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Sourcing, Interviewing, and Hiring When Time is Sensitive

The manager was faced with a difficult situation when three engineers quit just before their arrival and four more within the first week. To combat this, they worked tirelessly to recruit new engineers, becoming friends with recruiting agencies, using Vettery as their preferred method of recruiting, and revamping the interview process. Through their hard work, they were able to hire nine engineers in 100 days and three more shortly thereafter. They also learned the importance of extending interview requests, understanding a candidate's coding ability, and creating harder questions to ensure a successful hire.

Gaining Team Respect as a New Manager

A new engineering manager was not receiving the same respect as the other manager who had started two weeks prior. The new manager took a 'listen first' attitude, which was seen as inferior by some of the engineers. To gain the trust of the team, the manager stayed loyal to them and put their foot down on executive orders. The manager also learned that it would have been smarter to come in with a plan and communicate more frequently with the team.

Hiring Pipeline for Passion and Talent

The CTO of a new company in Brazil was tasked with hiring a team that was representative of the entrepreneur's vision. He created a pipeline of tests to filter out potential candidates, including IQ tests, smoke tests, and paid challenges. He learned that it is more important to hire talented and motivated individuals than those with specific skill sets, and was able to assemble a successful team with high retention rates.

Sourcing Interested Candidates in QA

This article discusses how to identify candidates who are truly interested in a QA career. The author suggests posing an interview question that requires the candidate to think about how an architecture will break, and looking for a system level thinker who can think at the component level and introduce chaos into the system. Additionally, the author suggests leveling all QA engineers at the same level and salary range as software engineers, and creating a company culture that supports QA career growth.

Building a Dev Team From the Bottom Up

This article outlines the steps taken to build a successful development team, from defining the development process and culture to hiring interns and repurposing a project manager. It also highlights the importance of having a well-defined process and culture in order to attract and retain developers, as well as the benefits of having a junior take over support escalations to prevent senior resources from being interrupted. Finally, it suggests hiring interns as a way to build a pipeline of juniors as the team grows.

Becoming a great Product Manager

This article discusses the qualities of a great Product Manager, which include empathy, understanding the grey area, being a helper, and being a leader without authority. It suggests that becoming great is a 10,000 hour problem and that it takes 2 years of being lost and 3-5 years of making mistakes before one can really understand the difficulty of being great. It also suggests studying empathy, considering how to bring it to the whole team, wrestling with when to move to the next phase of development, and considering one's role as a culture creator.

Intuition Demystified: Why being data-driven and using your intuition aren’t as different as you think

This article discusses how teams can decide what to do next by using a combination of data-driven and data-informed approaches, such as KPIs, success metrics, A/B testing, prototypes, insights, intuition, market research, surveys, usability testing, and user empathy. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user and gathering the necessary data to build empathy for them in order to create innovative solutions that will truly serve them.

Kicking off an AI project

This article outlines the steps taken by a company to empower their platform with AI capabilities. The steps included hiring AI specialists, researching the domain, and creating a chatbot prototype. After 4 months, the team had a showcase ready and reached out to customers for feedback. After 3 more months, the product was in Beta and ready for launch. The takeaway from this process is that a balance of hiring and knowledge gathering can be effective in boosting the ramp up time of new technologies, but it is important to get customer feedback early on.

How to Manage Product Managers

When managing Product Managers with different strengths, it is important to review their performance individually. This can be done by looking at two categories of performance indicators: skill and engagement. Depending on the employee's skill and engagement level, the manager must adjust their management style accordingly. For employees with high skill and low engagement, it is important to look at a 360 degree view of what could be affecting their performance, such as personal issues or misaligned expectations. It is also important to make expectations objective, so that the goal posts do not keep changing.

Building a Product Management Team from 1 to 2 Employees

When a start-up company grows, it can be difficult for the CEO or co-founder to keep up with all the decisions. To help, it is important to hire a counterpart who can fill in the gaps in skills and knowledge. However, it is also important to find someone you trust and to delegate tasks slowly and carefully. It is important to be clear about what decisions need manager input and what decisions can be made by the employee.

