Knowledge shared by our community

Delegating Responsibility in a Culture of Continuous Deployment

The manager of an engineering team has a duty to lead their engineers to become individually responsible for their work and ship it whenever it is ready. To do this, the manager delegates responsibility to each employee in the form of a significant feature and provides support when needed. The manager has learned that delegated responsibility is an efficient practice and discusses it with potential hires to see if they would thrive in this environment. Those who do take ownership, require little to no management, and are extremely productive.

Creating OKR’s for the First Time

This article outlines the process a company went through to create OKRs. They read a book on the topic, had brainstorming sessions to come up with objectives, and broke them down into quarterly goals. They learned that it is important to design OKRs at the right time, have milestones for measuring success, and identify the teams that are best for the objectives. They also knew that they wouldn't get the process right the first time, but they still needed to start somewhere.

SCIENCE of Innovation

Innovation is a key topic in business, and is about turning ideas into solutions that add value from a customer's perspective. SCIENCE is an acronym for strategies to focus on for innovation: Sized right, Continuous innovation, Iterative rapid prototyping, Everyone can, Newness Fallacy, Conductive setting, and Emulate. These strategies can help create a conducive environment for innovation, and enable everyone to innovate. Embarking on a journey of innovation can be challenging, but with the right strategies, it can be successful.

Accountability or Nothing

Accountability is a reflection of self-worth, self-confidence and determination, and it is important to deliver on personal accountability. This story is helpful for both specialist contributors and team leaders, and outlines how to be accountable. It emphasizes the importance of putting your hand up, being accountable regardless of the outcome, not basing accountability on visibility, having integrity, fixing issues even if you didn't cause them, valuing the word you give, being determined, and making accountability a habit. Leaders should encourage and reward accountability in order to have a strong team that can be counted on to deliver.

Sprint Cadence- To Follow or Not Follow

This article discusses the benefits and pitfalls of having scrum teams follow the same sprint cadence. Benefits include microservices and dependencies, sprint planning time, scrum-of-scrums, multiple dependencies, continuous improvement, and an analogy from nature. Pitfalls or concerns include dependencies not being in the same sprint, scrum and Kanban teams, and all teams planning at the same time leading to chaos. Lessons learned include the importance of cadence being compared to the synchronized activities of an NFL team and the benefits of teams following the same sprint cadence.

Minimum Viable Process (!Product)

The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has been used to define and ship products and can be applied to processes as well. To reduce resistance to process, it is important to understand the psychological reasons behind it and to introduce processes iteratively, gathering feedback and evolving them. It is also important to periodically take a critical look at all processes and decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. Doing this will help build the right set of processes and reduce resistance by bringing in rewards in increments.

Personal Brand Management

This article discusses how to apply two common models used in product development, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Kano Model, to personal branding. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and the Kano Model states that basic needs must be met and delighters should be provided to create an awe effect. The article suggests that by meeting basic needs and providing delighters, one can improve their NPS and create a strong personal brand.

Establishing a Better Relationship Between Engineers and Customers

In enterprise software, it is important for engineers to understand customer needs and pains in order to create real business value. Managers should ensure that product managers, architects, and product owners focus on the 'why' of a feature and that engineers have the opportunity to listen in on customer calls and even visit customer sites. This will help build empathy between the customer and the engineering team, and ensure that engineers understand what the customer is doing with the product they are building.

Building Remote Connections

This article discusses how to create meaningful connections through communication, which can be difficult due to timidness or feelings of inferiority. It suggests practicing active listening, establishing individual connections, spending in-person time together, leaving gap room in meetings, and exposing vulnerabilities to build trust and comfort. The lessons learned are that active listening breaks down insecurities, developing relationships outside of work builds trust, leaving gaps in meetings helps more reserved people find their voice, and exposing personal sides opens up communication.

Infrastructuring On-Call Rotation

This article outlines the infrastructure and strategies put in place for on-call and after-hours support. It includes a three-person rotation with a primary and secondary engineer, plus a product team member, and a weekly hand-off meeting. Everyone participates in the rotation, and the primary keeps a journal. Communication is clear and regular updates are sent every 15 minutes. The article also highlights the importance of a release schedule and exposing junior engineers to on-call.

The Collaborative Development of a Roadmap

The CTO/CPO has been running product, design, and engineering for 15+ years and has shifted to a more collaborative strategy for developing and implementing a roadmap. This involves having ongoing conversations with department heads, executives, and stakeholders to gain knowledge and build relationships, as well as having conversations with the board and CEO about the company's vision. The CTO/CPO then puts together a roadmap based on the collected data and presents it at an off-site. Through this process, the CTO/CPO has learned the importance of aligning on foundational aspects before presenting a roadmap, having constant conversations and feedback about potential roadmaps, and arming themselves with useful information and feedback prior to presenting a roadmap.

Restructuring A Product Team

This article discusses the challenge of structuring a team to work on an umbrella product with 20 sub-products. The author's solution was to slice the umbrella product into sub-products based on user intent and to keep teams as small as possible. To keep all teams on the same page, biweekly all team meetings were held. The author also found that it was better to give product manager duties to a designer or engineer until a new PM could be hired and onboarded.

Build Better Relationships through Open Communication with Clients

The speaker led product and operations at a SaaS company providing an incident management and communications platform. One of their clients, an energy company, was tough on them and didn't like changes to the platform. The speaker built a relationship with the executive responsible for risk management and business continuity at the customer by being open and honest about their own company challenges and listening to the customer's concerns. This process led to better communication and understanding between the company and their clients, resulting in better relationships, greater understanding, and greater retention.

Maintain Dispassionate Objectivity when Conflict-Solving

A strategy consultant was hired to help stand up a software joint venture between two US government-sponsored financial entities. The consultant was able to build relationships with stakeholders across multiple companies, hold weekly status meetings, and expose different teams' positions on various topics to de-politicize the situation. As a result, the consultant was successful in helping the JV execs and parent companies reach an agreement, winning them tens of millions of dollars in business. The consultant was also asked to join future projects dealing with similar issues.

Sometimes the Messenger is as Important as the Message

The technology consultancy I worked for was acquired by a large advertising conglomerate, and I joined the leadership team to lead the transformation PMO. I encountered many problems, but the biggest one was team members of various agencies not wanting to participate in data sharing. I spoke with the CEOs of each agency and they agreed to endorse the sharing, which allowed them to participate in more projects and the rest of the group benefited from their knowledge. This showed the importance of hearing about the benefits from their own leaders, who had already earned the respect of their teams.

