Knowledge shared by our community

The ‘30-60-90 Day Plan’ for New Managers

This article outlines a strategy for onboarding a new engineering manager to an existing team. The strategy involves having the new manager create a 30-60-90 day plan that outlines what they will do in each of those time frames. This plan should include getting to know the team, understanding the architecture, and making small and large changes. This strategy helps to ensure that the new manager has done their research and is coming up with their own solutions to the problems. It also allows for feedback from the hiring manager. For more junior-level hires, more coaching and guidance may be necessary.

Helping Your Reports Grow in Their Careers

This article discusses a management philosophy that focuses on building upon people's strengths and helping them become the best version of themselves. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding what the individual wants and what the company needs in order to create the best path for them. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not having a template to follow for guiding someone on their career path and getting comfortable with the fact that neither the manager nor the direct report knows the definitive answer on the best way to develop and grow.

Creating an Environment for Learning and Growth

Engineering managers have a lot of pressure coming from different angles, but their main focus is their team's well-being. To create an environment where individuals on the team are learning, growing, and thriving, the engineering manager should implement methods such as Lunch-and-Learns, Group Code Reviews, and Pair Programming. These methods should be layered on top of one another, and should be low barrier and low entry. Additionally, the engineering manager should ask the team for feedback to ensure that the sessions are useful and valuable.

Learning to Say No Using Collected Data

This article discusses the experience of working with a CEO on a second startup that was not as successful as the first. The CEO was making bad decisions and piling on features, leading to a toll on the team and the business. Fortunately, the organization replaced the CEO with a new one who implemented changes that saved them. The team learned to collect data and say no to feature requests, and the lesson learned was that it is important to learn how to say no and defend the bandwidth of the team.

Prioritizing Urgent Tasks in Scrum

This article discusses how to manage a project with an external task that needs immediate attention. It suggests introducing a "Prod first" policy to prioritize urgent tasks, and to refine the backlog each day to prioritize new tasks. It also highlights the importance of leaving bandwidth for urgent tasks, but also the difficulty of committing to long-term goals when urgent tasks take precedence.

Understanding Your Role as a CTO When Scaling

Technology leaders need to relinquish control, hire and train smart people to make decisions, create boundaries with guiding principles, and embrace their role as a leader in order to move into a CTO role or continue to run the technology organization at a fast scaling company.

Establishing Habits to Combat Stress and Uncertainty

This article discusses how to become more productive in daily work by implementing a manager schedule/maker schedule philosophy, review meetings, and a 'Do/Try/Consider' model for giving feedback. Establishing rituals and habits can provide structure and a sense of calmness when external things are moving quickly and unexpectedly.

Recalibrating Peer Relationships When Transitioning to Management

Transitioning from IC to manager can be tricky, especially when managing a friend. To build trust and set the right expectations, it is important to plan out how the change will be communicated and to deliver value in the first 30 days. Additionally, it is important to be confident and clear with expectations, and to ask for feedback to grow as a new manager.

Formalizing Career Conversations

New Relic implemented a process to increase the time managers spent engaging with engineers on career plans. This included having engineers write a one-page description of their 5-10 year career timeline and having the engineering leadership team review the career plans of engineers across all functions. This improved survey scores and created visibility for new career opportunities.

Building Career Ladders with the Help of a Diverse Team

New Relic needed to create a formal career ladder to align with their pay levels. To do this, they sent out an email to the entire organization asking for names of people to be part of a 20-person working group. This group then held an off-site session to brainstorm and develop criteria and behaviors for each level. The career ladder was then sent out to a wider group for feedback, and finally published. The process was successful, and the lessons learned were that it was important to have a diverse group of people work on the ladder, and to have the group also be responsible for training the managers.

Pay Equity Improves Your Company’s Performance

This company implemented a pay equity policy to address discrepancies in salary setting due to unconscious bias. After a year of implementation, all engineers and managers at the same level were paid identically. The policy was well-received internally and externally, and helped to attract more people to the company due to its commitment to equity and inclusion.

Managing a Problematic Peer Relationship

This article discusses the problem of working with peers who are not aligned on direction, combative or aggressive. It outlines the actions taken to address this problem, such as getting alignment on decision-making frameworks, understanding the root assumptions and emotions that led to disagreements, discouraging triangulation, and adopting non-violent communication. It also outlines the lessons learned, such as understanding the root causes of disagreements, prioritizing alignment to get needs met, and managing up to drive alignment and get the team executing.

Keeping Up with Hyper-Growth by Promoting New Managers

Our company faced a challenge when it was acquired and had to double its engineering team from 14 to 28 engineers in a year. To address this, we promoted three engineers to team leads and created five teams of five people each. We provided support to the new managers through one-on-one coaching and 360 reviews, which allowed us to quickly detect and correct any issues. This approach helped us to preserve our team culture and promote engineers who had earned respect among their peers.

How To Work Effectively with Distributed Teams

This article discusses the challenges of distributed teams and provides guidelines to help manage them. These guidelines include separating work streams for different locations, building personal relationships, negotiating and compromising, giving notice for changes, and treating documentation as part of the product. Additionally, it suggests defaulting to asynchronous communication and revisiting and revising working guidelines regularly.

Receiving Anonymous Feedback from Your Team

A remote team was considering expanding their office space, but decided against it. To gauge the level of dis-ease among employees, anonymous feedback tools such as Officevibe were implemented. This allowed the team to understand the undercurrent of the organization and address any issues that arose. As a result, the team was able to learn more about the dynamics of the office and the cultural side of the team. The lesson learned was that ignoring the undercurrent of an organization can have a negative impact, and anonymous feedback can be a useful tool for managers.