Building the Right Team Early On

A team of thirty remote employees was brought on to build a clickable prototype, but it became clear that they would not be able to deliver the expected results in the given time and budget. To solve this, the team was let go and specialized contractors were hired instead. The key lesson learned was that it is not the size of the team that matters, but the value and output they can produce. To ensure the original vision is kept, a core group of management should direct the decisions and create a culture that empowers the team to make decisions that are good for the company and user base.

Surviving the Transition From IC to Management

This article discusses the transition from individual contributor to management and the challenges that come with it. It outlines the importance of learning to delegate, taking inspiration from those who have done it before, and improving upon soft skills such as listening. It also emphasizes the importance of focusing on people instead of projects and maintaining technical knowledge.

Why Your Engineers Should Spend More Time Writing Open Source Software Code

As a leader, the author challenges their team to take a step away from their own technical stack and focus time on contributing to open source projects. Through an experiment, the team contributed to three projects with numerous pull requests, and the results were remarkable. The author shares five reasons why other leaders should consider giving their team time to focus on open source, such as boosting engineer morale, helping to write better code, creating industry thought leaders, and attracting top talent. Open source contribution can lead to many opportunities and help build a better future.

Startup CEOs who fail to define this persona can waste millions in sales dollars

This article discusses the importance of identifying the Blocker Persona in B2B companies. This is different from the Negative/Exclusionary Persona, which is an organization that should be avoided. The Blocker Persona is a person within an organization who is blocking a sale. An example is given of a software test automation company who was unable to close a number of deals due to a Blocker Persona. Steps are outlined to identify the Blocker Persona, such as conducting buyer interviews and win/loss analysis. With the Blocker Persona in mind, counter-measures can be taken to help close the sale.

Transitioning from IC to Management

This article is about the journey of transitioning from an IC role to a management role. The author took the initiative to learn about leadership, empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychology in order to better understand the role of a manager. After applying for a managerial role, the author faced difficulty adjusting to the new role and managing people who were previously peers. Through management training and questioning from an IC perspective, the author was able to become a successful manager. The author learned that management and IC roles are different, and that prioritizing people over projects is key. Additionally, the author learned that diverse teams are essential for success, and that being authentic and transparent helps to build trust with the team.

Being managed by a non-technical manager

When managed by a non-technical person, it is important to understand their perspective and frame solutions in understandable ways. Get a better frame of reference, frame solutions in understandable ways, build a shared understanding on engineering as an investment thesis, own the technical decisions, and be a good partner with peers. This will help build a strong relationship with the non-technical manager and ensure successful communication.

Restructuring or Reorganizing an Organization

A leader had to restructure a team and combine several teams, which required training and a long-term vision. The leader had to understand the business need for the restructure and get input from stakeholders. Lessons learned include looking beyond what a manager would normally envision, restructuring for the right reasons, and getting input from senior engineers and product people.

Developing and Sustaining Diversity Within a Company

This article discusses the importance of hiring a diverse team and outlines the steps taken to achieve this. It suggests having a diverse interview panel, avoiding terms that label candidates, creating a grassroots organization, and using social networks as a hiring resource. It also suggests having a template that represents real voices from within the company to create a welcoming impact.

Handling distributed development sites

This article discusses three common scenarios for distributed development teams: extended work bench, innovation center, and local branch. It emphasizes the importance of alignment processes and transparent communication between the site and the headquarter to ensure the company's strategy is not compromised. It also recommends that each business function missing on the site should have at least one weekly sync and a physical presence at least once per quarter.

How to Apply Good Design to Healthcare Technology

This article discusses the challenges of data management in healthcare due to HIPAA regulations. It explains how Leo rewrote the system by taking a full stack approach to create a platform that is flexible to support the information access requirements of patients and staff. It also outlines the top ten lessons learned about designing a successful healthcare technology, such as accuracy, real-time data availability, personalization, security, clarity, comprehensiveness, collaboration, portability, and historical accuracy.

Sourcing, Interviewing, and Hiring When Time is Sensitive

The manager was faced with a difficult situation when three engineers quit just before their arrival and four more within the first week. To combat this, they worked tirelessly to recruit new engineers, becoming friends with recruiting agencies, using Vettery as their preferred method of recruiting, and revamping the interview process. Through their hard work, they were able to hire nine engineers in 100 days and three more shortly thereafter. They also learned the importance of extending interview requests, understanding a candidate's coding ability, and creating harder questions to ensure a successful hire.