Separating Commercial Software Development to its Own Department

This project was about developing a strategy for better managing software IP at a digital consulting firm. An operating model was developed and endorsed by CTOs and other product leaders, and was adopted by the consulting firm and its parent organization. The benefits of separating commercial software development to its own department include creating a consistent sales message and process, higher margins, better quality and consistent value for clients, and more productive teams.

Being Comfortable in Unfamiliar Territory

In order to take advantage of growth opportunities, one must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means cultivating a fearless quality and accepting that you are in control of your career. To do this, practice studying, communicating, prototyping, testing hypotheses, and making data-driven decisions. This will help you to feel empowered and work confidently in many situations.

Establishing Career Growth and OKR’s for New Team Members

This article discusses the importance of setting career-driven goals for incoming engineers. The author suggests establishing open communication and helping engineers write OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) to ensure they are properly aligned with their career development. The author also emphasizes the importance of making OKR's public and measurable, and using them as an opportunity to grow out of one's comfort zone.

Managing Misaligned OKRs to Prevent Churn and Increase Productivity

When the manager of a new site reliability engineering team was given a set of OKRs to fulfill, they realized that the amount of technical debt and firefighting was too high to meet the expectations. To address this, they adopted their own vision of a successful team, abdicated their order-making power, and distributed the responsibilities of the team across the company. As a result, they were able to retain team members, avoid burn out, and increase productivity. This experience taught the manager to understand the problem their boss was trying to solve, have a solid case for why they solved it differently, and to follow the spirit of their boss's orders rather than the letter.

Investigating the Need For Rewriting a Code Base and Then Successfully Doing So

The codebase inherited by the author was overly complex and difficult to navigate, resulting in a lot of wasted time. After investigation, the author and their senior engineer concluded that a rewrite was necessary, but the manager was resistant due to past experiences with rewrites taking 3-4x the time allotted. The author was able to convince the manager to move forward with the rewrite, which took 6 months instead of the estimated 4 months. The rewrite was successful, resulting in faster product wishlists, happier employees, and a feature that took a month to build in the old codebase taking only seven hours in the new codebase. Hiring new people and breaking up responsibility was especially helpful in the process.

Delegating Responsibility in a Culture of Continuous Deployment

The manager of an engineering team has a duty to lead their engineers to become individually responsible for their work and ship it whenever it is ready. To do this, the manager delegates responsibility to each employee in the form of a significant feature and provides support when needed. The manager has learned that delegated responsibility is an efficient practice and discusses it with potential hires to see if they would thrive in this environment. Those who do take ownership, require little to no management, and are extremely productive.

Creating OKR’s for the First Time

This article outlines the process a company went through to create OKRs. They read a book on the topic, had brainstorming sessions to come up with objectives, and broke them down into quarterly goals. They learned that it is important to design OKRs at the right time, have milestones for measuring success, and identify the teams that are best for the objectives. They also knew that they wouldn't get the process right the first time, but they still needed to start somewhere.

SCIENCE of Innovation

Innovation is a key topic in business, and is about turning ideas into solutions that add value from a customer's perspective. SCIENCE is an acronym for strategies to focus on for innovation: Sized right, Continuous innovation, Iterative rapid prototyping, Everyone can, Newness Fallacy, Conductive setting, and Emulate. These strategies can help create a conducive environment for innovation, and enable everyone to innovate. Embarking on a journey of innovation can be challenging, but with the right strategies, it can be successful.

Accountability or Nothing

Accountability is a reflection of self-worth, self-confidence and determination, and it is important to deliver on personal accountability. This story is helpful for both specialist contributors and team leaders, and outlines how to be accountable. It emphasizes the importance of putting your hand up, being accountable regardless of the outcome, not basing accountability on visibility, having integrity, fixing issues even if you didn't cause them, valuing the word you give, being determined, and making accountability a habit. Leaders should encourage and reward accountability in order to have a strong team that can be counted on to deliver.

Sprint Cadence- To Follow or Not Follow

This article discusses the benefits and pitfalls of having scrum teams follow the same sprint cadence. Benefits include microservices and dependencies, sprint planning time, scrum-of-scrums, multiple dependencies, continuous improvement, and an analogy from nature. Pitfalls or concerns include dependencies not being in the same sprint, scrum and Kanban teams, and all teams planning at the same time leading to chaos. Lessons learned include the importance of cadence being compared to the synchronized activities of an NFL team and the benefits of teams following the same sprint cadence.

Minimum Viable Process (!Product)

The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has been used to define and ship products and can be applied to processes as well. To reduce resistance to process, it is important to understand the psychological reasons behind it and to introduce processes iteratively, gathering feedback and evolving them. It is also important to periodically take a critical look at all processes and decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. Doing this will help build the right set of processes and reduce resistance by bringing in rewards in increments.

Personal Brand Management

This article discusses how to apply two common models used in product development, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Kano Model, to personal branding. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and the Kano Model states that basic needs must be met and delighters should be provided to create an awe effect. The article suggests that by meeting basic needs and providing delighters, one can improve their NPS and create a strong personal brand.

Establishing a Better Relationship Between Engineers and Customers

In enterprise software, it is important for engineers to understand customer needs and pains in order to create real business value. Managers should ensure that product managers, architects, and product owners focus on the 'why' of a feature and that engineers have the opportunity to listen in on customer calls and even visit customer sites. This will help build empathy between the customer and the engineering team, and ensure that engineers understand what the customer is doing with the product they are building.

Building Remote Connections

This article discusses how to create meaningful connections through communication, which can be difficult due to timidness or feelings of inferiority. It suggests practicing active listening, establishing individual connections, spending in-person time together, leaving gap room in meetings, and exposing vulnerabilities to build trust and comfort. The lessons learned are that active listening breaks down insecurities, developing relationships outside of work builds trust, leaving gaps in meetings helps more reserved people find their voice, and exposing personal sides opens up communication.

Infrastructuring On-Call Rotation

This article outlines the infrastructure and strategies put in place for on-call and after-hours support. It includes a three-person rotation with a primary and secondary engineer, plus a product team member, and a weekly hand-off meeting. Everyone participates in the rotation, and the primary keeps a journal. Communication is clear and regular updates are sent every 15 minutes. The article also highlights the importance of a release schedule and exposing junior engineers to on-call.