Maintaining Company Culture with Your Remote Teams

Working with remote teams can be difficult, so it is important to maintain company culture. To do this, the author set up "face-to-face" video calls to ensure that comments weren't taken out of context, and introduced "Meet Two" where individuals were tasked with meeting two new people each week. Additionally, the author visited remote teams once every quarter to ensure that they felt listened to. After receiving feedback, the author reduced "Meet Two" to "Meet One" to focus more on the culture across remote teams.

Reorganizing Your Teams According to Function

In order to scale the teams, the manager of managers implemented a reorganization of the teams by functionality, embedding QA within the teams and having them report to the same person. This allowed for the teams to grow in a repeatable fashion, while still feeling connected to the organization. Challenges included making sure the teams weren't working in isolated silos and having a shared platform for the product.

A Co-Founder Growing in His Career

The author, a co-founder of a company, learned how to scale a team and product, but wanted to continue to grow in their career. To do this, they challenged themselves and pushed outside of their comfort zone, such as giving a talk on a panel. They also learned to balance taking care of their employees while also taking time to protect and grow in their own career.

Recognizing the Value of Underrepresented Groups in Tech

A woman in tech with a master's degree in artificial intelligence faced strong criticism and had to defend her knowledge and ideas when she suggested a different use case for machine learning than a male colleague. She has developed strategies to prove herself and her knowledge, and when she is the leader of a meeting, she encourages people to ask questions and make suggestions without fear of judgement. She believes that having a diverse group of people who are less certain of themselves can lead to more objective meetings and better results.

Losing Your Manager’s Trust and How to Rebuild It

A new team member was brought in to give a fresh perspective to a team that was receiving negative press from the company. Initially, the manager was enthusiastic about the changes proposed, but then became harder to convince. After doing one-on-ones with the team and gathering information, the new team member discovered the root cause of the problem and was able to rebuild trust with the manager. Through this experience, the team member learned to be more wary of jumping to conclusions and to be more sympathetic when someone comes at them. This has had a positive impact on all of their work relationships.

The ‘30-60-90 Day Plan’ for New Managers

This article outlines a strategy for onboarding a new engineering manager to an existing team. The strategy involves having the new manager create a 30-60-90 day plan that outlines what they will do in each of those time frames. This plan should include getting to know the team, understanding the architecture, and making small and large changes. This strategy helps to ensure that the new manager has done their research and is coming up with their own solutions to the problems. It also allows for feedback from the hiring manager. For more junior-level hires, more coaching and guidance may be necessary.

Helping Your Reports Grow in Their Careers

This article discusses a management philosophy that focuses on building upon people's strengths and helping them become the best version of themselves. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding what the individual wants and what the company needs in order to create the best path for them. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not having a template to follow for guiding someone on their career path and getting comfortable with the fact that neither the manager nor the direct report knows the definitive answer on the best way to develop and grow.

Creating an Environment for Learning and Growth

Engineering managers have a lot of pressure coming from different angles, but their main focus is their team's well-being. To create an environment where individuals on the team are learning, growing, and thriving, the engineering manager should implement methods such as Lunch-and-Learns, Group Code Reviews, and Pair Programming. These methods should be layered on top of one another, and should be low barrier and low entry. Additionally, the engineering manager should ask the team for feedback to ensure that the sessions are useful and valuable.

Learning to Say No Using Collected Data

This article discusses the experience of working with a CEO on a second startup that was not as successful as the first. The CEO was making bad decisions and piling on features, leading to a toll on the team and the business. Fortunately, the organization replaced the CEO with a new one who implemented changes that saved them. The team learned to collect data and say no to feature requests, and the lesson learned was that it is important to learn how to say no and defend the bandwidth of the team.

Prioritizing Urgent Tasks in Scrum

This article discusses how to manage a project with an external task that needs immediate attention. It suggests introducing a "Prod first" policy to prioritize urgent tasks, and to refine the backlog each day to prioritize new tasks. It also highlights the importance of leaving bandwidth for urgent tasks, but also the difficulty of committing to long-term goals when urgent tasks take precedence.

Understanding Your Role as a CTO When Scaling

Technology leaders need to relinquish control, hire and train smart people to make decisions, create boundaries with guiding principles, and embrace their role as a leader in order to move into a CTO role or continue to run the technology organization at a fast scaling company.

Establishing Habits to Combat Stress and Uncertainty

This article discusses how to become more productive in daily work by implementing a manager schedule/maker schedule philosophy, review meetings, and a 'Do/Try/Consider' model for giving feedback. Establishing rituals and habits can provide structure and a sense of calmness when external things are moving quickly and unexpectedly.

Recalibrating Peer Relationships When Transitioning to Management

Transitioning from IC to manager can be tricky, especially when managing a friend. To build trust and set the right expectations, it is important to plan out how the change will be communicated and to deliver value in the first 30 days. Additionally, it is important to be confident and clear with expectations, and to ask for feedback to grow as a new manager.

Formalizing Career Conversations

New Relic implemented a process to increase the time managers spent engaging with engineers on career plans. This included having engineers write a one-page description of their 5-10 year career timeline and having the engineering leadership team review the career plans of engineers across all functions. This improved survey scores and created visibility for new career opportunities.

Building Career Ladders with the Help of a Diverse Team

New Relic needed to create a formal career ladder to align with their pay levels. To do this, they sent out an email to the entire organization asking for names of people to be part of a 20-person working group. This group then held an off-site session to brainstorm and develop criteria and behaviors for each level. The career ladder was then sent out to a wider group for feedback, and finally published. The process was successful, and the lessons learned were that it was important to have a diverse group of people work on the ladder, and to have the group also be responsible for training the managers.

