Knowledge shared by our community

What Does a Senior Engineer Look Like?

This article looks at the competencies expected of a Senior Engineer, such as technical scope of oversight, technical operations, people/project management, accuracy of estimations, continuous improvement, leadership, communication, and product mindedness. It also discusses the timeline of when these competencies should be expected to be demonstrated, and how to help engineers grow in areas where they may be lacking.

A New Manager to a Platform Team Should First Define Team Roles

Being a manager of a platform team can be challenging due to the lack of information on platform level work. To better understand the team's roles and responsibilities, it is important to compare it to leaders in the field and create a job description that advertises the product the team offers to the company. Establishing healthy boundaries by explicitly listing the team's roles will help avoid problems created by other teams. Companies should come up with their own, detailed role description and be explicit about the scope of their responsibilities and their relationship with other teams. This will help ensure the team's long-term happiness.

Evaluating Your Success as a New Manager

The transition to becoming a manager was difficult for the author, who struggled to evaluate how well they were doing. After a two-year process, they developed a framework for evaluating their performance, focusing on how they were helping the team solve problems and the development and growth of their direct reports. They learned to observe the people, process, and environment to understand their scope of helping and improving their team, and not to evaluate their performance based on team productivity.

Dealing with Toxic Employees

In a situation where two people were getting into heated arguments, the author took action to coach them, but realized that they were not paying enough attention to the effects of their behavior on other people. Through this experience, the author learned that dealing with toxic employees is a balancing act of trying to make both the employee and the team successful, and that it is important to pay attention to how people are treating each other and take action to resolve conflicts as early as possible.

What to Expect When Transitioning From an Individual Contributor to a Manager

A small company was growing quickly and the director of engineering offered the narrator a manager role. The narrator accepted, but wanted to make sure their team was comfortable with the transition. After being promoted, the narrator struggled with delegating tasks to their former team members. The narrator learned that it is important to involve the team in the transition, to expect no immediate results, and to connect with peers to avoid feeling isolated.

Understanding What Drives People Can Help You Seduce Senior Engineers to Join Your Company

Companies need to be aware that senior engineers are more likely to choose purpose and passion over a high salary. To attract them, companies should look for experienced professionals at career fairs and networking events, have honest conversations outside the office, and tailor benefits to their specific needs. Two main motives that drive senior engineers are personal growth and mentoring possibilities, so companies should offer trainings and the chance to mentor junior colleagues.

Embedding Company Values To Build a Well-Structured Career Ladder

This article outlines the steps taken to create a clearly defined career path for engineers, including separating paths for individual contributors and managers, defining core values and expectations for each position level, and providing employees with a self-assessment document. The article also highlights the importance of defining values and providing day-to-day examples to illustrate them, as well as the importance of including both quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure performance.

Building a Product Vision

Flyt used a combination of 1:1 interviews, workshops, and research to create a product vision that was easy to share, understand, and pass around. They used three levers (expectancy, inspiration, and direction) to make the words powerful and inspirational. To make the vision stick, they free listed ideas, prioritized them, modeled them against an influence model, and mapped them to a calendar. They also linked the concept of vision to faith and expectancy.

Tactics for Managing Cross Team Complexity

This article outlines five tactics to manage complexity across teams: establishing a rhythm, creating a playbook of plays, using checklists, tracking work on boards, and adding issue watchers. These tactics help teams move from an entrepreneurial mindset to a purposeful one, and allow them to communicate more effectively and work more efficiently.

Fixing Breaks in Product with Scale

As a product organization grows from 10 to 100 people, the "Build Trap" can occur where teams default to building more software instead of improving business metrics. Planning, communication, and organization can break down, and big, messy data can become difficult to manage. To prevent this, teams should focus on customer problems, use impact maps and OKRs, use written communication, decentralize decision making, and run experiments to validate product hypotheses.

The First Time I Became a CTO

In 2016, the author became CTO of a 60+ person startup in the commercial solar space. After researching the company and meeting with the team, the author decided to start fresh with a new product and technology stack. The author identified the team's stars and created an environment of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and transparency. The team was able to launch the product and onboard their first customer, but the main solar business struggled and the technology team was spun off. The author learned to identify stars, trust them to provide direction, make decisions and course correct quickly, and be transparent and consistent.

Discussing Pay Compensation

This article discusses how to approach a conversation about earning more money. It suggests researching the company's compensation authority, providing a list of accomplishments, and comparing market salaries to demonstrate why a raise is deserved. It also suggests being honest about other offers and emphasizing the value of staying with the current company. The article emphasizes the importance of making noise and letting the manager know that compensation is important.

Helping Your Boss Reconsider Lowering Technical Standards When Hiring

When hiring someone for a project, it is important to be in alignment with your boss about the success levels you expect. It is better to not lose the client in pursuit of an exemplary candidate, and to lower the technical standards if there are no client complaints. Creating a defined process and bringing factual elements to the table during discussions with your superior will help make the hiring process easier and more successful.

Guiding Engineers to Create Valuable Software

This article discusses the need for managers to provide support and scaffolding for engineers to be successful in creating software that adds value to the company. It suggests that managers should be honest about the need to produce things of value, set milestones and goals, and demonstrate their own approach to work. It also emphasizes the importance of repetition in building skill and the need to deliver things through technology in order to get better at it.

Generating Good Feedback as a Manager

This article discusses how managers can create a stronger working relationship with their reports by changing the type of questions they ask from closed to open, and by creating a space of psychological safety and vulnerability by sharing their own frustrations and challenges. This exercise helps to build a deeper understanding of each person and can lead to productive conversations around feedback.