The Collaborative Development of a Roadmap

The CTO/CPO has been running product, design, and engineering for 15+ years and has shifted to a more collaborative strategy for developing and implementing a roadmap. This involves having ongoing conversations with department heads, executives, and stakeholders to gain knowledge and build relationships, as well as having conversations with the board and CEO about the company's vision. The CTO/CPO then puts together a roadmap based on the collected data and presents it at an off-site. Through this process, the CTO/CPO has learned the importance of aligning on foundational aspects before presenting a roadmap, having constant conversations and feedback about potential roadmaps, and arming themselves with useful information and feedback prior to presenting a roadmap.

Restructuring A Product Team

This article discusses the challenge of structuring a team to work on an umbrella product with 20 sub-products. The author's solution was to slice the umbrella product into sub-products based on user intent and to keep teams as small as possible. To keep all teams on the same page, biweekly all team meetings were held. The author also found that it was better to give product manager duties to a designer or engineer until a new PM could be hired and onboarded.

Build Better Relationships through Open Communication with Clients

The speaker led product and operations at a SaaS company providing an incident management and communications platform. One of their clients, an energy company, was tough on them and didn't like changes to the platform. The speaker built a relationship with the executive responsible for risk management and business continuity at the customer by being open and honest about their own company challenges and listening to the customer's concerns. This process led to better communication and understanding between the company and their clients, resulting in better relationships, greater understanding, and greater retention.

Maintain Dispassionate Objectivity when Conflict-Solving

A strategy consultant was hired to help stand up a software joint venture between two US government-sponsored financial entities. The consultant was able to build relationships with stakeholders across multiple companies, hold weekly status meetings, and expose different teams' positions on various topics to de-politicize the situation. As a result, the consultant was successful in helping the JV execs and parent companies reach an agreement, winning them tens of millions of dollars in business. The consultant was also asked to join future projects dealing with similar issues.

Sometimes the Messenger is as Important as the Message

The technology consultancy I worked for was acquired by a large advertising conglomerate, and I joined the leadership team to lead the transformation PMO. I encountered many problems, but the biggest one was team members of various agencies not wanting to participate in data sharing. I spoke with the CEOs of each agency and they agreed to endorse the sharing, which allowed them to participate in more projects and the rest of the group benefited from their knowledge. This showed the importance of hearing about the benefits from their own leaders, who had already earned the respect of their teams.

Separating Commercial Software Development to its Own Department

This project was about developing a strategy for better managing software IP at a digital consulting firm. An operating model was developed and endorsed by CTOs and other product leaders, and was adopted by the consulting firm and its parent organization. The benefits of separating commercial software development to its own department include creating a consistent sales message and process, higher margins, better quality and consistent value for clients, and more productive teams.

Being Comfortable in Unfamiliar Territory

In order to take advantage of growth opportunities, one must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means cultivating a fearless quality and accepting that you are in control of your career. To do this, practice studying, communicating, prototyping, testing hypotheses, and making data-driven decisions. This will help you to feel empowered and work confidently in many situations.

Establishing Career Growth and OKR’s for New Team Members

This article discusses the importance of setting career-driven goals for incoming engineers. The author suggests establishing open communication and helping engineers write OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) to ensure they are properly aligned with their career development. The author also emphasizes the importance of making OKR's public and measurable, and using them as an opportunity to grow out of one's comfort zone.

Managing Misaligned OKRs to Prevent Churn and Increase Productivity

When the manager of a new site reliability engineering team was given a set of OKRs to fulfill, they realized that the amount of technical debt and firefighting was too high to meet the expectations. To address this, they adopted their own vision of a successful team, abdicated their order-making power, and distributed the responsibilities of the team across the company. As a result, they were able to retain team members, avoid burn out, and increase productivity. This experience taught the manager to understand the problem their boss was trying to solve, have a solid case for why they solved it differently, and to follow the spirit of their boss's orders rather than the letter.

Investigating the Need For Rewriting a Code Base and Then Successfully Doing So

The codebase inherited by the author was overly complex and difficult to navigate, resulting in a lot of wasted time. After investigation, the author and their senior engineer concluded that a rewrite was necessary, but the manager was resistant due to past experiences with rewrites taking 3-4x the time allotted. The author was able to convince the manager to move forward with the rewrite, which took 6 months instead of the estimated 4 months. The rewrite was successful, resulting in faster product wishlists, happier employees, and a feature that took a month to build in the old codebase taking only seven hours in the new codebase. Hiring new people and breaking up responsibility was especially helpful in the process.

Delegating Responsibility in a Culture of Continuous Deployment

The manager of an engineering team has a duty to lead their engineers to become individually responsible for their work and ship it whenever it is ready. To do this, the manager delegates responsibility to each employee in the form of a significant feature and provides support when needed. The manager has learned that delegated responsibility is an efficient practice and discusses it with potential hires to see if they would thrive in this environment. Those who do take ownership, require little to no management, and are extremely productive.

Creating OKR’s for the First Time

This article outlines the process a company went through to create OKRs. They read a book on the topic, had brainstorming sessions to come up with objectives, and broke them down into quarterly goals. They learned that it is important to design OKRs at the right time, have milestones for measuring success, and identify the teams that are best for the objectives. They also knew that they wouldn't get the process right the first time, but they still needed to start somewhere.

SCIENCE of Innovation

Innovation is a key topic in business, and is about turning ideas into solutions that add value from a customer's perspective. SCIENCE is an acronym for strategies to focus on for innovation: Sized right, Continuous innovation, Iterative rapid prototyping, Everyone can, Newness Fallacy, Conductive setting, and Emulate. These strategies can help create a conducive environment for innovation, and enable everyone to innovate. Embarking on a journey of innovation can be challenging, but with the right strategies, it can be successful.

Accountability or Nothing

Accountability is a reflection of self-worth, self-confidence and determination, and it is important to deliver on personal accountability. This story is helpful for both specialist contributors and team leaders, and outlines how to be accountable. It emphasizes the importance of putting your hand up, being accountable regardless of the outcome, not basing accountability on visibility, having integrity, fixing issues even if you didn't cause them, valuing the word you give, being determined, and making accountability a habit. Leaders should encourage and reward accountability in order to have a strong team that can be counted on to deliver.

Sprint Cadence- To Follow or Not Follow

This article discusses the benefits and pitfalls of having scrum teams follow the same sprint cadence. Benefits include microservices and dependencies, sprint planning time, scrum-of-scrums, multiple dependencies, continuous improvement, and an analogy from nature. Pitfalls or concerns include dependencies not being in the same sprint, scrum and Kanban teams, and all teams planning at the same time leading to chaos. Lessons learned include the importance of cadence being compared to the synchronized activities of an NFL team and the benefits of teams following the same sprint cadence.