Pay Equity Improves Your Company’s Performance

This company implemented a pay equity policy to address discrepancies in salary setting due to unconscious bias. After a year of implementation, all engineers and managers at the same level were paid identically. The policy was well-received internally and externally, and helped to attract more people to the company due to its commitment to equity and inclusion.

Managing a Problematic Peer Relationship

This article discusses the problem of working with peers who are not aligned on direction, combative or aggressive. It outlines the actions taken to address this problem, such as getting alignment on decision-making frameworks, understanding the root assumptions and emotions that led to disagreements, discouraging triangulation, and adopting non-violent communication. It also outlines the lessons learned, such as understanding the root causes of disagreements, prioritizing alignment to get needs met, and managing up to drive alignment and get the team executing.

Keeping Up with Hyper-Growth by Promoting New Managers

Our company faced a challenge when it was acquired and had to double its engineering team from 14 to 28 engineers in a year. To address this, we promoted three engineers to team leads and created five teams of five people each. We provided support to the new managers through one-on-one coaching and 360 reviews, which allowed us to quickly detect and correct any issues. This approach helped us to preserve our team culture and promote engineers who had earned respect among their peers.

How To Work Effectively with Distributed Teams

This article discusses the challenges of distributed teams and provides guidelines to help manage them. These guidelines include separating work streams for different locations, building personal relationships, negotiating and compromising, giving notice for changes, and treating documentation as part of the product. Additionally, it suggests defaulting to asynchronous communication and revisiting and revising working guidelines regularly.

Receiving Anonymous Feedback from Your Team

A remote team was considering expanding their office space, but decided against it. To gauge the level of dis-ease among employees, anonymous feedback tools such as Officevibe were implemented. This allowed the team to understand the undercurrent of the organization and address any issues that arose. As a result, the team was able to learn more about the dynamics of the office and the cultural side of the team. The lesson learned was that ignoring the undercurrent of an organization can have a negative impact, and anonymous feedback can be a useful tool for managers.

Maintaining Company Culture with Your Remote Teams

Working with remote teams can be difficult, so it is important to maintain company culture. To do this, the author set up "face-to-face" video calls to ensure that comments weren't taken out of context, and introduced "Meet Two" where individuals were tasked with meeting two new people each week. Additionally, the author visited remote teams once every quarter to ensure that they felt listened to. After receiving feedback, the author reduced "Meet Two" to "Meet One" to focus more on the culture across remote teams.

Reorganizing Your Teams According to Function

In order to scale the teams, the manager of managers implemented a reorganization of the teams by functionality, embedding QA within the teams and having them report to the same person. This allowed for the teams to grow in a repeatable fashion, while still feeling connected to the organization. Challenges included making sure the teams weren't working in isolated silos and having a shared platform for the product.

A Co-Founder Growing in His Career

The author, a co-founder of a company, learned how to scale a team and product, but wanted to continue to grow in their career. To do this, they challenged themselves and pushed outside of their comfort zone, such as giving a talk on a panel. They also learned to balance taking care of their employees while also taking time to protect and grow in their own career.

Recognizing the Value of Underrepresented Groups in Tech

A woman in tech with a master's degree in artificial intelligence faced strong criticism and had to defend her knowledge and ideas when she suggested a different use case for machine learning than a male colleague. She has developed strategies to prove herself and her knowledge, and when she is the leader of a meeting, she encourages people to ask questions and make suggestions without fear of judgement. She believes that having a diverse group of people who are less certain of themselves can lead to more objective meetings and better results.

Losing Your Manager’s Trust and How to Rebuild It

A new team member was brought in to give a fresh perspective to a team that was receiving negative press from the company. Initially, the manager was enthusiastic about the changes proposed, but then became harder to convince. After doing one-on-ones with the team and gathering information, the new team member discovered the root cause of the problem and was able to rebuild trust with the manager. Through this experience, the team member learned to be more wary of jumping to conclusions and to be more sympathetic when someone comes at them. This has had a positive impact on all of their work relationships.

The ‘30-60-90 Day Plan’ for New Managers

This article outlines a strategy for onboarding a new engineering manager to an existing team. The strategy involves having the new manager create a 30-60-90 day plan that outlines what they will do in each of those time frames. This plan should include getting to know the team, understanding the architecture, and making small and large changes. This strategy helps to ensure that the new manager has done their research and is coming up with their own solutions to the problems. It also allows for feedback from the hiring manager. For more junior-level hires, more coaching and guidance may be necessary.

Helping Your Reports Grow in Their Careers

This article discusses a management philosophy that focuses on building upon people's strengths and helping them become the best version of themselves. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding what the individual wants and what the company needs in order to create the best path for them. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not having a template to follow for guiding someone on their career path and getting comfortable with the fact that neither the manager nor the direct report knows the definitive answer on the best way to develop and grow.

Creating an Environment for Learning and Growth

Engineering managers have a lot of pressure coming from different angles, but their main focus is their team's well-being. To create an environment where individuals on the team are learning, growing, and thriving, the engineering manager should implement methods such as Lunch-and-Learns, Group Code Reviews, and Pair Programming. These methods should be layered on top of one another, and should be low barrier and low entry. Additionally, the engineering manager should ask the team for feedback to ensure that the sessions are useful and valuable.

Learning to Say No Using Collected Data

This article discusses the experience of working with a CEO on a second startup that was not as successful as the first. The CEO was making bad decisions and piling on features, leading to a toll on the team and the business. Fortunately, the organization replaced the CEO with a new one who implemented changes that saved them. The team learned to collect data and say no to feature requests, and the lesson learned was that it is important to learn how to say no and defend the bandwidth of the team.

Prioritizing Urgent Tasks in Scrum

This article discusses how to manage a project with an external task that needs immediate attention. It suggests introducing a "Prod first" policy to prioritize urgent tasks, and to refine the backlog each day to prioritize new tasks. It also highlights the importance of leaving bandwidth for urgent tasks, but also the difficulty of committing to long-term goals when urgent tasks take precedence.

