetings and planning, and adding resources. The team was able to deliver on the late project and hit the goal of achieving a single OKR. The manager also provided extra feedback and support to the previous manager who returned to an IC role. The lessons learned were that it is important to identify and aggressively go after the most important goals and to provide value to the business.

Crisis Situation? You Have More Time to Act Than You Think.

In the face of a crisis, the author took a more practical approach and used the time available to assess the situation, talk to people, and make the best decision possible. This allowed the company to ship on schedule and taught the author the importance of taking the time to assess before acting.

Dream Big, Be Incremental

When an engineering leader at a startup company had to take over teams with no direct expertise, they took action to ensure the teams would stay together and to define clear boundaries. They also identified team leaders with expertise and built rapport with them to understand their decisions. The leader learned that it is important to understand what the team should be doing, to come together around a deliverable, and to enact change incrementally.

Modifying Recruiting, Interviewing, and Hiring Processes According to City Size

The author was tasked with the mission of stacking up an engineering team in a much smaller city than they were used to. To do this, they had to redesign the interview process to fit the smaller city and create a solid selling pitch. Over the course of six months, they personally phone screened, interviewed, and sold around 300 candidates, growing the team from 1 person to 30 people. The author learned that it is important to figure out what makes you unique and pitch that to your candidates, and to get the help of a technical recruiter.

Necessary Skills of a Product Manager

As a product manager, the author has found that technical skills are not necessary for their role, as they are more focused on understanding the user and their problems. They have found that building relationships with engineers and asking questions is a useful way to demonstrate credibility. However, for certain roles, such as at Stripe, technical skills are necessary as the users are developers.

Generating Problem Statements as Part of the Design Process

At my previous job, the company was growing and the backlog of things to be built was increasing. To address this, I suggested repositioning the conversation to be about problem statements and assigning impact and confidence scores to them. This approach would help align management and stakeholders, and create a creative space for teams to come up with unique solutions based on the actual problems.

Laying Off an Unmotivated Engineer

The CTO of a startup had to hire quickly after the R&D team left. He hired a senior engineer who was experienced and came from a good background, but after a year he became unmotivated. The CTO had one-on-one conversations with him to try to re-engage him, but eventually they decided to part ways. The CTO gave him a recommendation despite his lack of motivation, and learned that sometimes burning people out is necessary to keep the business running, but should be used cautiously.

How To Improve Your Diversity Hiring

In order to increase diversity in the workplace, a senior manager organized coaching sessions for diverse engineering candidates who had passed the interview stage. The sessions focused on teaching the candidates how to communicate effectively in a culturally specific setting. The results were very successful, with 75% of the coached candidates receiving offers from the company. The program was well-received by colleagues, who understood the importance of helping diverse candidates overcome cultural barriers.

How Daydreaming Can Help You With a Roadmap Planning

Creativity is an important part of engineering, but engineers are often overwhelmed with workloads that prevent them from unlocking their creative potential. To make time for creativity, one should plan two or three must-do features for the upcoming quarter, find their creative hour, and let ideas simmer over a few days or weeks. Additionally, one should find relevant input or material to help with the creative process. With these steps, engineers can create innovative solutions to problems and build awesome roadmaps.

Project Estimation Using T-Shirt Sizes

This article discusses an effective agile estimation technique for project estimation in software development, called t-shirt sizing. It involves categorizing tasks into S, M, L, and XL buckets, which can be mapped to a 1 person work week. The scale can be adjusted based on business and project needs, and there are three techniques (T1, T2, and T3) for estimating delivery dates with varying accuracy. This technique helps teams understand their velocity and plan for resources, while avoiding analysis-paralysis.

The Evolution of an Enterprise’s Architecture

This article discusses the importance of customer experience when it comes to enterprise software architecture. It outlines four key phases in the life of a startup and the corresponding architectural decisions that should be made in each phase. These phases include No Product, Minimum Viable Product, Product-Market Fit, and Growth and Scale. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the company's lifecycle in order to make the right architectural decisions. It also provides advice on how to prioritize customer feedback, use public cloud features, and develop a DevOps process.