Minimum Viable Process (!Product)

The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has been used to define and ship products and can be applied to processes as well. To reduce resistance to process, it is important to understand the psychological reasons behind it and to introduce processes iteratively, gathering feedback and evolving them. It is also important to periodically take a critical look at all processes and decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. Doing this will help build the right set of processes and reduce resistance by bringing in rewards in increments.

Personal Brand Management

This article discusses how to apply two common models used in product development, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Kano Model, to personal branding. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and the Kano Model states that basic needs must be met and delighters should be provided to create an awe effect. The article suggests that by meeting basic needs and providing delighters, one can improve their NPS and create a strong personal brand.

Establishing a Better Relationship Between Engineers and Customers

In enterprise software, it is important for engineers to understand customer needs and pains in order to create real business value. Managers should ensure that product managers, architects, and product owners focus on the 'why' of a feature and that engineers have the opportunity to listen in on customer calls and even visit customer sites. This will help build empathy between the customer and the engineering team, and ensure that engineers understand what the customer is doing with the product they are building.

Building Remote Connections

This article discusses how to create meaningful connections through communication, which can be difficult due to timidness or feelings of inferiority. It suggests practicing active listening, establishing individual connections, spending in-person time together, leaving gap room in meetings, and exposing vulnerabilities to build trust and comfort. The lessons learned are that active listening breaks down insecurities, developing relationships outside of work builds trust, leaving gaps in meetings helps more reserved people find their voice, and exposing personal sides opens up communication.

Infrastructuring On-Call Rotation

This article outlines the infrastructure and strategies put in place for on-call and after-hours support. It includes a three-person rotation with a primary and secondary engineer, plus a product team member, and a weekly hand-off meeting. Everyone participates in the rotation, and the primary keeps a journal. Communication is clear and regular updates are sent every 15 minutes. The article also highlights the importance of a release schedule and exposing junior engineers to on-call.

The Collaborative Development of a Roadmap

The CTO/CPO has been running product, design, and engineering for 15+ years and has shifted to a more collaborative strategy for developing and implementing a roadmap. This involves having ongoing conversations with department heads, executives, and stakeholders to gain knowledge and build relationships, as well as having conversations with the board and CEO about the company's vision. The CTO/CPO then puts together a roadmap based on the collected data and presents it at an off-site. Through this process, the CTO/CPO has learned the importance of aligning on foundational aspects before presenting a roadmap, having constant conversations and feedback about potential roadmaps, and arming themselves with useful information and feedback prior to presenting a roadmap.

Restructuring A Product Team

This article discusses the challenge of structuring a team to work on an umbrella product with 20 sub-products. The author's solution was to slice the umbrella product into sub-products based on user intent and to keep teams as small as possible. To keep all teams on the same page, biweekly all team meetings were held. The author also found that it was better to give product manager duties to a designer or engineer until a new PM could be hired and onboarded.

Build Better Relationships through Open Communication with Clients

The speaker led product and operations at a SaaS company providing an incident management and communications platform. One of their clients, an energy company, was tough on them and didn't like changes to the platform. The speaker built a relationship with the executive responsible for risk management and business continuity at the customer by being open and honest about their own company challenges and listening to the customer's concerns. This process led to better communication and understanding between the company and their clients, resulting in better relationships, greater understanding, and greater retention.

Maintain Dispassionate Objectivity when Conflict-Solving

A strategy consultant was hired to help stand up a software joint venture between two US government-sponsored financial entities. The consultant was able to build relationships with stakeholders across multiple companies, hold weekly status meetings, and expose different teams' positions on various topics to de-politicize the situation. As a result, the consultant was successful in helping the JV execs and parent companies reach an agreement, winning them tens of millions of dollars in business. The consultant was also asked to join future projects dealing with similar issues.

Sometimes the Messenger is as Important as the Message

The technology consultancy I worked for was acquired by a large advertising conglomerate, and I joined the leadership team to lead the transformation PMO. I encountered many problems, but the biggest one was team members of various agencies not wanting to participate in data sharing. I spoke with the CEOs of each agency and they agreed to endorse the sharing, which allowed them to participate in more projects and the rest of the group benefited from their knowledge. This showed the importance of hearing about the benefits from their own leaders, who had already earned the respect of their teams.

Separating Commercial Software Development to its Own Department

This project was about developing a strategy for better managing software IP at a digital consulting firm. An operating model was developed and endorsed by CTOs and other product leaders, and was adopted by the consulting firm and its parent organization. The benefits of separating commercial software development to its own department include creating a consistent sales message and process, higher margins, better quality and consistent value for clients, and more productive teams.

Being Comfortable in Unfamiliar Territory

In order to take advantage of growth opportunities, one must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means cultivating a fearless quality and accepting that you are in control of your career. To do this, practice studying, communicating, prototyping, testing hypotheses, and making data-driven decisions. This will help you to feel empowered and work confidently in many situations.

Establishing Career Growth and OKR’s for New Team Members

This article discusses the importance of setting career-driven goals for incoming engineers. The author suggests establishing open communication and helping engineers write OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) to ensure they are properly aligned with their career development. The author also emphasizes the importance of making OKR's public and measurable, and using them as an opportunity to grow out of one's comfort zone.

Managing Misaligned OKRs to Prevent Churn and Increase Productivity

When the manager of a new site reliability engineering team was given a set of OKRs to fulfill, they realized that the amount of technical debt and firefighting was too high to meet the expectations. To address this, they adopted their own vision of a successful team, abdicated their order-making power, and distributed the responsibilities of the team across the company. As a result, they were able to retain team members, avoid burn out, and increase productivity. This experience taught the manager to understand the problem their boss was trying to solve, have a solid case for why they solved it differently, and to follow the spirit of their boss's orders rather than the letter.

Investigating the Need For Rewriting a Code Base and Then Successfully Doing So

The codebase inherited by the author was overly complex and difficult to navigate, resulting in a lot of wasted time. After investigation, the author and their senior engineer concluded that a rewrite was necessary, but the manager was resistant due to past experiences with rewrites taking 3-4x the time allotted. The author was able to convince the manager to move forward with the rewrite, which took 6 months instead of the estimated 4 months. The rewrite was successful, resulting in faster product wishlists, happier employees, and a feature that took a month to build in the old codebase taking only seven hours in the new codebase. Hiring new people and breaking up responsibility was especially helpful in the process.