Understanding Your Role as a CTO When Scaling

Technology leaders need to relinquish control, hire and train smart people to make decisions, create boundaries with guiding principles, and embrace their role as a leader in order to move into a CTO role or continue to run the technology organization at a fast scaling company.

Establishing Habits to Combat Stress and Uncertainty

This article discusses how to become more productive in daily work by implementing a manager schedule/maker schedule philosophy, review meetings, and a 'Do/Try/Consider' model for giving feedback. Establishing rituals and habits can provide structure and a sense of calmness when external things are moving quickly and unexpectedly.

Recalibrating Peer Relationships When Transitioning to Management

Transitioning from IC to manager can be tricky, especially when managing a friend. To build trust and set the right expectations, it is important to plan out how the change will be communicated and to deliver value in the first 30 days. Additionally, it is important to be confident and clear with expectations, and to ask for feedback to grow as a new manager.

Formalizing Career Conversations

New Relic implemented a process to increase the time managers spent engaging with engineers on career plans. This included having engineers write a one-page description of their 5-10 year career timeline and having the engineering leadership team review the career plans of engineers across all functions. This improved survey scores and created visibility for new career opportunities.

Building Career Ladders with the Help of a Diverse Team

New Relic needed to create a formal career ladder to align with their pay levels. To do this, they sent out an email to the entire organization asking for names of people to be part of a 20-person working group. This group then held an off-site session to brainstorm and develop criteria and behaviors for each level. The career ladder was then sent out to a wider group for feedback, and finally published. The process was successful, and the lessons learned were that it was important to have a diverse group of people work on the ladder, and to have the group also be responsible for training the managers.

Pay Equity Improves Your Company’s Performance

This company implemented a pay equity policy to address discrepancies in salary setting due to unconscious bias. After a year of implementation, all engineers and managers at the same level were paid identically. The policy was well-received internally and externally, and helped to attract more people to the company due to its commitment to equity and inclusion.

Managing a Problematic Peer Relationship

This article discusses the problem of working with peers who are not aligned on direction, combative or aggressive. It outlines the actions taken to address this problem, such as getting alignment on decision-making frameworks, understanding the root assumptions and emotions that led to disagreements, discouraging triangulation, and adopting non-violent communication. It also outlines the lessons learned, such as understanding the root causes of disagreements, prioritizing alignment to get needs met, and managing up to drive alignment and get the team executing.

Keeping Up with Hyper-Growth by Promoting New Managers

Our company faced a challenge when it was acquired and had to double its engineering team from 14 to 28 engineers in a year. To address this, we promoted three engineers to team leads and created five teams of five people each. We provided support to the new managers through one-on-one coaching and 360 reviews, which allowed us to quickly detect and correct any issues. This approach helped us to preserve our team culture and promote engineers who had earned respect among their peers.

How To Work Effectively with Distributed Teams

This article discusses the challenges of distributed teams and provides guidelines to help manage them. These guidelines include separating work streams for different locations, building personal relationships, negotiating and compromising, giving notice for changes, and treating documentation as part of the product. Additionally, it suggests defaulting to asynchronous communication and revisiting and revising working guidelines regularly.

Receiving Anonymous Feedback from Your Team

A remote team was considering expanding their office space, but decided against it. To gauge the level of dis-ease among employees, anonymous feedback tools such as Officevibe were implemented. This allowed the team to understand the undercurrent of the organization and address any issues that arose. As a result, the team was able to learn more about the dynamics of the office and the cultural side of the team. The lesson learned was that ignoring the undercurrent of an organization can have a negative impact, and anonymous feedback can be a useful tool for managers.

Maintaining Company Culture with Your Remote Teams

Working with remote teams can be difficult, so it is important to maintain company culture. To do this, the author set up "face-to-face" video calls to ensure that comments weren't taken out of context, and introduced "Meet Two" where individuals were tasked with meeting two new people each week. Additionally, the author visited remote teams once every quarter to ensure that they felt listened to. After receiving feedback, the author reduced "Meet Two" to "Meet One" to focus more on the culture across remote teams.

Reorganizing Your Teams According to Function

In order to scale the teams, the manager of managers implemented a reorganization of the teams by functionality, embedding QA within the teams and having them report to the same person. This allowed for the teams to grow in a repeatable fashion, while still feeling connected to the organization. Challenges included making sure the teams weren't working in isolated silos and having a shared platform for the product.

A Co-Founder Growing in His Career

The author, a co-founder of a company, learned how to scale a team and product, but wanted to continue to grow in their career. To do this, they challenged themselves and pushed outside of their comfort zone, such as giving a talk on a panel. They also learned to balance taking care of their employees while also taking time to protect and grow in their own career.

Recognizing the Value of Underrepresented Groups in Tech

A woman in tech with a master's degree in artificial intelligence faced strong criticism and had to defend her knowledge and ideas when she suggested a different use case for machine learning than a male colleague. She has developed strategies to prove herself and her knowledge, and when she is the leader of a meeting, she encourages people to ask questions and make suggestions without fear of judgement. She believes that having a diverse group of people who are less certain of themselves can lead to more objective meetings and better results.

Losing Your Manager’s Trust and How to Rebuild It

A new team member was brought in to give a fresh perspective to a team that was receiving negative press from the company. Initially, the manager was enthusiastic about the changes proposed, but then became harder to convince. After doing one-on-ones with the team and gathering information, the new team member discovered the root cause of the problem and was able to rebuild trust with the manager. Through this experience, the team member learned to be more wary of jumping to conclusions and to be more sympathetic when someone comes at them. This has had a positive impact on all of their work relationships.