Gaining Team Respect as a New Manager

A new engineering manager was not receiving the same respect as the other manager who had started two weeks prior. The new manager took a 'listen first' attitude, which was seen as inferior by some of the engineers. To gain the trust of the team, the manager stayed loyal to them and put their foot down on executive orders. The manager also learned that it would have been smarter to come in with a plan and communicate more frequently with the team.

Hiring Pipeline for Passion and Talent

The CTO of a new company in Brazil was tasked with hiring a team that was representative of the entrepreneur's vision. He created a pipeline of tests to filter out potential candidates, including IQ tests, smoke tests, and paid challenges. He learned that it is more important to hire talented and motivated individuals than those with specific skill sets, and was able to assemble a successful team with high retention rates.

Sourcing Interested Candidates in QA

This article discusses how to identify candidates who are truly interested in a QA career. The author suggests posing an interview question that requires the candidate to think about how an architecture will break, and looking for a system level thinker who can think at the component level and introduce chaos into the system. Additionally, the author suggests leveling all QA engineers at the same level and salary range as software engineers, and creating a company culture that supports QA career growth.

Building a Dev Team From the Bottom Up

This article outlines the steps taken to build a successful development team, from defining the development process and culture to hiring interns and repurposing a project manager. It also highlights the importance of having a well-defined process and culture in order to attract and retain developers, as well as the benefits of having a junior take over support escalations to prevent senior resources from being interrupted. Finally, it suggests hiring interns as a way to build a pipeline of juniors as the team grows.

Becoming a great Product Manager

This article discusses the qualities of a great Product Manager, which include empathy, understanding the grey area, being a helper, and being a leader without authority. It suggests that becoming great is a 10,000 hour problem and that it takes 2 years of being lost and 3-5 years of making mistakes before one can really understand the difficulty of being great. It also suggests studying empathy, considering how to bring it to the whole team, wrestling with when to move to the next phase of development, and considering one's role as a culture creator.

Intuition Demystified: Why being data-driven and using your intuition aren’t as different as you think

This article discusses how teams can decide what to do next by using a combination of data-driven and data-informed approaches, such as KPIs, success metrics, A/B testing, prototypes, insights, intuition, market research, surveys, usability testing, and user empathy. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user and gathering the necessary data to build empathy for them in order to create innovative solutions that will truly serve them.

Kicking off an AI project

This article outlines the steps taken by a company to empower their platform with AI capabilities. The steps included hiring AI specialists, researching the domain, and creating a chatbot prototype. After 4 months, the team had a showcase ready and reached out to customers for feedback. After 3 more months, the product was in Beta and ready for launch. The takeaway from this process is that a balance of hiring and knowledge gathering can be effective in boosting the ramp up time of new technologies, but it is important to get customer feedback early on.

How to Manage Product Managers

When managing Product Managers with different strengths, it is important to review their performance individually. This can be done by looking at two categories of performance indicators: skill and engagement. Depending on the employee's skill and engagement level, the manager must adjust their management style accordingly. For employees with high skill and low engagement, it is important to look at a 360 degree view of what could be affecting their performance, such as personal issues or misaligned expectations. It is also important to make expectations objective, so that the goal posts do not keep changing.

Building a Product Management Team from 1 to 2 Employees

When a start-up company grows, it can be difficult for the CEO or co-founder to keep up with all the decisions. To help, it is important to hire a counterpart who can fill in the gaps in skills and knowledge. However, it is also important to find someone you trust and to delegate tasks slowly and carefully. It is important to be clear about what decisions need manager input and what decisions can be made by the employee.

Building the Right Team Early On

A team of thirty remote employees was brought on to build a clickable prototype, but it became clear that they would not be able to deliver the expected results in the given time and budget. To solve this, the team was let go and specialized contractors were hired instead. The key lesson learned was that it is not the size of the team that matters, but the value and output they can produce. To ensure the original vision is kept, a core group of management should direct the decisions and create a culture that empowers the team to make decisions that are good for the company and user base.