Delegating Responsibility in a Culture of Continuous Deployment

The manager of an engineering team has a duty to lead their engineers to become individually responsible for their work and ship it whenever it is ready. To do this, the manager delegates responsibility to each employee in the form of a significant feature and provides support when needed. The manager has learned that delegated responsibility is an efficient practice and discusses it with potential hires to see if they would thrive in this environment. Those who do take ownership, require little to no management, and are extremely productive.

Creating OKR’s for the First Time

This article outlines the process a company went through to create OKRs. They read a book on the topic, had brainstorming sessions to come up with objectives, and broke them down into quarterly goals. They learned that it is important to design OKRs at the right time, have milestones for measuring success, and identify the teams that are best for the objectives. They also knew that they wouldn't get the process right the first time, but they still needed to start somewhere.

SCIENCE of Innovation

Innovation is a key topic in business, and is about turning ideas into solutions that add value from a customer's perspective. SCIENCE is an acronym for strategies to focus on for innovation: Sized right, Continuous innovation, Iterative rapid prototyping, Everyone can, Newness Fallacy, Conductive setting, and Emulate. These strategies can help create a conducive environment for innovation, and enable everyone to innovate. Embarking on a journey of innovation can be challenging, but with the right strategies, it can be successful.

Accountability or Nothing

Accountability is a reflection of self-worth, self-confidence and determination, and it is important to deliver on personal accountability. This story is helpful for both specialist contributors and team leaders, and outlines how to be accountable. It emphasizes the importance of putting your hand up, being accountable regardless of the outcome, not basing accountability on visibility, having integrity, fixing issues even if you didn't cause them, valuing the word you give, being determined, and making accountability a habit. Leaders should encourage and reward accountability in order to have a strong team that can be counted on to deliver.

Sprint Cadence- To Follow or Not Follow

This article discusses the benefits and pitfalls of having scrum teams follow the same sprint cadence. Benefits include microservices and dependencies, sprint planning time, scrum-of-scrums, multiple dependencies, continuous improvement, and an analogy from nature. Pitfalls or concerns include dependencies not being in the same sprint, scrum and Kanban teams, and all teams planning at the same time leading to chaos. Lessons learned include the importance of cadence being compared to the synchronized activities of an NFL team and the benefits of teams following the same sprint cadence.

Minimum Viable Process (!Product)

The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has been used to define and ship products and can be applied to processes as well. To reduce resistance to process, it is important to understand the psychological reasons behind it and to introduce processes iteratively, gathering feedback and evolving them. It is also important to periodically take a critical look at all processes and decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. Doing this will help build the right set of processes and reduce resistance by bringing in rewards in increments.

Personal Brand Management

This article discusses how to apply two common models used in product development, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Kano Model, to personal branding. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and the Kano Model states that basic needs must be met and delighters should be provided to create an awe effect. The article suggests that by meeting basic needs and providing delighters, one can improve their NPS and create a strong personal brand.

Establishing a Better Relationship Between Engineers and Customers

In enterprise software, it is important for engineers to understand customer needs and pains in order to create real business value. Managers should ensure that product managers, architects, and product owners focus on the 'why' of a feature and that engineers have the opportunity to listen in on customer calls and even visit customer sites. This will help build empathy between the customer and the engineering team, and ensure that engineers understand what the customer is doing with the product they are building.

Building Remote Connections

This article discusses how to create meaningful connections through communication, which can be difficult due to timidness or feelings of inferiority. It suggests practicing active listening, establishing individual connections, spending in-person time together, leaving gap room in meetings, and exposing vulnerabilities to build trust and comfort. The lessons learned are that active listening breaks down insecurities, developing relationships outside of work builds trust, leaving gaps in meetings helps more reserved people find their voice, and exposing personal sides opens up communication.

Infrastructuring On-Call Rotation

This article outlines the infrastructure and strategies put in place for on-call and after-hours support. It includes a three-person rotation with a primary and secondary engineer, plus a product team member, and a weekly hand-off meeting. Everyone participates in the rotation, and the primary keeps a journal. Communication is clear and regular updates are sent every 15 minutes. The article also highlights the importance of a release schedule and exposing junior engineers to on-call.

The Collaborative Development of a Roadmap

The CTO/CPO has been running product, design, and engineering for 15+ years and has shifted to a more collaborative strategy for developing and implementing a roadmap. This involves having ongoing conversations with department heads, executives, and stakeholders to gain knowledge and build relationships, as well as having conversations with the board and CEO about the company's vision. The CTO/CPO then puts together a roadmap based on the collected data and presents it at an off-site. Through this process, the CTO/CPO has learned the importance of aligning on foundational aspects before presenting a roadmap, having constant conversations and feedback about potential roadmaps, and arming themselves with useful information and feedback prior to presenting a roadmap.

Restructuring A Product Team

This article discusses the challenge of structuring a team to work on an umbrella product with 20 sub-products. The author's solution was to slice the umbrella product into sub-products based on user intent and to keep teams as small as possible. To keep all teams on the same page, biweekly all team meetings were held. The author also found that it was better to give product manager duties to a designer or engineer until a new PM could be hired and onboarded.

Build Better Relationships through Open Communication with Clients

The speaker led product and operations at a SaaS company providing an incident management and communications platform. One of their clients, an energy company, was tough on them and didn't like changes to the platform. The speaker built a relationship with the executive responsible for risk management and business continuity at the customer by being open and honest about their own company challenges and listening to the customer's concerns. This process led to better communication and understanding between the company and their clients, resulting in better relationships, greater understanding, and greater retention.

Maintain Dispassionate Objectivity when Conflict-Solving

A strategy consultant was hired to help stand up a software joint venture between two US government-sponsored financial entities. The consultant was able to build relationships with stakeholders across multiple companies, hold weekly status meetings, and expose different teams' positions on various topics to de-politicize the situation. As a result, the consultant was successful in helping the JV execs and parent companies reach an agreement, winning them tens of millions of dollars in business. The consultant was also asked to join future projects dealing with similar issues.

Sometimes the Messenger is as Important as the Message

The technology consultancy I worked for was acquired by a large advertising conglomerate, and I joined the leadership team to lead the transformation PMO. I encountered many problems, but the biggest one was team members of various agencies not wanting to participate in data sharing. I spoke with the CEOs of each agency and they agreed to endorse the sharing, which allowed them to participate in more projects and the rest of the group benefited from their knowledge. This showed the importance of hearing about the benefits from their own leaders, who had already earned the respect of their teams.