Build Products That Your Customers Want / Build Something People Want

The organization that the author works for had a perception that the products being built weren't relevant or making a difference to customers. To address this, the author created a simple framework of three questions to be asked at weekly product design working sessions: What is the customer problem, is it an important problem, and does the solution solve the customer problem. After a few months, the team adopted the customer problem mindset and the author is now looking to graduate the framework to the next level by adding another question.

IC to CTO, Coding to Not Coding

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a CTO and founder of a startup, the author questioned whether they wanted to remain in the leadership role or return to coding. After gathering data and talking to people they respected, the author decided to stay in their C-level role and picked up side projects to satisfy their coding hunger. The lessons learned from this experience are to gather data to make the right decision, accept the shift in responsibilities, and add incremental value to the team.

Structuring a Career Ladder For a Scaling Team

This article discusses the process of creating a career ladder for a startup that grew from two people to 45 people. The author researched other companies' career ladders and modified Medium's growth framework to create the 'Moonfrog Growth Framework', which consists of seven levels and five buckets of competency. The author also learned that in the early days of a startup, it is important to focus on building a successful engineering culture, rather than worrying about a career ladder. Additionally, it is important to create a career ladder that is specific to the company and to reduce the value of titles.

Nearshoring in Argentina: This Is How We’re Doing It

This article discusses the benefits of outsourcing to Argentina, such as cultural similarities, excellent English proficiency, and geographic proximity. It also explains how the company works with clients to form long-lasting partnerships and how they prefer to work with multinationals over startups. The article emphasizes that companies should not lump together all outsourcing or offshoring experiences, as working in Argentina differs significantly from working in India.

Empowering a Small Tech Team to Take on More Responsibility

Climb Credit's CTO faced the challenge of creating a robust technology platform with a small team. To solve this problem, he empowered the team to act like product owners, created open communication channels within the company, and implemented an agile process to manage adoption. This approach enabled the team to double the number of students they could help in a single day, but also had drawbacks, such as diverting time away from core functionality.

Avoiding Product Failure Through User Demand Testing

Climb Credit wanted to understand the demand for a product that could recommend a fitting program for students given the career they are considering. To do this, CTO decided to run a hackathon-style experiment to build a prototype and test the market with limited risk. The experiment was successful and tripled conversions on the platform, allowing them to make concrete decisions based on real data. The CTO learned that it is important to check assumptions at the door and put products in front of users to get the best signal.

How To Deal With Unhealthy Team Dynamics

This article discusses the importance of healthy team dynamics and how to achieve it. A workshop was convened to discuss each person's KPIs, and each team member was asked to reflect on the team's role and contribution to the business. Through this process, the team was able to reach a consensus on KPIs, which was an important reference point. The article also highlights the importance of these workshops, as well as the challenges of organizing them regularly.

Establishing Communication in a Growing Engineering and Product Team

The company had difficulty regulating communication between engineering and product teams due to different locations. To fix this, they introduced daily stand-ups, weekly demos and planning, bi-weekly engineering and product staff meetings, monthly OKR reviews, and quarterly Recap and Launch Days. They learned that communication needs to be operational, consistent, and tailored to the user profile.

Product Organization Structure in a Growing Company

In order to speed up the process and increase efficiency, a company restructured their organization by creating four larger units of 10-20 people, each managed by a senior engineering manager and a product manager. This allowed for more ambitious projects to be taken on, and for smaller issues to be solved within the unit without having to seek help from others. It also fostered a sense of freedom and flexibility, and engineers were able to take on more ambitious skills.

On Building Impactful Teams

A manager took over a poorly performing team and was able to turn it around in three months by eliminating unnecessary deliverables, restructuring team meetings and planning, and adding resources. The team was able to deliver on the late project and hit the goal of achieving a single OKR. The manager also provided extra feedback and support to the previous manager who returned to an IC role. The lessons learned were that it is important to identify and aggressively go after the most important goals and to provide value to the business.

Crisis Situation? You Have More Time to Act Than You Think.

In the face of a crisis, the author took a more practical approach and used the time available to assess the situation, talk to people, and make the best decision possible. This allowed the company to ship on schedule and taught the author the importance of taking the time to assess before acting.

Dream Big, Be Incremental

When an engineering leader at a startup company had to take over teams with no direct expertise, they took action to ensure the teams would stay together and to define clear boundaries. They also identified team leaders with expertise and built rapport with them to understand their decisions. The leader learned that it is important to understand what the team should be doing, to come together around a deliverable, and to enact change incrementally.