The ‘30-60-90 Day Plan’ for New Managers

This article outlines a strategy for onboarding a new engineering manager to an existing team. The strategy involves having the new manager create a 30-60-90 day plan that outlines what they will do in each of those time frames. This plan should include getting to know the team, understanding the architecture, and making small and large changes. This strategy helps to ensure that the new manager has done their research and is coming up with their own solutions to the problems. It also allows for feedback from the hiring manager. For more junior-level hires, more coaching and guidance may be necessary.

Helping Your Reports Grow in Their Careers

This article discusses a management philosophy that focuses on building upon people's strengths and helping them become the best version of themselves. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding what the individual wants and what the company needs in order to create the best path for them. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not having a template to follow for guiding someone on their career path and getting comfortable with the fact that neither the manager nor the direct report knows the definitive answer on the best way to develop and grow.

Creating an Environment for Learning and Growth

Engineering managers have a lot of pressure coming from different angles, but their main focus is their team's well-being. To create an environment where individuals on the team are learning, growing, and thriving, the engineering manager should implement methods such as Lunch-and-Learns, Group Code Reviews, and Pair Programming. These methods should be layered on top of one another, and should be low barrier and low entry. Additionally, the engineering manager should ask the team for feedback to ensure that the sessions are useful and valuable.

Learning to Say No Using Collected Data

This article discusses the experience of working with a CEO on a second startup that was not as successful as the first. The CEO was making bad decisions and piling on features, leading to a toll on the team and the business. Fortunately, the organization replaced the CEO with a new one who implemented changes that saved them. The team learned to collect data and say no to feature requests, and the lesson learned was that it is important to learn how to say no and defend the bandwidth of the team.

Prioritizing Urgent Tasks in Scrum

This article discusses how to manage a project with an external task that needs immediate attention. It suggests introducing a "Prod first" policy to prioritize urgent tasks, and to refine the backlog each day to prioritize new tasks. It also highlights the importance of leaving bandwidth for urgent tasks, but also the difficulty of committing to long-term goals when urgent tasks take precedence.

Understanding Your Role as a CTO When Scaling

Technology leaders need to relinquish control, hire and train smart people to make decisions, create boundaries with guiding principles, and embrace their role as a leader in order to move into a CTO role or continue to run the technology organization at a fast scaling company.

Establishing Habits to Combat Stress and Uncertainty

This article discusses how to become more productive in daily work by implementing a manager schedule/maker schedule philosophy, review meetings, and a 'Do/Try/Consider' model for giving feedback. Establishing rituals and habits can provide structure and a sense of calmness when external things are moving quickly and unexpectedly.

Recalibrating Peer Relationships When Transitioning to Management

Transitioning from IC to manager can be tricky, especially when managing a friend. To build trust and set the right expectations, it is important to plan out how the change will be communicated and to deliver value in the first 30 days. Additionally, it is important to be confident and clear with expectations, and to ask for feedback to grow as a new manager.

Formalizing Career Conversations

New Relic implemented a process to increase the time managers spent engaging with engineers on career plans. This included having engineers write a one-page description of their 5-10 year career timeline and having the engineering leadership team review the career plans of engineers across all functions. This improved survey scores and created visibility for new career opportunities.

Building Career Ladders with the Help of a Diverse Team

New Relic needed to create a formal career ladder to align with their pay levels. To do this, they sent out an email to the entire organization asking for names of people to be part of a 20-person working group. This group then held an off-site session to brainstorm and develop criteria and behaviors for each level. The career ladder was then sent out to a wider group for feedback, and finally published. The process was successful, and the lessons learned were that it was important to have a diverse group of people work on the ladder, and to have the group also be responsible for training the managers.

Pay Equity Improves Your Company’s Performance

This company implemented a pay equity policy to address discrepancies in salary setting due to unconscious bias. After a year of implementation, all engineers and managers at the same level were paid identically. The policy was well-received internally and externally, and helped to attract more people to the company due to its commitment to equity and inclusion.

Managing a Problematic Peer Relationship

This article discusses the problem of working with peers who are not aligned on direction, combative or aggressive. It outlines the actions taken to address this problem, such as getting alignment on decision-making frameworks, understanding the root assumptions and emotions that led to disagreements, discouraging triangulation, and adopting non-violent communication. It also outlines the lessons learned, such as understanding the root causes of disagreements, prioritizing alignment to get needs met, and managing up to drive alignment and get the team executing.

Keeping Up with Hyper-Growth by Promoting New Managers

Our company faced a challenge when it was acquired and had to double its engineering team from 14 to 28 engineers in a year. To address this, we promoted three engineers to team leads and created five teams of five people each. We provided support to the new managers through one-on-one coaching and 360 reviews, which allowed us to quickly detect and correct any issues. This approach helped us to preserve our team culture and promote engineers who had earned respect among their peers.

How To Work Effectively with Distributed Teams

This article discusses the challenges of distributed teams and provides guidelines to help manage them. These guidelines include separating work streams for different locations, building personal relationships, negotiating and compromising, giving notice for changes, and treating documentation as part of the product. Additionally, it suggests defaulting to asynchronous communication and revisiting and revising working guidelines regularly.

Receiving Anonymous Feedback from Your Team

A remote team was considering expanding their office space, but decided against it. To gauge the level of dis-ease among employees, anonymous feedback tools such as Officevibe were implemented. This allowed the team to understand the undercurrent of the organization and address any issues that arose. As a result, the team was able to learn more about the dynamics of the office and the cultural side of the team. The lesson learned was that ignoring the undercurrent of an organization can have a negative impact, and anonymous feedback can be a useful tool for managers.