Separating Commercial Software Development to its Own Department

This project was about developing a strategy for better managing software IP at a digital consulting firm. An operating model was developed and endorsed by CTOs and other product leaders, and was adopted by the consulting firm and its parent organization. The benefits of separating commercial software development to its own department include creating a consistent sales message and process, higher margins, better quality and consistent value for clients, and more productive teams.

Being Comfortable in Unfamiliar Territory

In order to take advantage of growth opportunities, one must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means cultivating a fearless quality and accepting that you are in control of your career. To do this, practice studying, communicating, prototyping, testing hypotheses, and making data-driven decisions. This will help you to feel empowered and work confidently in many situations.

Establishing Career Growth and OKR’s for New Team Members

This article discusses the importance of setting career-driven goals for incoming engineers. The author suggests establishing open communication and helping engineers write OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) to ensure they are properly aligned with their career development. The author also emphasizes the importance of making OKR's public and measurable, and using them as an opportunity to grow out of one's comfort zone.

Managing Misaligned OKRs to Prevent Churn and Increase Productivity

When the manager of a new site reliability engineering team was given a set of OKRs to fulfill, they realized that the amount of technical debt and firefighting was too high to meet the expectations. To address this, they adopted their own vision of a successful team, abdicated their order-making power, and distributed the responsibilities of the team across the company. As a result, they were able to retain team members, avoid burn out, and increase productivity. This experience taught the manager to understand the problem their boss was trying to solve, have a solid case for why they solved it differently, and to follow the spirit of their boss's orders rather than the letter.

Investigating the Need For Rewriting a Code Base and Then Successfully Doing So

The codebase inherited by the author was overly complex and difficult to navigate, resulting in a lot of wasted time. After investigation, the author and their senior engineer concluded that a rewrite was necessary, but the manager was resistant due to past experiences with rewrites taking 3-4x the time allotted. The author was able to convince the manager to move forward with the rewrite, which took 6 months instead of the estimated 4 months. The rewrite was successful, resulting in faster product wishlists, happier employees, and a feature that took a month to build in the old codebase taking only seven hours in the new codebase. Hiring new people and breaking up responsibility was especially helpful in the process.

Delegating Responsibility in a Culture of Continuous Deployment

The manager of an engineering team has a duty to lead their engineers to become individually responsible for their work and ship it whenever it is ready. To do this, the manager delegates responsibility to each employee in the form of a significant feature and provides support when needed. The manager has learned that delegated responsibility is an efficient practice and discusses it with potential hires to see if they would thrive in this environment. Those who do take ownership, require little to no management, and are extremely productive.

Creating OKR’s for the First Time

This article outlines the process a company went through to create OKRs. They read a book on the topic, had brainstorming sessions to come up with objectives, and broke them down into quarterly goals. They learned that it is important to design OKRs at the right time, have milestones for measuring success, and identify the teams that are best for the objectives. They also knew that they wouldn't get the process right the first time, but they still needed to start somewhere.

SCIENCE of Innovation

Innovation is a key topic in business, and is about turning ideas into solutions that add value from a customer's perspective. SCIENCE is an acronym for strategies to focus on for innovation: Sized right, Continuous innovation, Iterative rapid prototyping, Everyone can, Newness Fallacy, Conductive setting, and Emulate. These strategies can help create a conducive environment for innovation, and enable everyone to innovate. Embarking on a journey of innovation can be challenging, but with the right strategies, it can be successful.

Accountability or Nothing

Accountability is a reflection of self-worth, self-confidence and determination, and it is important to deliver on personal accountability. This story is helpful for both specialist contributors and team leaders, and outlines how to be accountable. It emphasizes the importance of putting your hand up, being accountable regardless of the outcome, not basing accountability on visibility, having integrity, fixing issues even if you didn't cause them, valuing the word you give, being determined, and making accountability a habit. Leaders should encourage and reward accountability in order to have a strong team that can be counted on to deliver.

Sprint Cadence- To Follow or Not Follow

This article discusses the benefits and pitfalls of having scrum teams follow the same sprint cadence. Benefits include microservices and dependencies, sprint planning time, scrum-of-scrums, multiple dependencies, continuous improvement, and an analogy from nature. Pitfalls or concerns include dependencies not being in the same sprint, scrum and Kanban teams, and all teams planning at the same time leading to chaos. Lessons learned include the importance of cadence being compared to the synchronized activities of an NFL team and the benefits of teams following the same sprint cadence.

Minimum Viable Process (!Product)

The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has been used to define and ship products and can be applied to processes as well. To reduce resistance to process, it is important to understand the psychological reasons behind it and to introduce processes iteratively, gathering feedback and evolving them. It is also important to periodically take a critical look at all processes and decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. Doing this will help build the right set of processes and reduce resistance by bringing in rewards in increments.

Personal Brand Management

This article discusses how to apply two common models used in product development, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Kano Model, to personal branding. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and the Kano Model states that basic needs must be met and delighters should be provided to create an awe effect. The article suggests that by meeting basic needs and providing delighters, one can improve their NPS and create a strong personal brand.

Establishing a Better Relationship Between Engineers and Customers

In enterprise software, it is important for engineers to understand customer needs and pains in order to create real business value. Managers should ensure that product managers, architects, and product owners focus on the 'why' of a feature and that engineers have the opportunity to listen in on customer calls and even visit customer sites. This will help build empathy between the customer and the engineering team, and ensure that engineers understand what the customer is doing with the product they are building.

Building Remote Connections

This article discusses how to create meaningful connections through communication, which can be difficult due to timidness or feelings of inferiority. It suggests practicing active listening, establishing individual connections, spending in-person time together, leaving gap room in meetings, and exposing vulnerabilities to build trust and comfort. The lessons learned are that active listening breaks down insecurities, developing relationships outside of work builds trust, leaving gaps in meetings helps more reserved people find their voice, and exposing personal sides opens up communication.

Infrastructuring On-Call Rotation

This article outlines the infrastructure and strategies put in place for on-call and after-hours support. It includes a three-person rotation with a primary and secondary engineer, plus a product team member, and a weekly hand-off meeting. Everyone participates in the rotation, and the primary keeps a journal. Communication is clear and regular updates are sent every 15 minutes. The article also highlights the importance of a release schedule and exposing junior engineers to on-call.