Modifying Recruiting, Interviewing, and Hiring Processes According to City Size

The author was tasked with the mission of stacking up an engineering team in a much smaller city than they were used to. To do this, they had to redesign the interview process to fit the smaller city and create a solid selling pitch. Over the course of six months, they personally phone screened, interviewed, and sold around 300 candidates, growing the team from 1 person to 30 people. The author learned that it is important to figure out what makes you unique and pitch that to your candidates, and to get the help of a technical recruiter.

Necessary Skills of a Product Manager

As a product manager, the author has found that technical skills are not necessary for their role, as they are more focused on understanding the user and their problems. They have found that building relationships with engineers and asking questions is a useful way to demonstrate credibility. However, for certain roles, such as at Stripe, technical skills are necessary as the users are developers.

Generating Problem Statements as Part of the Design Process

At my previous job, the company was growing and the backlog of things to be built was increasing. To address this, I suggested repositioning the conversation to be about problem statements and assigning impact and confidence scores to them. This approach would help align management and stakeholders, and create a creative space for teams to come up with unique solutions based on the actual problems.

Laying Off an Unmotivated Engineer

The CTO of a startup had to hire quickly after the R&D team left. He hired a senior engineer who was experienced and came from a good background, but after a year he became unmotivated. The CTO had one-on-one conversations with him to try to re-engage him, but eventually they decided to part ways. The CTO gave him a recommendation despite his lack of motivation, and learned that sometimes burning people out is necessary to keep the business running, but should be used cautiously.

How To Improve Your Diversity Hiring

In order to increase diversity in the workplace, a senior manager organized coaching sessions for diverse engineering candidates who had passed the interview stage. The sessions focused on teaching the candidates how to communicate effectively in a culturally specific setting. The results were very successful, with 75% of the coached candidates receiving offers from the company. The program was well-received by colleagues, who understood the importance of helping diverse candidates overcome cultural barriers.

How Daydreaming Can Help You With a Roadmap Planning

Creativity is an important part of engineering, but engineers are often overwhelmed with workloads that prevent them from unlocking their creative potential. To make time for creativity, one should plan two or three must-do features for the upcoming quarter, find their creative hour, and let ideas simmer over a few days or weeks. Additionally, one should find relevant input or material to help with the creative process. With these steps, engineers can create innovative solutions to problems and build awesome roadmaps.

Project Estimation Using T-Shirt Sizes

This article discusses an effective agile estimation technique for project estimation in software development, called t-shirt sizing. It involves categorizing tasks into S, M, L, and XL buckets, which can be mapped to a 1 person work week. The scale can be adjusted based on business and project needs, and there are three techniques (T1, T2, and T3) for estimating delivery dates with varying accuracy. This technique helps teams understand their velocity and plan for resources, while avoiding analysis-paralysis.

The Evolution of an Enterprise’s Architecture

This article discusses the importance of customer experience when it comes to enterprise software architecture. It outlines four key phases in the life of a startup and the corresponding architectural decisions that should be made in each phase. These phases include No Product, Minimum Viable Product, Product-Market Fit, and Growth and Scale. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the company's lifecycle in order to make the right architectural decisions. It also provides advice on how to prioritize customer feedback, use public cloud features, and develop a DevOps process.

Build Products That Your Customers Want / Build Something People Want

The organization that the author works for had a perception that the products being built weren't relevant or making a difference to customers. To address this, the author created a simple framework of three questions to be asked at weekly product design working sessions: What is the customer problem, is it an important problem, and does the solution solve the customer problem. After a few months, the team adopted the customer problem mindset and the author is now looking to graduate the framework to the next level by adding another question.

IC to CTO, Coding to Not Coding

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a CTO and founder of a startup, the author questioned whether they wanted to remain in the leadership role or return to coding. After gathering data and talking to people they respected, the author decided to stay in their C-level role and picked up side projects to satisfy their coding hunger. The lessons learned from this experience are to gather data to make the right decision, accept the shift in responsibilities, and add incremental value to the team.