Improving Operational Readiness

After an unexpected departure of a key engineer, a team of 12 engineers with multiple products to support needed to become more operationally aware. To do this, they created a team improvement plan, studied how other teams handled the issue, adopted dashboards and metrics, asked for help from other teams, and created information radiators. Over time, they improved their process and were better prepared to help drive an engineering-wide initiative. Lessons learned included getting engineers to buy into the problem, being able to trace bugs to rare user errors, and learning more about the systems and their potential failure modes.

Experimenting with One Week Sprints

This article discusses the challenge of quickly growing a product team from 5 to 12 teammates within three months. To maintain good practices and efficiency, the team decided to move from three week Sprints to one week Sprints. This allowed them to speed up the learning process and workflow experience, better figure out issues, and take smaller actions to remove obstacles. After four months, the team changed to two week Sprints and learned that setting constraints can help the team and organization improve, and that the learning rhythm is a powerful lever when dealing with a lot of changes.

Dealing with an Unhappy Team Member

A team member was constantly criticizing the company, creating a negative environment. The manager tried to resolve the situation but it was not enough. With help from HR, the manager was able to get the team member to resign and leave the team feeling better. The manager learned that it is important to address negativity immediately, be specific when giving feedback, and phrase it as a challenge instead of a threat.

Recovering From the Abilene Paradox

A team made a collective decision that was counter to the thoughts and feelings of its individual members, a phenomenon known as the 'Abilene Paradox'. To remedy the situation, the manager conducted one-on-ones with each team member and had a meeting with the whole team to explain the findings. After rethinking the team's decision, the design was republished successfully. The manager learned the importance of creating an environment where team members feel safe to voice their differing views and of making sure the team is focused on the vision when making major decisions.

Hiring and Building a Data Science Team

When building a data science team, it is important to identify the bottleneck and hire the appropriate people. Consider hiring a generalist with coding skills and business skills, or a data engineer instead of a data scientist. Passion is more important than education/experience. Additionally, pairing a good engineer with a data engineer or analytics person can be beneficial. Lastly, be mindful of the broad term "data science" when hiring.

What Does a Senior Engineer Look Like?

This article looks at the competencies expected of a Senior Engineer, such as technical scope of oversight, technical operations, people/project management, accuracy of estimations, continuous improvement, leadership, communication, and product mindedness. It also discusses the timeline of when these competencies should be expected to be demonstrated, and how to help engineers grow in areas where they may be lacking.

A New Manager to a Platform Team Should First Define Team Roles

Being a manager of a platform team can be challenging due to the lack of information on platform level work. To better understand the team's roles and responsibilities, it is important to compare it to leaders in the field and create a job description that advertises the product the team offers to the company. Establishing healthy boundaries by explicitly listing the team's roles will help avoid problems created by other teams. Companies should come up with their own, detailed role description and be explicit about the scope of their responsibilities and their relationship with other teams. This will help ensure the team's long-term happiness.

Evaluating Your Success as a New Manager

The transition to becoming a manager was difficult for the author, who struggled to evaluate how well they were doing. After a two-year process, they developed a framework for evaluating their performance, focusing on how they were helping the team solve problems and the development and growth of their direct reports. They learned to observe the people, process, and environment to understand their scope of helping and improving their team, and not to evaluate their performance based on team productivity.

Dealing with Toxic Employees

In a situation where two people were getting into heated arguments, the author took action to coach them, but realized that they were not paying enough attention to the effects of their behavior on other people. Through this experience, the author learned that dealing with toxic employees is a balancing act of trying to make both the employee and the team successful, and that it is important to pay attention to how people are treating each other and take action to resolve conflicts as early as possible.

What to Expect When Transitioning From an Individual Contributor to a Manager

A small company was growing quickly and the director of engineering offered the narrator a manager role. The narrator accepted, but wanted to make sure their team was comfortable with the transition. After being promoted, the narrator struggled with delegating tasks to their former team members. The narrator learned that it is important to involve the team in the transition, to expect no immediate results, and to connect with peers to avoid feeling isolated.

Understanding What Drives People Can Help You Seduce Senior Engineers to Join Your Company

Companies need to be aware that senior engineers are more likely to choose purpose and passion over a high salary. To attract them, companies should look for experienced professionals at career fairs and networking events, have honest conversations outside the office, and tailor benefits to their specific needs. Two main motives that drive senior engineers are personal growth and mentoring possibilities, so companies should offer trainings and the chance to mentor junior colleagues.

Embedding Company Values To Build a Well-Structured Career Ladder

This article outlines the steps taken to create a clearly defined career path for engineers, including separating paths for individual contributors and managers, defining core values and expectations for each position level, and providing employees with a self-assessment document. The article also highlights the importance of defining values and providing day-to-day examples to illustrate them, as well as the importance of including both quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure performance.

Building a Product Vision

Flyt used a combination of 1:1 interviews, workshops, and research to create a product vision that was easy to share, understand, and pass around. They used three levers (expectancy, inspiration, and direction) to make the words powerful and inspirational. To make the vision stick, they free listed ideas, prioritized them, modeled them against an influence model, and mapped them to a calendar. They also linked the concept of vision to faith and expectancy.

Tactics for Managing Cross Team Complexity

This article outlines five tactics to manage complexity across teams: establishing a rhythm, creating a playbook of plays, using checklists, tracking work on boards, and adding issue watchers. These tactics help teams move from an entrepreneurial mindset to a purposeful one, and allow them to communicate more effectively and work more efficiently.

Fixing Breaks in Product with Scale

As a product organization grows from 10 to 100 people, the "Build Trap" can occur where teams default to building more software instead of improving business metrics. Planning, communication, and organization can break down, and big, messy data can become difficult to manage. To prevent this, teams should focus on customer problems, use impact maps and OKRs, use written communication, decentralize decision making, and run experiments to validate product hypotheses.