The Collaborative Development of a Roadmap

The CTO/CPO has been running product, design, and engineering for 15+ years and has shifted to a more collaborative strategy for developing and implementing a roadmap. This involves having ongoing conversations with department heads, executives, and stakeholders to gain knowledge and build relationships, as well as having conversations with the board and CEO about the company's vision. The CTO/CPO then puts together a roadmap based on the collected data and presents it at an off-site. Through this process, the CTO/CPO has learned the importance of aligning on foundational aspects before presenting a roadmap, having constant conversations and feedback about potential roadmaps, and arming themselves with useful information and feedback prior to presenting a roadmap.

Restructuring A Product Team

This article discusses the challenge of structuring a team to work on an umbrella product with 20 sub-products. The author's solution was to slice the umbrella product into sub-products based on user intent and to keep teams as small as possible. To keep all teams on the same page, biweekly all team meetings were held. The author also found that it was better to give product manager duties to a designer or engineer until a new PM could be hired and onboarded.

Build Better Relationships through Open Communication with Clients

The speaker led product and operations at a SaaS company providing an incident management and communications platform. One of their clients, an energy company, was tough on them and didn't like changes to the platform. The speaker built a relationship with the executive responsible for risk management and business continuity at the customer by being open and honest about their own company challenges and listening to the customer's concerns. This process led to better communication and understanding between the company and their clients, resulting in better relationships, greater understanding, and greater retention.

Maintain Dispassionate Objectivity when Conflict-Solving

A strategy consultant was hired to help stand up a software joint venture between two US government-sponsored financial entities. The consultant was able to build relationships with stakeholders across multiple companies, hold weekly status meetings, and expose different teams' positions on various topics to de-politicize the situation. As a result, the consultant was successful in helping the JV execs and parent companies reach an agreement, winning them tens of millions of dollars in business. The consultant was also asked to join future projects dealing with similar issues.

Sometimes the Messenger is as Important as the Message

The technology consultancy I worked for was acquired by a large advertising conglomerate, and I joined the leadership team to lead the transformation PMO. I encountered many problems, but the biggest one was team members of various agencies not wanting to participate in data sharing. I spoke with the CEOs of each agency and they agreed to endorse the sharing, which allowed them to participate in more projects and the rest of the group benefited from their knowledge. This showed the importance of hearing about the benefits from their own leaders, who had already earned the respect of their teams.

Separating Commercial Software Development to its Own Department

This project was about developing a strategy for better managing software IP at a digital consulting firm. An operating model was developed and endorsed by CTOs and other product leaders, and was adopted by the consulting firm and its parent organization. The benefits of separating commercial software development to its own department include creating a consistent sales message and process, higher margins, better quality and consistent value for clients, and more productive teams.

Being Comfortable in Unfamiliar Territory

In order to take advantage of growth opportunities, one must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means cultivating a fearless quality and accepting that you are in control of your career. To do this, practice studying, communicating, prototyping, testing hypotheses, and making data-driven decisions. This will help you to feel empowered and work confidently in many situations.

Establishing Career Growth and OKR’s for New Team Members

This article discusses the importance of setting career-driven goals for incoming engineers. The author suggests establishing open communication and helping engineers write OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) to ensure they are properly aligned with their career development. The author also emphasizes the importance of making OKR's public and measurable, and using them as an opportunity to grow out of one's comfort zone.

Managing Misaligned OKRs to Prevent Churn and Increase Productivity

When the manager of a new site reliability engineering team was given a set of OKRs to fulfill, they realized that the amount of technical debt and firefighting was too high to meet the expectations. To address this, they adopted their own vision of a successful team, abdicated their order-making power, and distributed the responsibilities of the team across the company. As a result, they were able to retain team members, avoid burn out, and increase productivity. This experience taught the manager to understand the problem their boss was trying to solve, have a solid case for why they solved it differently, and to follow the spirit of their boss's orders rather than the letter.

Investigating the Need For Rewriting a Code Base and Then Successfully Doing So

The codebase inherited by the author was overly complex and difficult to navigate, resulting in a lot of wasted time. After investigation, the author and their senior engineer concluded that a rewrite was necessary, but the manager was resistant due to past experiences with rewrites taking 3-4x the time allotted. The author was able to convince the manager to move forward with the rewrite, which took 6 months instead of the estimated 4 months. The rewrite was successful, resulting in faster product wishlists, happier employees, and a feature that took a month to build in the old codebase taking only seven hours in the new codebase. Hiring new people and breaking up responsibility was especially helpful in the process.

Delegating Responsibility in a Culture of Continuous Deployment

The manager of an engineering team has a duty to lead their engineers to become individually responsible for their work and ship it whenever it is ready. To do this, the manager delegates responsibility to each employee in the form of a significant feature and provides support when needed. The manager has learned that delegated responsibility is an efficient practice and discusses it with potential hires to see if they would thrive in this environment. Those who do take ownership, require little to no management, and are extremely productive.

Creating OKR’s for the First Time

This article outlines the process a company went through to create OKRs. They read a book on the topic, had brainstorming sessions to come up with objectives, and broke them down into quarterly goals. They learned that it is important to design OKRs at the right time, have milestones for measuring success, and identify the teams that are best for the objectives. They also knew that they wouldn't get the process right the first time, but they still needed to start somewhere.

SCIENCE of Innovation

Innovation is a key topic in business, and is about turning ideas into solutions that add value from a customer's perspective. SCIENCE is an acronym for strategies to focus on for innovation: Sized right, Continuous innovation, Iterative rapid prototyping, Everyone can, Newness Fallacy, Conductive setting, and Emulate. These strategies can help create a conducive environment for innovation, and enable everyone to innovate. Embarking on a journey of innovation can be challenging, but with the right strategies, it can be successful.

Accountability or Nothing

Accountability is a reflection of self-worth, self-confidence and determination, and it is important to deliver on personal accountability. This story is helpful for both specialist contributors and team leaders, and outlines how to be accountable. It emphasizes the importance of putting your hand up, being accountable regardless of the outcome, not basing accountability on visibility, having integrity, fixing issues even if you didn't cause them, valuing the word you give, being determined, and making accountability a habit. Leaders should encourage and reward accountability in order to have a strong team that can be counted on to deliver.

Sprint Cadence- To Follow or Not Follow

This article discusses the benefits and pitfalls of having scrum teams follow the same sprint cadence. Benefits include microservices and dependencies, sprint planning time, scrum-of-scrums, multiple dependencies, continuous improvement, and an analogy from nature. Pitfalls or concerns include dependencies not being in the same sprint, scrum and Kanban teams, and all teams planning at the same time leading to chaos. Lessons learned include the importance of cadence being compared to the synchronized activities of an NFL team and the benefits of teams following the same sprint cadence.