Structuring a Career Ladder For a Scaling Team

This article discusses the process of creating a career ladder for a startup that grew from two people to 45 people. The author researched other companies' career ladders and modified Medium's growth framework to create the 'Moonfrog Growth Framework', which consists of seven levels and five buckets of competency. The author also learned that in the early days of a startup, it is important to focus on building a successful engineering culture, rather than worrying about a career ladder. Additionally, it is important to create a career ladder that is specific to the company and to reduce the value of titles.

Nearshoring in Argentina: This Is How We’re Doing It

This article discusses the benefits of outsourcing to Argentina, such as cultural similarities, excellent English proficiency, and geographic proximity. It also explains how the company works with clients to form long-lasting partnerships and how they prefer to work with multinationals over startups. The article emphasizes that companies should not lump together all outsourcing or offshoring experiences, as working in Argentina differs significantly from working in India.

Empowering a Small Tech Team to Take on More Responsibility

Climb Credit's CTO faced the challenge of creating a robust technology platform with a small team. To solve this problem, he empowered the team to act like product owners, created open communication channels within the company, and implemented an agile process to manage adoption. This approach enabled the team to double the number of students they could help in a single day, but also had drawbacks, such as diverting time away from core functionality.

Avoiding Product Failure Through User Demand Testing

Climb Credit wanted to understand the demand for a product that could recommend a fitting program for students given the career they are considering. To do this, CTO decided to run a hackathon-style experiment to build a prototype and test the market with limited risk. The experiment was successful and tripled conversions on the platform, allowing them to make concrete decisions based on real data. The CTO learned that it is important to check assumptions at the door and put products in front of users to get the best signal.

How To Deal With Unhealthy Team Dynamics

This article discusses the importance of healthy team dynamics and how to achieve it. A workshop was convened to discuss each person's KPIs, and each team member was asked to reflect on the team's role and contribution to the business. Through this process, the team was able to reach a consensus on KPIs, which was an important reference point. The article also highlights the importance of these workshops, as well as the challenges of organizing them regularly.

Establishing Communication in a Growing Engineering and Product Team

The company had difficulty regulating communication between engineering and product teams due to different locations. To fix this, they introduced daily stand-ups, weekly demos and planning, bi-weekly engineering and product staff meetings, monthly OKR reviews, and quarterly Recap and Launch Days. They learned that communication needs to be operational, consistent, and tailored to the user profile.

Product Organization Structure in a Growing Company

In order to speed up the process and increase efficiency, a company restructured their organization by creating four larger units of 10-20 people, each managed by a senior engineering manager and a product manager. This allowed for more ambitious projects to be taken on, and for smaller issues to be solved within the unit without having to seek help from others. It also fostered a sense of freedom and flexibility, and engineers were able to take on more ambitious skills.

On Building Impactful Teams

A manager took over a poorly performing team and was able to turn it around in three months by eliminating unnecessary deliverables, restructuring team meetings and planning, and adding resources. The team was able to deliver on the late project and hit the goal of achieving a single OKR. The manager also provided extra feedback and support to the previous manager who returned to an IC role. The lessons learned were that it is important to identify and aggressively go after the most important goals and to provide value to the business.

Crisis Situation? You Have More Time to Act Than You Think.

In the face of a crisis, the author took a more practical approach and used the time available to assess the situation, talk to people, and make the best decision possible. This allowed the company to ship on schedule and taught the author the importance of taking the time to assess before acting.

Dream Big, Be Incremental

When an engineering leader at a startup company had to take over teams with no direct expertise, they took action to ensure the teams would stay together and to define clear boundaries. They also identified team leaders with expertise and built rapport with them to understand their decisions. The leader learned that it is important to understand what the team should be doing, to come together around a deliverable, and to enact change incrementally.

Modifying Recruiting, Interviewing, and Hiring Processes According to City Size

The author was tasked with the mission of stacking up an engineering team in a much smaller city than they were used to. To do this, they had to redesign the interview process to fit the smaller city and create a solid selling pitch. Over the course of six months, they personally phone screened, interviewed, and sold around 300 candidates, growing the team from 1 person to 30 people. The author learned that it is important to figure out what makes you unique and pitch that to your candidates, and to get the help of a technical recruiter.

Necessary Skills of a Product Manager

As a product manager, the author has found that technical skills are not necessary for their role, as they are more focused on understanding the user and their problems. They have found that building relationships with engineers and asking questions is a useful way to demonstrate credibility. However, for certain roles, such as at Stripe, technical skills are necessary as the users are developers.