The First Time I Became a CTO

In 2016, the author became CTO of a 60+ person startup in the commercial solar space. After researching the company and meeting with the team, the author decided to start fresh with a new product and technology stack. The author identified the team's stars and created an environment of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and transparency. The team was able to launch the product and onboard their first customer, but the main solar business struggled and the technology team was spun off. The author learned to identify stars, trust them to provide direction, make decisions and course correct quickly, and be transparent and consistent.

Discussing Pay Compensation

This article discusses how to approach a conversation about earning more money. It suggests researching the company's compensation authority, providing a list of accomplishments, and comparing market salaries to demonstrate why a raise is deserved. It also suggests being honest about other offers and emphasizing the value of staying with the current company. The article emphasizes the importance of making noise and letting the manager know that compensation is important.

Helping Your Boss Reconsider Lowering Technical Standards When Hiring

When hiring someone for a project, it is important to be in alignment with your boss about the success levels you expect. It is better to not lose the client in pursuit of an exemplary candidate, and to lower the technical standards if there are no client complaints. Creating a defined process and bringing factual elements to the table during discussions with your superior will help make the hiring process easier and more successful.

Guiding Engineers to Create Valuable Software

This article discusses the need for managers to provide support and scaffolding for engineers to be successful in creating software that adds value to the company. It suggests that managers should be honest about the need to produce things of value, set milestones and goals, and demonstrate their own approach to work. It also emphasizes the importance of repetition in building skill and the need to deliver things through technology in order to get better at it.

Generating Good Feedback as a Manager

This article discusses how managers can create a stronger working relationship with their reports by changing the type of questions they ask from closed to open, and by creating a space of psychological safety and vulnerability by sharing their own frustrations and challenges. This exercise helps to build a deeper understanding of each person and can lead to productive conversations around feedback.

Improving Operational Readiness

After an unexpected departure of a key engineer, a team of 12 engineers with multiple products to support needed to become more operationally aware. To do this, they created a team improvement plan, studied how other teams handled the issue, adopted dashboards and metrics, asked for help from other teams, and created information radiators. Over time, they improved their process and were better prepared to help drive an engineering-wide initiative. Lessons learned included getting engineers to buy into the problem, being able to trace bugs to rare user errors, and learning more about the systems and their potential failure modes.

Experimenting with One Week Sprints

This article discusses the challenge of quickly growing a product team from 5 to 12 teammates within three months. To maintain good practices and efficiency, the team decided to move from three week Sprints to one week Sprints. This allowed them to speed up the learning process and workflow experience, better figure out issues, and take smaller actions to remove obstacles. After four months, the team changed to two week Sprints and learned that setting constraints can help the team and organization improve, and that the learning rhythm is a powerful lever when dealing with a lot of changes.

Dealing with an Unhappy Team Member

A team member was constantly criticizing the company, creating a negative environment. The manager tried to resolve the situation but it was not enough. With help from HR, the manager was able to get the team member to resign and leave the team feeling better. The manager learned that it is important to address negativity immediately, be specific when giving feedback, and phrase it as a challenge instead of a threat.

Recovering From the Abilene Paradox

A team made a collective decision that was counter to the thoughts and feelings of its individual members, a phenomenon known as the 'Abilene Paradox'. To remedy the situation, the manager conducted one-on-ones with each team member and had a meeting with the whole team to explain the findings. After rethinking the team's decision, the design was republished successfully. The manager learned the importance of creating an environment where team members feel safe to voice their differing views and of making sure the team is focused on the vision when making major decisions.

Hiring and Building a Data Science Team

When building a data science team, it is important to identify the bottleneck and hire the appropriate people. Consider hiring a generalist with coding skills and business skills, or a data engineer instead of a data scientist. Passion is more important than education/experience. Additionally, pairing a good engineer with a data engineer or analytics person can be beneficial. Lastly, be mindful of the broad term "data science" when hiring.

What Does a Senior Engineer Look Like?

This article looks at the competencies expected of a Senior Engineer, such as technical scope of oversight, technical operations, people/project management, accuracy of estimations, continuous improvement, leadership, communication, and product mindedness. It also discusses the timeline of when these competencies should be expected to be demonstrated, and how to help engineers grow in areas where they may be lacking.

A New Manager to a Platform Team Should First Define Team Roles

Being a manager of a platform team can be challenging due to the lack of information on platform level work. To better understand the team's roles and responsibilities, it is important to compare it to leaders in the field and create a job description that advertises the product the team offers to the company. Establishing healthy boundaries by explicitly listing the team's roles will help avoid problems created by other teams. Companies should come up with their own, detailed role description and be explicit about the scope of their responsibilities and their relationship with other teams. This will help ensure the team's long-term happiness.

Evaluating Your Success as a New Manager

The transition to becoming a manager was difficult for the author, who struggled to evaluate how well they were doing. After a two-year process, they developed a framework for evaluating their performance, focusing on how they were helping the team solve problems and the development and growth of their direct reports. They learned to observe the people, process, and environment to understand their scope of helping and improving their team, and not to evaluate their performance based on team productivity.

Dealing with Toxic Employees

In a situation where two people were getting into heated arguments, the author took action to coach them, but realized that they were not paying enough attention to the effects of their behavior on other people. Through this experience, the author learned that dealing with toxic employees is a balancing act of trying to make both the employee and the team successful, and that it is important to pay attention to how people are treating each other and take action to resolve conflicts as early as possible.

What to Expect When Transitioning From an Individual Contributor to a Manager

A small company was growing quickly and the director of engineering offered the narrator a manager role. The narrator accepted, but wanted to make sure their team was comfortable with the transition. After being promoted, the narrator struggled with delegating tasks to their former team members. The narrator learned that it is important to involve the team in the transition, to expect no immediate results, and to connect with peers to avoid feeling isolated.