Minimum Viable Process (!Product)

The concept of minimum viable product (MVP) has been used to define and ship products and can be applied to processes as well. To reduce resistance to process, it is important to understand the psychological reasons behind it and to introduce processes iteratively, gathering feedback and evolving them. It is also important to periodically take a critical look at all processes and decide which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. Doing this will help build the right set of processes and reduce resistance by bringing in rewards in increments.

Personal Brand Management

This article discusses how to apply two common models used in product development, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Kano Model, to personal branding. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters, and the Kano Model states that basic needs must be met and delighters should be provided to create an awe effect. The article suggests that by meeting basic needs and providing delighters, one can improve their NPS and create a strong personal brand.

Establishing a Better Relationship Between Engineers and Customers

In enterprise software, it is important for engineers to understand customer needs and pains in order to create real business value. Managers should ensure that product managers, architects, and product owners focus on the 'why' of a feature and that engineers have the opportunity to listen in on customer calls and even visit customer sites. This will help build empathy between the customer and the engineering team, and ensure that engineers understand what the customer is doing with the product they are building.

Building Remote Connections

This article discusses how to create meaningful connections through communication, which can be difficult due to timidness or feelings of inferiority. It suggests practicing active listening, establishing individual connections, spending in-person time together, leaving gap room in meetings, and exposing vulnerabilities to build trust and comfort. The lessons learned are that active listening breaks down insecurities, developing relationships outside of work builds trust, leaving gaps in meetings helps more reserved people find their voice, and exposing personal sides opens up communication.

Infrastructuring On-Call Rotation

This article outlines the infrastructure and strategies put in place for on-call and after-hours support. It includes a three-person rotation with a primary and secondary engineer, plus a product team member, and a weekly hand-off meeting. Everyone participates in the rotation, and the primary keeps a journal. Communication is clear and regular updates are sent every 15 minutes. The article also highlights the importance of a release schedule and exposing junior engineers to on-call.

The Collaborative Development of a Roadmap

The CTO/CPO has been running product, design, and engineering for 15+ years and has shifted to a more collaborative strategy for developing and implementing a roadmap. This involves having ongoing conversations with department heads, executives, and stakeholders to gain knowledge and build relationships, as well as having conversations with the board and CEO about the company's vision. The CTO/CPO then puts together a roadmap based on the collected data and presents it at an off-site. Through this process, the CTO/CPO has learned the importance of aligning on foundational aspects before presenting a roadmap, having constant conversations and feedback about potential roadmaps, and arming themselves with useful information and feedback prior to presenting a roadmap.

Restructuring A Product Team

This article discusses the challenge of structuring a team to work on an umbrella product with 20 sub-products. The author's solution was to slice the umbrella product into sub-products based on user intent and to keep teams as small as possible. To keep all teams on the same page, biweekly all team meetings were held. The author also found that it was better to give product manager duties to a designer or engineer until a new PM could be hired and onboarded.

Build Better Relationships through Open Communication with Clients

The speaker led product and operations at a SaaS company providing an incident management and communications platform. One of their clients, an energy company, was tough on them and didn't like changes to the platform. The speaker built a relationship with the executive responsible for risk management and business continuity at the customer by being open and honest about their own company challenges and listening to the customer's concerns. This process led to better communication and understanding between the company and their clients, resulting in better relationships, greater understanding, and greater retention.

Maintain Dispassionate Objectivity when Conflict-Solving

A strategy consultant was hired to help stand up a software joint venture between two US government-sponsored financial entities. The consultant was able to build relationships with stakeholders across multiple companies, hold weekly status meetings, and expose different teams' positions on various topics to de-politicize the situation. As a result, the consultant was successful in helping the JV execs and parent companies reach an agreement, winning them tens of millions of dollars in business. The consultant was also asked to join future projects dealing with similar issues.

Sometimes the Messenger is as Important as the Message

The technology consultancy I worked for was acquired by a large advertising conglomerate, and I joined the leadership team to lead the transformation PMO. I encountered many problems, but the biggest one was team members of various agencies not wanting to participate in data sharing. I spoke with the CEOs of each agency and they agreed to endorse the sharing, which allowed them to participate in more projects and the rest of the group benefited from their knowledge. This showed the importance of hearing about the benefits from their own leaders, who had already earned the respect of their teams.

Separating Commercial Software Development to its Own Department

This project was about developing a strategy for better managing software IP at a digital consulting firm. An operating model was developed and endorsed by CTOs and other product leaders, and was adopted by the consulting firm and its parent organization. The benefits of separating commercial software development to its own department include creating a consistent sales message and process, higher margins, better quality and consistent value for clients, and more productive teams.

Being Comfortable in Unfamiliar Territory

In order to take advantage of growth opportunities, one must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This means cultivating a fearless quality and accepting that you are in control of your career. To do this, practice studying, communicating, prototyping, testing hypotheses, and making data-driven decisions. This will help you to feel empowered and work confidently in many situations.

Establishing Career Growth and OKR’s for New Team Members

This article discusses the importance of setting career-driven goals for incoming engineers. The author suggests establishing open communication and helping engineers write OKR's (Objectives and Key Results) to ensure they are properly aligned with their career development. The author also emphasizes the importance of making OKR's public and measurable, and using them as an opportunity to grow out of one's comfort zone.

Managing Misaligned OKRs to Prevent Churn and Increase Productivity

When the manager of a new site reliability engineering team was given a set of OKRs to fulfill, they realized that the amount of technical debt and firefighting was too high to meet the expectations. To address this, they adopted their own vision of a successful team, abdicated their order-making power, and distributed the responsibilities of the team across the company. As a result, they were able to retain team members, avoid burn out, and increase productivity. This experience taught the manager to understand the problem their boss was trying to solve, have a solid case for why they solved it differently, and to follow the spirit of their boss's orders rather than the letter.

Investigating the Need For Rewriting a Code Base and Then Successfully Doing So

The codebase inherited by the author was overly complex and difficult to navigate, resulting in a lot of wasted time. After investigation, the author and their senior engineer concluded that a rewrite was necessary, but the manager was resistant due to past experiences with rewrites taking 3-4x the time allotted. The author was able to convince the manager to move forward with the rewrite, which took 6 months instead of the estimated 4 months. The rewrite was successful, resulting in faster product wishlists, happier employees, and a feature that took a month to build in the old codebase taking only seven hours in the new codebase. Hiring new people and breaking up responsibility was especially helpful in the process.