Generating Problem Statements as Part of the Design Process

At my previous job, the company was growing and the backlog of things to be built was increasing. To address this, I suggested repositioning the conversation to be about problem statements and assigning impact and confidence scores to them. This approach would help align management and stakeholders, and create a creative space for teams to come up with unique solutions based on the actual problems.

Laying Off an Unmotivated Engineer

The CTO of a startup had to hire quickly after the R&D team left. He hired a senior engineer who was experienced and came from a good background, but after a year he became unmotivated. The CTO had one-on-one conversations with him to try to re-engage him, but eventually they decided to part ways. The CTO gave him a recommendation despite his lack of motivation, and learned that sometimes burning people out is necessary to keep the business running, but should be used cautiously.

How To Improve Your Diversity Hiring

In order to increase diversity in the workplace, a senior manager organized coaching sessions for diverse engineering candidates who had passed the interview stage. The sessions focused on teaching the candidates how to communicate effectively in a culturally specific setting. The results were very successful, with 75% of the coached candidates receiving offers from the company. The program was well-received by colleagues, who understood the importance of helping diverse candidates overcome cultural barriers.

How Daydreaming Can Help You With a Roadmap Planning

Creativity is an important part of engineering, but engineers are often overwhelmed with workloads that prevent them from unlocking their creative potential. To make time for creativity, one should plan two or three must-do features for the upcoming quarter, find their creative hour, and let ideas simmer over a few days or weeks. Additionally, one should find relevant input or material to help with the creative process. With these steps, engineers can create innovative solutions to problems and build awesome roadmaps.

Project Estimation Using T-Shirt Sizes

This article discusses an effective agile estimation technique for project estimation in software development, called t-shirt sizing. It involves categorizing tasks into S, M, L, and XL buckets, which can be mapped to a 1 person work week. The scale can be adjusted based on business and project needs, and there are three techniques (T1, T2, and T3) for estimating delivery dates with varying accuracy. This technique helps teams understand their velocity and plan for resources, while avoiding analysis-paralysis.

The Evolution of an Enterprise’s Architecture

This article discusses the importance of customer experience when it comes to enterprise software architecture. It outlines four key phases in the life of a startup and the corresponding architectural decisions that should be made in each phase. These phases include No Product, Minimum Viable Product, Product-Market Fit, and Growth and Scale. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding the company's lifecycle in order to make the right architectural decisions. It also provides advice on how to prioritize customer feedback, use public cloud features, and develop a DevOps process.

Build Products That Your Customers Want / Build Something People Want

The organization that the author works for had a perception that the products being built weren't relevant or making a difference to customers. To address this, the author created a simple framework of three questions to be asked at weekly product design working sessions: What is the customer problem, is it an important problem, and does the solution solve the customer problem. After a few months, the team adopted the customer problem mindset and the author is now looking to graduate the framework to the next level by adding another question.

IC to CTO, Coding to Not Coding

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a CTO and founder of a startup, the author questioned whether they wanted to remain in the leadership role or return to coding. After gathering data and talking to people they respected, the author decided to stay in their C-level role and picked up side projects to satisfy their coding hunger. The lessons learned from this experience are to gather data to make the right decision, accept the shift in responsibilities, and add incremental value to the team.

Structuring a Career Ladder For a Scaling Team

This article discusses the process of creating a career ladder for a startup that grew from two people to 45 people. The author researched other companies' career ladders and modified Medium's growth framework to create the 'Moonfrog Growth Framework', which consists of seven levels and five buckets of competency. The author also learned that in the early days of a startup, it is important to focus on building a successful engineering culture, rather than worrying about a career ladder. Additionally, it is important to create a career ladder that is specific to the company and to reduce the value of titles.

Nearshoring in Argentina: This Is How We’re Doing It

This article discusses the benefits of outsourcing to Argentina, such as cultural similarities, excellent English proficiency, and geographic proximity. It also explains how the company works with clients to form long-lasting partnerships and how they prefer to work with multinationals over startups. The article emphasizes that companies should not lump together all outsourcing or offshoring experiences, as working in Argentina differs significantly from working in India.