Understanding What Drives People Can Help You Seduce Senior Engineers to Join Your Company

Companies need to be aware that senior engineers are more likely to choose purpose and passion over a high salary. To attract them, companies should look for experienced professionals at career fairs and networking events, have honest conversations outside the office, and tailor benefits to their specific needs. Two main motives that drive senior engineers are personal growth and mentoring possibilities, so companies should offer trainings and the chance to mentor junior colleagues.

Embedding Company Values To Build a Well-Structured Career Ladder

This article outlines the steps taken to create a clearly defined career path for engineers, including separating paths for individual contributors and managers, defining core values and expectations for each position level, and providing employees with a self-assessment document. The article also highlights the importance of defining values and providing day-to-day examples to illustrate them, as well as the importance of including both quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure performance.

Building a Product Vision

Flyt used a combination of 1:1 interviews, workshops, and research to create a product vision that was easy to share, understand, and pass around. They used three levers (expectancy, inspiration, and direction) to make the words powerful and inspirational. To make the vision stick, they free listed ideas, prioritized them, modeled them against an influence model, and mapped them to a calendar. They also linked the concept of vision to faith and expectancy.

Tactics for Managing Cross Team Complexity

This article outlines five tactics to manage complexity across teams: establishing a rhythm, creating a playbook of plays, using checklists, tracking work on boards, and adding issue watchers. These tactics help teams move from an entrepreneurial mindset to a purposeful one, and allow them to communicate more effectively and work more efficiently.

Fixing Breaks in Product with Scale

As a product organization grows from 10 to 100 people, the "Build Trap" can occur where teams default to building more software instead of improving business metrics. Planning, communication, and organization can break down, and big, messy data can become difficult to manage. To prevent this, teams should focus on customer problems, use impact maps and OKRs, use written communication, decentralize decision making, and run experiments to validate product hypotheses.

The First Time I Became a CTO

In 2016, the author became CTO of a 60+ person startup in the commercial solar space. After researching the company and meeting with the team, the author decided to start fresh with a new product and technology stack. The author identified the team's stars and created an environment of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and transparency. The team was able to launch the product and onboard their first customer, but the main solar business struggled and the technology team was spun off. The author learned to identify stars, trust them to provide direction, make decisions and course correct quickly, and be transparent and consistent.

Discussing Pay Compensation

This article discusses how to approach a conversation about earning more money. It suggests researching the company's compensation authority, providing a list of accomplishments, and comparing market salaries to demonstrate why a raise is deserved. It also suggests being honest about other offers and emphasizing the value of staying with the current company. The article emphasizes the importance of making noise and letting the manager know that compensation is important.

Helping Your Boss Reconsider Lowering Technical Standards When Hiring

When hiring someone for a project, it is important to be in alignment with your boss about the success levels you expect. It is better to not lose the client in pursuit of an exemplary candidate, and to lower the technical standards if there are no client complaints. Creating a defined process and bringing factual elements to the table during discussions with your superior will help make the hiring process easier and more successful.

Guiding Engineers to Create Valuable Software

This article discusses the need for managers to provide support and scaffolding for engineers to be successful in creating software that adds value to the company. It suggests that managers should be honest about the need to produce things of value, set milestones and goals, and demonstrate their own approach to work. It also emphasizes the importance of repetition in building skill and the need to deliver things through technology in order to get better at it.

Generating Good Feedback as a Manager

This article discusses how managers can create a stronger working relationship with their reports by changing the type of questions they ask from closed to open, and by creating a space of psychological safety and vulnerability by sharing their own frustrations and challenges. This exercise helps to build a deeper understanding of each person and can lead to productive conversations around feedback.

Improving Operational Readiness

After an unexpected departure of a key engineer, a team of 12 engineers with multiple products to support needed to become more operationally aware. To do this, they created a team improvement plan, studied how other teams handled the issue, adopted dashboards and metrics, asked for help from other teams, and created information radiators. Over time, they improved their process and were better prepared to help drive an engineering-wide initiative. Lessons learned included getting engineers to buy into the problem, being able to trace bugs to rare user errors, and learning more about the systems and their potential failure modes.

Experimenting with One Week Sprints

This article discusses the challenge of quickly growing a product team from 5 to 12 teammates within three months. To maintain good practices and efficiency, the team decided to move from three week Sprints to one week Sprints. This allowed them to speed up the learning process and workflow experience, better figure out issues, and take smaller actions to remove obstacles. After four months, the team changed to two week Sprints and learned that setting constraints can help the team and organization improve, and that the learning rhythm is a powerful lever when dealing with a lot of changes.

Dealing with an Unhappy Team Member

A team member was constantly criticizing the company, creating a negative environment. The manager tried to resolve the situation but it was not enough. With help from HR, the manager was able to get the team member to resign and leave the team feeling better. The manager learned that it is important to address negativity immediately, be specific when giving feedback, and phrase it as a challenge instead of a threat.

Recovering From the Abilene Paradox

A team made a collective decision that was counter to the thoughts and feelings of its individual members, a phenomenon known as the 'Abilene Paradox'. To remedy the situation, the manager conducted one-on-ones with each team member and had a meeting with the whole team to explain the findings. After rethinking the team's decision, the design was republished successfully. The manager learned the importance of creating an environment where team members feel safe to voice their differing views and of making sure the team is focused on the vision when making major decisions.

Hiring and Building a Data Science Team

When building a data science team, it is important to identify the bottleneck and hire the appropriate people. Consider hiring a generalist with coding skills and business skills, or a data engineer instead of a data scientist. Passion is more important than education/experience. Additionally, pairing a good engineer with a data engineer or analytics person can be beneficial. Lastly, be mindful of the broad term "data science" when hiring.