Maintaining Company Culture with Your Remote Teams

Working with remote teams can be difficult, so it is important to maintain company culture. To do this, the author set up "face-to-face" video calls to ensure that comments weren't taken out of context, and introduced "Meet Two" where individuals were tasked with meeting two new people each week. Additionally, the author visited remote teams once every quarter to ensure that they felt listened to. After receiving feedback, the author reduced "Meet Two" to "Meet One" to focus more on the culture across remote teams.

Reorganizing Your Teams According to Function

In order to scale the teams, the manager of managers implemented a reorganization of the teams by functionality, embedding QA within the teams and having them report to the same person. This allowed for the teams to grow in a repeatable fashion, while still feeling connected to the organization. Challenges included making sure the teams weren't working in isolated silos and having a shared platform for the product.

A Co-Founder Growing in His Career

The author, a co-founder of a company, learned how to scale a team and product, but wanted to continue to grow in their career. To do this, they challenged themselves and pushed outside of their comfort zone, such as giving a talk on a panel. They also learned to balance taking care of their employees while also taking time to protect and grow in their own career.

Recognizing the Value of Underrepresented Groups in Tech

A woman in tech with a master's degree in artificial intelligence faced strong criticism and had to defend her knowledge and ideas when she suggested a different use case for machine learning than a male colleague. She has developed strategies to prove herself and her knowledge, and when she is the leader of a meeting, she encourages people to ask questions and make suggestions without fear of judgement. She believes that having a diverse group of people who are less certain of themselves can lead to more objective meetings and better results.

Losing Your Manager’s Trust and How to Rebuild It

A new team member was brought in to give a fresh perspective to a team that was receiving negative press from the company. Initially, the manager was enthusiastic about the changes proposed, but then became harder to convince. After doing one-on-ones with the team and gathering information, the new team member discovered the root cause of the problem and was able to rebuild trust with the manager. Through this experience, the team member learned to be more wary of jumping to conclusions and to be more sympathetic when someone comes at them. This has had a positive impact on all of their work relationships.

The ‘30-60-90 Day Plan’ for New Managers

This article outlines a strategy for onboarding a new engineering manager to an existing team. The strategy involves having the new manager create a 30-60-90 day plan that outlines what they will do in each of those time frames. This plan should include getting to know the team, understanding the architecture, and making small and large changes. This strategy helps to ensure that the new manager has done their research and is coming up with their own solutions to the problems. It also allows for feedback from the hiring manager. For more junior-level hires, more coaching and guidance may be necessary.

Helping Your Reports Grow in Their Careers

This article discusses a management philosophy that focuses on building upon people's strengths and helping them become the best version of themselves. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding what the individual wants and what the company needs in order to create the best path for them. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not having a template to follow for guiding someone on their career path and getting comfortable with the fact that neither the manager nor the direct report knows the definitive answer on the best way to develop and grow.

Creating an Environment for Learning and Growth

Engineering managers have a lot of pressure coming from different angles, but their main focus is their team's well-being. To create an environment where individuals on the team are learning, growing, and thriving, the engineering manager should implement methods such as Lunch-and-Learns, Group Code Reviews, and Pair Programming. These methods should be layered on top of one another, and should be low barrier and low entry. Additionally, the engineering manager should ask the team for feedback to ensure that the sessions are useful and valuable.

Learning to Say No Using Collected Data

This article discusses the experience of working with a CEO on a second startup that was not as successful as the first. The CEO was making bad decisions and piling on features, leading to a toll on the team and the business. Fortunately, the organization replaced the CEO with a new one who implemented changes that saved them. The team learned to collect data and say no to feature requests, and the lesson learned was that it is important to learn how to say no and defend the bandwidth of the team.

Prioritizing Urgent Tasks in Scrum

This article discusses how to manage a project with an external task that needs immediate attention. It suggests introducing a "Prod first" policy to prioritize urgent tasks, and to refine the backlog each day to prioritize new tasks. It also highlights the importance of leaving bandwidth for urgent tasks, but also the difficulty of committing to long-term goals when urgent tasks take precedence.

Understanding Your Role as a CTO When Scaling

Technology leaders need to relinquish control, hire and train smart people to make decisions, create boundaries with guiding principles, and embrace their role as a leader in order to move into a CTO role or continue to run the technology organization at a fast scaling company.

Establishing Habits to Combat Stress and Uncertainty

This article discusses how to become more productive in daily work by implementing a manager schedule/maker schedule philosophy, review meetings, and a 'Do/Try/Consider' model for giving feedback. Establishing rituals and habits can provide structure and a sense of calmness when external things are moving quickly and unexpectedly.

Recalibrating Peer Relationships When Transitioning to Management

Transitioning from IC to manager can be tricky, especially when managing a friend. To build trust and set the right expectations, it is important to plan out how the change will be communicated and to deliver value in the first 30 days. Additionally, it is important to be confident and clear with expectations, and to ask for feedback to grow as a new manager.

Formalizing Career Conversations

New Relic implemented a process to increase the time managers spent engaging with engineers on career plans. This included having engineers write a one-page description of their 5-10 year career timeline and having the engineering leadership team review the career plans of engineers across all functions. This improved survey scores and created visibility for new career opportunities.

Building Career Ladders with the Help of a Diverse Team

New Relic needed to create a formal career ladder to align with their pay levels. To do this, they sent out an email to the entire organization asking for names of people to be part of a 20-person working group. This group then held an off-site session to brainstorm and develop criteria and behaviors for each level. The career ladder was then sent out to a wider group for feedback, and finally published. The process was successful, and the lessons learned were that it was important to have a diverse group of people work on the ladder, and to have the group also be responsible for training the managers.

Pay Equity Improves Your Company’s Performance

This company implemented a pay equity policy to address discrepancies in salary setting due to unconscious bias. After a year of implementation, all engineers and managers at the same level were paid identically. The policy was well-received internally and externally, and helped to attract more people to the company due to its commitment to equity and inclusion.