Empowering a Small Tech Team to Take on More Responsibility

Climb Credit's CTO faced the challenge of creating a robust technology platform with a small team. To solve this problem, he empowered the team to act like product owners, created open communication channels within the company, and implemented an agile process to manage adoption. This approach enabled the team to double the number of students they could help in a single day, but also had drawbacks, such as diverting time away from core functionality.

Avoiding Product Failure Through User Demand Testing

Climb Credit wanted to understand the demand for a product that could recommend a fitting program for students given the career they are considering. To do this, CTO decided to run a hackathon-style experiment to build a prototype and test the market with limited risk. The experiment was successful and tripled conversions on the platform, allowing them to make concrete decisions based on real data. The CTO learned that it is important to check assumptions at the door and put products in front of users to get the best signal.

How To Deal With Unhealthy Team Dynamics

This article discusses the importance of healthy team dynamics and how to achieve it. A workshop was convened to discuss each person's KPIs, and each team member was asked to reflect on the team's role and contribution to the business. Through this process, the team was able to reach a consensus on KPIs, which was an important reference point. The article also highlights the importance of these workshops, as well as the challenges of organizing them regularly.

Establishing Communication in a Growing Engineering and Product Team

The company had difficulty regulating communication between engineering and product teams due to different locations. To fix this, they introduced daily stand-ups, weekly demos and planning, bi-weekly engineering and product staff meetings, monthly OKR reviews, and quarterly Recap and Launch Days. They learned that communication needs to be operational, consistent, and tailored to the user profile.

Product Organization Structure in a Growing Company

In order to speed up the process and increase efficiency, a company restructured their organization by creating four larger units of 10-20 people, each managed by a senior engineering manager and a product manager. This allowed for more ambitious projects to be taken on, and for smaller issues to be solved within the unit without having to seek help from others. It also fostered a sense of freedom and flexibility, and engineers were able to take on more ambitious skills.

On Building Impactful Teams

A manager took over a poorly performing team and was able to turn it around in three months by eliminating unnecessary deliverables, restructuring team meetings and planning, and adding resources. The team was able to deliver on the late project and hit the goal of achieving a single OKR. The manager also provided extra feedback and support to the previous manager who returned to an IC role. The lessons learned were that it is important to identify and aggressively go after the most important goals and to provide value to the business.

Crisis Situation? You Have More Time to Act Than You Think.

In the face of a crisis, the author took a more practical approach and used the time available to assess the situation, talk to people, and make the best decision possible. This allowed the company to ship on schedule and taught the author the importance of taking the time to assess before acting.

Dream Big, Be Incremental

When an engineering leader at a startup company had to take over teams with no direct expertise, they took action to ensure the teams would stay together and to define clear boundaries. They also identified team leaders with expertise and built rapport with them to understand their decisions. The leader learned that it is important to understand what the team should be doing, to come together around a deliverable, and to enact change incrementally.

Modifying Recruiting, Interviewing, and Hiring Processes According to City Size

The author was tasked with the mission of stacking up an engineering team in a much smaller city than they were used to. To do this, they had to redesign the interview process to fit the smaller city and create a solid selling pitch. Over the course of six months, they personally phone screened, interviewed, and sold around 300 candidates, growing the team from 1 person to 30 people. The author learned that it is important to figure out what makes you unique and pitch that to your candidates, and to get the help of a technical recruiter.

Necessary Skills of a Product Manager

As a product manager, the author has found that technical skills are not necessary for their role, as they are more focused on understanding the user and their problems. They have found that building relationships with engineers and asking questions is a useful way to demonstrate credibility. However, for certain roles, such as at Stripe, technical skills are necessary as the users are developers.

Generating Problem Statements as Part of the Design Process

At my previous job, the company was growing and the backlog of things to be built was increasing. To address this, I suggested repositioning the conversation to be about problem statements and assigning impact and confidence scores to them. This approach would help align management and stakeholders, and create a creative space for teams to come up with unique solutions based on the actual problems.

Laying Off an Unmotivated Engineer

The CTO of a startup had to hire quickly after the R&D team left. He hired a senior engineer who was experienced and came from a good background, but after a year he became unmotivated. The CTO had one-on-one conversations with him to try to re-engage him, but eventually they decided to part ways. The CTO gave him a recommendation despite his lack of motivation, and learned that sometimes burning people out is necessary to keep the business running, but should be used cautiously.