What Does a Senior Engineer Look Like?

This article looks at the competencies expected of a Senior Engineer, such as technical scope of oversight, technical operations, people/project management, accuracy of estimations, continuous improvement, leadership, communication, and product mindedness. It also discusses the timeline of when these competencies should be expected to be demonstrated, and how to help engineers grow in areas where they may be lacking.

A New Manager to a Platform Team Should First Define Team Roles

Being a manager of a platform team can be challenging due to the lack of information on platform level work. To better understand the team's roles and responsibilities, it is important to compare it to leaders in the field and create a job description that advertises the product the team offers to the company. Establishing healthy boundaries by explicitly listing the team's roles will help avoid problems created by other teams. Companies should come up with their own, detailed role description and be explicit about the scope of their responsibilities and their relationship with other teams. This will help ensure the team's long-term happiness.

Evaluating Your Success as a New Manager

The transition to becoming a manager was difficult for the author, who struggled to evaluate how well they were doing. After a two-year process, they developed a framework for evaluating their performance, focusing on how they were helping the team solve problems and the development and growth of their direct reports. They learned to observe the people, process, and environment to understand their scope of helping and improving their team, and not to evaluate their performance based on team productivity.

Dealing with Toxic Employees

In a situation where two people were getting into heated arguments, the author took action to coach them, but realized that they were not paying enough attention to the effects of their behavior on other people. Through this experience, the author learned that dealing with toxic employees is a balancing act of trying to make both the employee and the team successful, and that it is important to pay attention to how people are treating each other and take action to resolve conflicts as early as possible.

What to Expect When Transitioning From an Individual Contributor to a Manager

A small company was growing quickly and the director of engineering offered the narrator a manager role. The narrator accepted, but wanted to make sure their team was comfortable with the transition. After being promoted, the narrator struggled with delegating tasks to their former team members. The narrator learned that it is important to involve the team in the transition, to expect no immediate results, and to connect with peers to avoid feeling isolated.

Understanding What Drives People Can Help You Seduce Senior Engineers to Join Your Company

Companies need to be aware that senior engineers are more likely to choose purpose and passion over a high salary. To attract them, companies should look for experienced professionals at career fairs and networking events, have honest conversations outside the office, and tailor benefits to their specific needs. Two main motives that drive senior engineers are personal growth and mentoring possibilities, so companies should offer trainings and the chance to mentor junior colleagues.

Embedding Company Values To Build a Well-Structured Career Ladder

This article outlines the steps taken to create a clearly defined career path for engineers, including separating paths for individual contributors and managers, defining core values and expectations for each position level, and providing employees with a self-assessment document. The article also highlights the importance of defining values and providing day-to-day examples to illustrate them, as well as the importance of including both quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure performance.

Building a Product Vision

Flyt used a combination of 1:1 interviews, workshops, and research to create a product vision that was easy to share, understand, and pass around. They used three levers (expectancy, inspiration, and direction) to make the words powerful and inspirational. To make the vision stick, they free listed ideas, prioritized them, modeled them against an influence model, and mapped them to a calendar. They also linked the concept of vision to faith and expectancy.

Tactics for Managing Cross Team Complexity

This article outlines five tactics to manage complexity across teams: establishing a rhythm, creating a playbook of plays, using checklists, tracking work on boards, and adding issue watchers. These tactics help teams move from an entrepreneurial mindset to a purposeful one, and allow them to communicate more effectively and work more efficiently.

Fixing Breaks in Product with Scale

As a product organization grows from 10 to 100 people, the "Build Trap" can occur where teams default to building more software instead of improving business metrics. Planning, communication, and organization can break down, and big, messy data can become difficult to manage. To prevent this, teams should focus on customer problems, use impact maps and OKRs, use written communication, decentralize decision making, and run experiments to validate product hypotheses.

The First Time I Became a CTO

In 2016, the author became CTO of a 60+ person startup in the commercial solar space. After researching the company and meeting with the team, the author decided to start fresh with a new product and technology stack. The author identified the team's stars and created an environment of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and transparency. The team was able to launch the product and onboard their first customer, but the main solar business struggled and the technology team was spun off. The author learned to identify stars, trust them to provide direction, make decisions and course correct quickly, and be transparent and consistent.

Discussing Pay Compensation

This article discusses how to approach a conversation about earning more money. It suggests researching the company's compensation authority, providing a list of accomplishments, and comparing market salaries to demonstrate why a raise is deserved. It also suggests being honest about other offers and emphasizing the value of staying with the current company. The article emphasizes the importance of making noise and letting the manager know that compensation is important.

Helping Your Boss Reconsider Lowering Technical Standards When Hiring

When hiring someone for a project, it is important to be in alignment with your boss about the success levels you expect. It is better to not lose the client in pursuit of an exemplary candidate, and to lower the technical standards if there are no client complaints. Creating a defined process and bringing factual elements to the table during discussions with your superior will help make the hiring process easier and more successful.

Guiding Engineers to Create Valuable Software

This article discusses the need for managers to provide support and scaffolding for engineers to be successful in creating software that adds value to the company. It suggests that managers should be honest about the need to produce things of value, set milestones and goals, and demonstrate their own approach to work. It also emphasizes the importance of repetition in building skill and the need to deliver things through technology in order to get better at it.

Generating Good Feedback as a Manager

This article discusses how managers can create a stronger working relationship with their reports by changing the type of questions they ask from closed to open, and by creating a space of psychological safety and vulnerability by sharing their own frustrations and challenges. This exercise helps to build a deeper understanding of each person and can lead to productive conversations around feedback.