Managing a Problematic Peer Relationship

This article discusses the problem of working with peers who are not aligned on direction, combative or aggressive. It outlines the actions taken to address this problem, such as getting alignment on decision-making frameworks, understanding the root assumptions and emotions that led to disagreements, discouraging triangulation, and adopting non-violent communication. It also outlines the lessons learned, such as understanding the root causes of disagreements, prioritizing alignment to get needs met, and managing up to drive alignment and get the team executing.

Keeping Up with Hyper-Growth by Promoting New Managers

Our company faced a challenge when it was acquired and had to double its engineering team from 14 to 28 engineers in a year. To address this, we promoted three engineers to team leads and created five teams of five people each. We provided support to the new managers through one-on-one coaching and 360 reviews, which allowed us to quickly detect and correct any issues. This approach helped us to preserve our team culture and promote engineers who had earned respect among their peers.

How To Work Effectively with Distributed Teams

This article discusses the challenges of distributed teams and provides guidelines to help manage them. These guidelines include separating work streams for different locations, building personal relationships, negotiating and compromising, giving notice for changes, and treating documentation as part of the product. Additionally, it suggests defaulting to asynchronous communication and revisiting and revising working guidelines regularly.

Receiving Anonymous Feedback from Your Team

A remote team was considering expanding their office space, but decided against it. To gauge the level of dis-ease among employees, anonymous feedback tools such as Officevibe were implemented. This allowed the team to understand the undercurrent of the organization and address any issues that arose. As a result, the team was able to learn more about the dynamics of the office and the cultural side of the team. The lesson learned was that ignoring the undercurrent of an organization can have a negative impact, and anonymous feedback can be a useful tool for managers.

Maintaining Company Culture with Your Remote Teams

Working with remote teams can be difficult, so it is important to maintain company culture. To do this, the author set up "face-to-face" video calls to ensure that comments weren't taken out of context, and introduced "Meet Two" where individuals were tasked with meeting two new people each week. Additionally, the author visited remote teams once every quarter to ensure that they felt listened to. After receiving feedback, the author reduced "Meet Two" to "Meet One" to focus more on the culture across remote teams.

Reorganizing Your Teams According to Function

In order to scale the teams, the manager of managers implemented a reorganization of the teams by functionality, embedding QA within the teams and having them report to the same person. This allowed for the teams to grow in a repeatable fashion, while still feeling connected to the organization. Challenges included making sure the teams weren't working in isolated silos and having a shared platform for the product.

A Co-Founder Growing in His Career

The author, a co-founder of a company, learned how to scale a team and product, but wanted to continue to grow in their career. To do this, they challenged themselves and pushed outside of their comfort zone, such as giving a talk on a panel. They also learned to balance taking care of their employees while also taking time to protect and grow in their own career.

Recognizing the Value of Underrepresented Groups in Tech

A woman in tech with a master's degree in artificial intelligence faced strong criticism and had to defend her knowledge and ideas when she suggested a different use case for machine learning than a male colleague. She has developed strategies to prove herself and her knowledge, and when she is the leader of a meeting, she encourages people to ask questions and make suggestions without fear of judgement. She believes that having a diverse group of people who are less certain of themselves can lead to more objective meetings and better results.

Losing Your Manager’s Trust and How to Rebuild It

A new team member was brought in to give a fresh perspective to a team that was receiving negative press from the company. Initially, the manager was enthusiastic about the changes proposed, but then became harder to convince. After doing one-on-ones with the team and gathering information, the new team member discovered the root cause of the problem and was able to rebuild trust with the manager. Through this experience, the team member learned to be more wary of jumping to conclusions and to be more sympathetic when someone comes at them. This has had a positive impact on all of their work relationships.

The ‘30-60-90 Day Plan’ for New Managers

This article outlines a strategy for onboarding a new engineering manager to an existing team. The strategy involves having the new manager create a 30-60-90 day plan that outlines what they will do in each of those time frames. This plan should include getting to know the team, understanding the architecture, and making small and large changes. This strategy helps to ensure that the new manager has done their research and is coming up with their own solutions to the problems. It also allows for feedback from the hiring manager. For more junior-level hires, more coaching and guidance may be necessary.

Helping Your Reports Grow in Their Careers

This article discusses a management philosophy that focuses on building upon people's strengths and helping them become the best version of themselves. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding what the individual wants and what the company needs in order to create the best path for them. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not having a template to follow for guiding someone on their career path and getting comfortable with the fact that neither the manager nor the direct report knows the definitive answer on the best way to develop and grow.

Creating an Environment for Learning and Growth

Engineering managers have a lot of pressure coming from different angles, but their main focus is their team's well-being. To create an environment where individuals on the team are learning, growing, and thriving, the engineering manager should implement methods such as Lunch-and-Learns, Group Code Reviews, and Pair Programming. These methods should be layered on top of one another, and should be low barrier and low entry. Additionally, the engineering manager should ask the team for feedback to ensure that the sessions are useful and valuable.

Learning to Say No Using Collected Data

This article discusses the experience of working with a CEO on a second startup that was not as successful as the first. The CEO was making bad decisions and piling on features, leading to a toll on the team and the business. Fortunately, the organization replaced the CEO with a new one who implemented changes that saved them. The team learned to collect data and say no to feature requests, and the lesson learned was that it is important to learn how to say no and defend the bandwidth of the team.

Prioritizing Urgent Tasks in Scrum

This article discusses how to manage a project with an external task that needs immediate attention. It suggests introducing a "Prod first" policy to prioritize urgent tasks, and to refine the backlog each day to prioritize new tasks. It also highlights the importance of leaving bandwidth for urgent tasks, but also the difficulty of committing to long-term goals when urgent tasks take precedence.