Improving Operational Readiness

After an unexpected departure of a key engineer, a team of 12 engineers with multiple products to support needed to become more operationally aware. To do this, they created a team improvement plan, studied how other teams handled the issue, adopted dashboards and metrics, asked for help from other teams, and created information radiators. Over time, they improved their process and were better prepared to help drive an engineering-wide initiative. Lessons learned included getting engineers to buy into the problem, being able to trace bugs to rare user errors, and learning more about the systems and their potential failure modes.

Experimenting with One Week Sprints

This article discusses the challenge of quickly growing a product team from 5 to 12 teammates within three months. To maintain good practices and efficiency, the team decided to move from three week Sprints to one week Sprints. This allowed them to speed up the learning process and workflow experience, better figure out issues, and take smaller actions to remove obstacles. After four months, the team changed to two week Sprints and learned that setting constraints can help the team and organization improve, and that the learning rhythm is a powerful lever when dealing with a lot of changes.

Dealing with an Unhappy Team Member

A team member was constantly criticizing the company, creating a negative environment. The manager tried to resolve the situation but it was not enough. With help from HR, the manager was able to get the team member to resign and leave the team feeling better. The manager learned that it is important to address negativity immediately, be specific when giving feedback, and phrase it as a challenge instead of a threat.

Recovering From the Abilene Paradox

A team made a collective decision that was counter to the thoughts and feelings of its individual members, a phenomenon known as the 'Abilene Paradox'. To remedy the situation, the manager conducted one-on-ones with each team member and had a meeting with the whole team to explain the findings. After rethinking the team's decision, the design was republished successfully. The manager learned the importance of creating an environment where team members feel safe to voice their differing views and of making sure the team is focused on the vision when making major decisions.

Hiring and Building a Data Science Team

When building a data science team, it is important to identify the bottleneck and hire the appropriate people. Consider hiring a generalist with coding skills and business skills, or a data engineer instead of a data scientist. Passion is more important than education/experience. Additionally, pairing a good engineer with a data engineer or analytics person can be beneficial. Lastly, be mindful of the broad term "data science" when hiring.

What Does a Senior Engineer Look Like?

This article looks at the competencies expected of a Senior Engineer, such as technical scope of oversight, technical operations, people/project management, accuracy of estimations, continuous improvement, leadership, communication, and product mindedness. It also discusses the timeline of when these competencies should be expected to be demonstrated, and how to help engineers grow in areas where they may be lacking.

A New Manager to a Platform Team Should First Define Team Roles

Being a manager of a platform team can be challenging due to the lack of information on platform level work. To better understand the team's roles and responsibilities, it is important to compare it to leaders in the field and create a job description that advertises the product the team offers to the company. Establishing healthy boundaries by explicitly listing the team's roles will help avoid problems created by other teams. Companies should come up with their own, detailed role description and be explicit about the scope of their responsibilities and their relationship with other teams. This will help ensure the team's long-term happiness.

Evaluating Your Success as a New Manager

The transition to becoming a manager was difficult for the author, who struggled to evaluate how well they were doing. After a two-year process, they developed a framework for evaluating their performance, focusing on how they were helping the team solve problems and the development and growth of their direct reports. They learned to observe the people, process, and environment to understand their scope of helping and improving their team, and not to evaluate their performance based on team productivity.

Dealing with Toxic Employees

In a situation where two people were getting into heated arguments, the author took action to coach them, but realized that they were not paying enough attention to the effects of their behavior on other people. Through this experience, the author learned that dealing with toxic employees is a balancing act of trying to make both the employee and the team successful, and that it is important to pay attention to how people are treating each other and take action to resolve conflicts as early as possible.

What to Expect When Transitioning From an Individual Contributor to a Manager

A small company was growing quickly and the director of engineering offered the narrator a manager role. The narrator accepted, but wanted to make sure their team was comfortable with the transition. After being promoted, the narrator struggled with delegating tasks to their former team members. The narrator learned that it is important to involve the team in the transition, to expect no immediate results, and to connect with peers to avoid feeling isolated.

Understanding What Drives People Can Help You Seduce Senior Engineers to Join Your Company

Companies need to be aware that senior engineers are more likely to choose purpose and passion over a high salary. To attract them, companies should look for experienced professionals at career fairs and networking events, have honest conversations outside the office, and tailor benefits to their specific needs. Two main motives that drive senior engineers are personal growth and mentoring possibilities, so companies should offer trainings and the chance to mentor junior colleagues.

Embedding Company Values To Build a Well-Structured Career Ladder

This article outlines the steps taken to create a clearly defined career path for engineers, including separating paths for individual contributors and managers, defining core values and expectations for each position level, and providing employees with a self-assessment document. The article also highlights the importance of defining values and providing day-to-day examples to illustrate them, as well as the importance of including both quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure performance.

Building a Product Vision

Flyt used a combination of 1:1 interviews, workshops, and research to create a product vision that was easy to share, understand, and pass around. They used three levers (expectancy, inspiration, and direction) to make the words powerful and inspirational. To make the vision stick, they free listed ideas, prioritized them, modeled them against an influence model, and mapped them to a calendar. They also linked the concept of vision to faith and expectancy.

Tactics for Managing Cross Team Complexity

This article outlines five tactics to manage complexity across teams: establishing a rhythm, creating a playbook of plays, using checklists, tracking work on boards, and adding issue watchers. These tactics help teams move from an entrepreneurial mindset to a purposeful one, and allow them to communicate more effectively and work more efficiently.

Fixing Breaks in Product with Scale

As a product organization grows from 10 to 100 people, the "Build Trap" can occur where teams default to building more software instead of improving business metrics. Planning, communication, and organization can break down, and big, messy data can become difficult to manage. To prevent this, teams should focus on customer problems, use impact maps and OKRs, use written communication, decentralize decision making, and run experiments to validate product hypotheses.

The First Time I Became a CTO

In 2016, the author became CTO of a 60+ person startup in the commercial solar space. After researching the company and meeting with the team, the author decided to start fresh with a new product and technology stack. The author identified the team's stars and created an environment of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and transparency. The team was able to launch the product and onboard their first customer, but the main solar business struggled and the technology team was spun off. The author learned to identify stars, trust them to provide direction, make decisions and course correct quickly, and be transparent and consistent.

Discussing Pay Compensation

This article discusses how to approach a conversation about earning more money. It suggests researching the company's compensation authority, providing a list of accomplishments, and comparing market salaries to demonstrate why a raise is deserved. It also suggests being honest about other offers and emphasizing the value of staying with the current company. The article emphasizes the importance of making noise and letting the manager know that compensation is important.

Helping Your Boss Reconsider Lowering Technical Standards When Hiring

When hiring someone for a project, it is important to be in alignment with your boss about the success levels you expect. It is better to not lose the client in pursuit of an exemplary candidate, and to lower the technical standards if there are no client complaints. Creating a defined process and bringing factual elements to the table during discussions with your superior will help make the hiring process easier and more successful.

Guiding Engineers to Create Valuable Software

This article discusses the need for managers to provide support and scaffolding for engineers to be successful in creating software that adds value to the company. It suggests that managers should be honest about the need to produce things of value, set milestones and goals, and demonstrate their own approach to work. It also emphasizes the importance of repetition in building skill and the need to deliver things through technology in order to get better at it.

Generating Good Feedback as a Manager

This article discusses how managers can create a stronger working relationship with their reports by changing the type of questions they ask from closed to open, and by creating a space of psychological safety and vulnerability by sharing their own frustrations and challenges. This exercise helps to build a deeper understanding of each person and can lead to productive conversations around feedback.

Improving Operational Readiness

After an unexpected departure of a key engineer, a team of 12 engineers with multiple products to support needed to become more operationally aware. To do this, they created a team improvement plan, studied how other teams handled the issue, adopted dashboards and metrics, asked for help from other teams, and created information radiators. Over time, they improved their process and were better prepared to help drive an engineering-wide initiative. Lessons learned included getting engineers to buy into the problem, being able to trace bugs to rare user errors, and learning more about the systems and their potential failure modes.

Experimenting with One Week Sprints

This article discusses the challenge of quickly growing a product team from 5 to 12 teammates within three months. To maintain good practices and efficiency, the team decided to move from three week Sprints to one week Sprints. This allowed them to speed up the learning process and workflow experience, better figure out issues, and take smaller actions to remove obstacles. After four months, the team changed to two week Sprints and learned that setting constraints can help the team and organization improve, and that the learning rhythm is a powerful lever when dealing with a lot of changes.

Dealing with an Unhappy Team Member

A team member was constantly criticizing the company, creating a negative environment. The manager tried to resolve the situation but it was not enough. With help from HR, the manager was able to get the team member to resign and leave the team feeling better. The manager learned that it is important to address negativity immediately, be specific when giving feedback, and phrase it as a challenge instead of a threat.

Recovering From the Abilene Paradox

A team made a collective decision that was counter to the thoughts and feelings of its individual members, a phenomenon known as the 'Abilene Paradox'. To remedy the situation, the manager conducted one-on-ones with each team member and had a meeting with the whole team to explain the findings. After rethinking the team's decision, the design was republished successfully. The manager learned the importance of creating an environment where team members feel safe to voice their differing views and of making sure the team is focused on the vision when making major decisions.

Hiring and Building a Data Science Team

When building a data science team, it is important to identify the bottleneck and hire the appropriate people. Consider hiring a generalist with coding skills and business skills, or a data engineer instead of a data scientist. Passion is more important than education/experience. Additionally, pairing a good engineer with a data engineer or analytics person can be beneficial. Lastly, be mindful of the broad term "data science" when hiring.

What Does a Senior Engineer Look Like?

This article looks at the competencies expected of a Senior Engineer, such as technical scope of oversight, technical operations, people/project management, accuracy of estimations, continuous improvement, leadership, communication, and product mindedness. It also discusses the timeline of when these competencies should be expected to be demonstrated, and how to help engineers grow in areas where they may be lacking.

A New Manager to a Platform Team Should First Define Team Roles

Being a manager of a platform team can be challenging due to the lack of information on platform level work. To better understand the team's roles and responsibilities, it is important to compare it to leaders in the field and create a job description that advertises the product the team offers to the company. Establishing healthy boundaries by explicitly listing the team's roles will help avoid problems created by other teams. Companies should come up with their own, detailed role description and be explicit about the scope of their responsibilities and their relationship with other teams. This will help ensure the team's long-term happiness.

Evaluating Your Success as a New Manager

The transition to becoming a manager was difficult for the author, who struggled to evaluate how well they were doing. After a two-year process, they developed a framework for evaluating their performance, focusing on how they were helping the team solve problems and the development and growth of their direct reports. They learned to observe the people, process, and environment to understand their scope of helping and improving their team, and not to evaluate their performance based on team productivity.

Dealing with Toxic Employees

In a situation where two people were getting into heated arguments, the author took action to coach them, but realized that they were not paying enough attention to the effects of their behavior on other people. Through this experience, the author learned that dealing with toxic employees is a balancing act of trying to make both the employee and the team successful, and that it is important to pay attention to how people are treating each other and take action to resolve conflicts as early as possible.

What to Expect When Transitioning From an Individual Contributor to a Manager

A small company was growing quickly and the director of engineering offered the narrator a manager role. The narrator accepted, but wanted to make sure their team was comfortable with the transition. After being promoted, the narrator struggled with delegating tasks to their former team members. The narrator learned that it is important to involve the team in the transition, to expect no immediate results, and to connect with peers to avoid feeling isolated.