Understanding Your Role as a CTO When Scaling

Technology leaders need to relinquish control, hire and train smart people to make decisions, create boundaries with guiding principles, and embrace their role as a leader in order to move into a CTO role or continue to run the technology organization at a fast scaling company.

Establishing Habits to Combat Stress and Uncertainty

This article discusses how to become more productive in daily work by implementing a manager schedule/maker schedule philosophy, review meetings, and a 'Do/Try/Consider' model for giving feedback. Establishing rituals and habits can provide structure and a sense of calmness when external things are moving quickly and unexpectedly.

Recalibrating Peer Relationships When Transitioning to Management

Transitioning from IC to manager can be tricky, especially when managing a friend. To build trust and set the right expectations, it is important to plan out how the change will be communicated and to deliver value in the first 30 days. Additionally, it is important to be confident and clear with expectations, and to ask for feedback to grow as a new manager.

Formalizing Career Conversations

New Relic implemented a process to increase the time managers spent engaging with engineers on career plans. This included having engineers write a one-page description of their 5-10 year career timeline and having the engineering leadership team review the career plans of engineers across all functions. This improved survey scores and created visibility for new career opportunities.

Building Career Ladders with the Help of a Diverse Team

New Relic needed to create a formal career ladder to align with their pay levels. To do this, they sent out an email to the entire organization asking for names of people to be part of a 20-person working group. This group then held an off-site session to brainstorm and develop criteria and behaviors for each level. The career ladder was then sent out to a wider group for feedback, and finally published. The process was successful, and the lessons learned were that it was important to have a diverse group of people work on the ladder, and to have the group also be responsible for training the managers.

Pay Equity Improves Your Company’s Performance

This company implemented a pay equity policy to address discrepancies in salary setting due to unconscious bias. After a year of implementation, all engineers and managers at the same level were paid identically. The policy was well-received internally and externally, and helped to attract more people to the company due to its commitment to equity and inclusion.

Managing a Problematic Peer Relationship

This article discusses the problem of working with peers who are not aligned on direction, combative or aggressive. It outlines the actions taken to address this problem, such as getting alignment on decision-making frameworks, understanding the root assumptions and emotions that led to disagreements, discouraging triangulation, and adopting non-violent communication. It also outlines the lessons learned, such as understanding the root causes of disagreements, prioritizing alignment to get needs met, and managing up to drive alignment and get the team executing.

Keeping Up with Hyper-Growth by Promoting New Managers

Our company faced a challenge when it was acquired and had to double its engineering team from 14 to 28 engineers in a year. To address this, we promoted three engineers to team leads and created five teams of five people each. We provided support to the new managers through one-on-one coaching and 360 reviews, which allowed us to quickly detect and correct any issues. This approach helped us to preserve our team culture and promote engineers who had earned respect among their peers.

How To Work Effectively with Distributed Teams

This article discusses the challenges of distributed teams and provides guidelines to help manage them. These guidelines include separating work streams for different locations, building personal relationships, negotiating and compromising, giving notice for changes, and treating documentation as part of the product. Additionally, it suggests defaulting to asynchronous communication and revisiting and revising working guidelines regularly.

Receiving Anonymous Feedback from Your Team

A remote team was considering expanding their office space, but decided against it. To gauge the level of dis-ease among employees, anonymous feedback tools such as Officevibe were implemented. This allowed the team to understand the undercurrent of the organization and address any issues that arose. As a result, the team was able to learn more about the dynamics of the office and the cultural side of the team. The lesson learned was that ignoring the undercurrent of an organization can have a negative impact, and anonymous feedback can be a useful tool for managers.

Maintaining Company Culture with Your Remote Teams

Working with remote teams can be difficult, so it is important to maintain company culture. To do this, the author set up "face-to-face" video calls to ensure that comments weren't taken out of context, and introduced "Meet Two" where individuals were tasked with meeting two new people each week. Additionally, the author visited remote teams once every quarter to ensure that they felt listened to. After receiving feedback, the author reduced "Meet Two" to "Meet One" to focus more on the culture across remote teams.

Reorganizing Your Teams According to Function

In order to scale the teams, the manager of managers implemented a reorganization of the teams by functionality, embedding QA within the teams and having them report to the same person. This allowed for the teams to grow in a repeatable fashion, while still feeling connected to the organization. Challenges included making sure the teams weren't working in isolated silos and having a shared platform for the product.

A Co-Founder Growing in His Career

The author, a co-founder of a company, learned how to scale a team and product, but wanted to continue to grow in their career. To do this, they challenged themselves and pushed outside of their comfort zone, such as giving a talk on a panel. They also learned to balance taking care of their employees while also taking time to protect and grow in their own career.

Recognizing the Value of Underrepresented Groups in Tech

A woman in tech with a master's degree in artificial intelligence faced strong criticism and had to defend her knowledge and ideas when she suggested a different use case for machine learning than a male colleague. She has developed strategies to prove herself and her knowledge, and when she is the leader of a meeting, she encourages people to ask questions and make suggestions without fear of judgement. She believes that having a diverse group of people who are less certain of themselves can lead to more objective meetings and better results.

Losing Your Manager’s Trust and How to Rebuild It

A new team member was brought in to give a fresh perspective to a team that was receiving negative press from the company. Initially, the manager was enthusiastic about the changes proposed, but then became harder to convince. After doing one-on-ones with the team and gathering information, the new team member discovered the root cause of the problem and was able to rebuild trust with the manager. Through this experience, the team member learned to be more wary of jumping to conclusions and to be more sympathetic when someone comes at them. This has had a positive impact on all of their work relationships.