Understanding What Drives People Can Help You Seduce Senior Engineers to Join Your Company

Companies need to be aware that senior engineers are more likely to choose purpose and passion over a high salary. To attract them, companies should look for experienced professionals at career fairs and networking events, have honest conversations outside the office, and tailor benefits to their specific needs. Two main motives that drive senior engineers are personal growth and mentoring possibilities, so companies should offer trainings and the chance to mentor junior colleagues.

Embedding Company Values To Build a Well-Structured Career Ladder

This article outlines the steps taken to create a clearly defined career path for engineers, including separating paths for individual contributors and managers, defining core values and expectations for each position level, and providing employees with a self-assessment document. The article also highlights the importance of defining values and providing day-to-day examples to illustrate them, as well as the importance of including both quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure performance.

Building a Product Vision

Flyt used a combination of 1:1 interviews, workshops, and research to create a product vision that was easy to share, understand, and pass around. They used three levers (expectancy, inspiration, and direction) to make the words powerful and inspirational. To make the vision stick, they free listed ideas, prioritized them, modeled them against an influence model, and mapped them to a calendar. They also linked the concept of vision to faith and expectancy.

Tactics for Managing Cross Team Complexity

This article outlines five tactics to manage complexity across teams: establishing a rhythm, creating a playbook of plays, using checklists, tracking work on boards, and adding issue watchers. These tactics help teams move from an entrepreneurial mindset to a purposeful one, and allow them to communicate more effectively and work more efficiently.

Fixing Breaks in Product with Scale

As a product organization grows from 10 to 100 people, the "Build Trap" can occur where teams default to building more software instead of improving business metrics. Planning, communication, and organization can break down, and big, messy data can become difficult to manage. To prevent this, teams should focus on customer problems, use impact maps and OKRs, use written communication, decentralize decision making, and run experiments to validate product hypotheses.

The First Time I Became a CTO

In 2016, the author became CTO of a 60+ person startup in the commercial solar space. After researching the company and meeting with the team, the author decided to start fresh with a new product and technology stack. The author identified the team's stars and created an environment of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and transparency. The team was able to launch the product and onboard their first customer, but the main solar business struggled and the technology team was spun off. The author learned to identify stars, trust them to provide direction, make decisions and course correct quickly, and be transparent and consistent.

Discussing Pay Compensation

This article discusses how to approach a conversation about earning more money. It suggests researching the company's compensation authority, providing a list of accomplishments, and comparing market salaries to demonstrate why a raise is deserved. It also suggests being honest about other offers and emphasizing the value of staying with the current company. The article emphasizes the importance of making noise and letting the manager know that compensation is important.

Helping Your Boss Reconsider Lowering Technical Standards When Hiring

When hiring someone for a project, it is important to be in alignment with your boss about the success levels you expect. It is better to not lose the client in pursuit of an exemplary candidate, and to lower the technical standards if there are no client complaints. Creating a defined process and bringing factual elements to the table during discussions with your superior will help make the hiring process easier and more successful.

Guiding Engineers to Create Valuable Software

This article discusses the need for managers to provide support and scaffolding for engineers to be successful in creating software that adds value to the company. It suggests that managers should be honest about the need to produce things of value, set milestones and goals, and demonstrate their own approach to work. It also emphasizes the importance of repetition in building skill and the need to deliver things through technology in order to get better at it.

Generating Good Feedback as a Manager

This article discusses how managers can create a stronger working relationship with their reports by changing the type of questions they ask from closed to open, and by creating a space of psychological safety and vulnerability by sharing their own frustrations and challenges. This exercise helps to build a deeper understanding of each person and can lead to productive conversations around feedback.

Improving Operational Readiness

After an unexpected departure of a key engineer, a team of 12 engineers with multiple products to support needed to become more operationally aware. To do this, they created a team improvement plan, studied how other teams handled the issue, adopted dashboards and metrics, asked for help from other teams, and created information radiators. Over time, they improved their process and were better prepared to help drive an engineering-wide initiative. Lessons learned included getting engineers to buy into the problem, being able to trace bugs to rare user errors, and learning more about the systems and their potential failure modes.

Experimenting with One Week Sprints

This article discusses the challenge of quickly growing a product team from 5 to 12 teammates within three months. To maintain good practices and efficiency, the team decided to move from three week Sprints to one week Sprints. This allowed them to speed up the learning process and workflow experience, better figure out issues, and take smaller actions to remove obstacles. After four months, the team changed to two week Sprints and learned that setting constraints can help the team and organization improve, and that the learning rhythm is a powerful lever when dealing with a lot of changes.

Dealing with an Unhappy Team Member

A team member was constantly criticizing the company, creating a negative environment. The manager tried to resolve the situation but it was not enough. With help from HR, the manager was able to get the team member to resign and leave the team feeling better. The manager learned that it is important to address negativity immediately, be specific when giving feedback, and phrase it as a challenge instead of a threat.

Recovering From the Abilene Paradox

A team made a collective decision that was counter to the thoughts and feelings of its individual members, a phenomenon known as the 'Abilene Paradox'. To remedy the situation, the manager conducted one-on-ones with each team member and had a meeting with the whole team to explain the findings. After rethinking the team's decision, the design was republished successfully. The manager learned the importance of creating an environment where team members feel safe to voice their differing views and of making sure the team is focused on the vision when making major decisions.

Hiring and Building a Data Science Team

When building a data science team, it is important to identify the bottleneck and hire the appropriate people. Consider hiring a generalist with coding skills and business skills, or a data engineer instead of a data scientist. Passion is more important than education/experience. Additionally, pairing a good engineer with a data engineer or analytics person can be beneficial. Lastly, be mindful of the broad term "data science" when hiring.