Surviving the Transition From IC to Management

This article discusses the transition from individual contributor to management and the challenges that come with it. It outlines the importance of learning to delegate, taking inspiration from those who have done it before, and improving upon soft skills such as listening. It also emphasizes the importance of focusing on people instead of projects and maintaining technical knowledge.

Why Your Engineers Should Spend More Time Writing Open Source Software Code

As a leader, the author challenges their team to take a step away from their own technical stack and focus time on contributing to open source projects. Through an experiment, the team contributed to three projects with numerous pull requests, and the results were remarkable. The author shares five reasons why other leaders should consider giving their team time to focus on open source, such as boosting engineer morale, helping to write better code, creating industry thought leaders, and attracting top talent. Open source contribution can lead to many opportunities and help build a better future.

Startup CEOs who fail to define this persona can waste millions in sales dollars

This article discusses the importance of identifying the Blocker Persona in B2B companies. This is different from the Negative/Exclusionary Persona, which is an organization that should be avoided. The Blocker Persona is a person within an organization who is blocking a sale. An example is given of a software test automation company who was unable to close a number of deals due to a Blocker Persona. Steps are outlined to identify the Blocker Persona, such as conducting buyer interviews and win/loss analysis. With the Blocker Persona in mind, counter-measures can be taken to help close the sale.

Transitioning from IC to Management

This article is about the journey of transitioning from an IC role to a management role. The author took the initiative to learn about leadership, empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychology in order to better understand the role of a manager. After applying for a managerial role, the author faced difficulty adjusting to the new role and managing people who were previously peers. Through management training and questioning from an IC perspective, the author was able to become a successful manager. The author learned that management and IC roles are different, and that prioritizing people over projects is key. Additionally, the author learned that diverse teams are essential for success, and that being authentic and transparent helps to build trust with the team.

Being managed by a non-technical manager

When managed by a non-technical person, it is important to understand their perspective and frame solutions in understandable ways. Get a better frame of reference, frame solutions in understandable ways, build a shared understanding on engineering as an investment thesis, own the technical decisions, and be a good partner with peers. This will help build a strong relationship with the non-technical manager and ensure successful communication.

Restructuring or Reorganizing an Organization

A leader had to restructure a team and combine several teams, which required training and a long-term vision. The leader had to understand the business need for the restructure and get input from stakeholders. Lessons learned include looking beyond what a manager would normally envision, restructuring for the right reasons, and getting input from senior engineers and product people.

Developing and Sustaining Diversity Within a Company

This article discusses the importance of hiring a diverse team and outlines the steps taken to achieve this. It suggests having a diverse interview panel, avoiding terms that label candidates, creating a grassroots organization, and using social networks as a hiring resource. It also suggests having a template that represents real voices from within the company to create a welcoming impact.

Handling distributed development sites

This article discusses three common scenarios for distributed development teams: extended work bench, innovation center, and local branch. It emphasizes the importance of alignment processes and transparent communication between the site and the headquarter to ensure the company's strategy is not compromised. It also recommends that each business function missing on the site should have at least one weekly sync and a physical presence at least once per quarter.

How to Apply Good Design to Healthcare Technology

This article discusses the challenges of data management in healthcare due to HIPAA regulations. It explains how Leo rewrote the system by taking a full stack approach to create a platform that is flexible to support the information access requirements of patients and staff. It also outlines the top ten lessons learned about designing a successful healthcare technology, such as accuracy, real-time data availability, personalization, security, clarity, comprehensiveness, collaboration, portability, and historical accuracy.

Sourcing, Interviewing, and Hiring When Time is Sensitive

The manager was faced with a difficult situation when three engineers quit just before their arrival and four more within the first week. To combat this, they worked tirelessly to recruit new engineers, becoming friends with recruiting agencies, using Vettery as their preferred method of recruiting, and revamping the interview process. Through their hard work, they were able to hire nine engineers in 100 days and three more shortly thereafter. They also learned the importance of extending interview requests, understanding a candidate's coding ability, and creating harder questions to ensure a successful hire.

Gaining Team Respect as a New Manager

A new engineering manager was not receiving the same respect as the other manager who had started two weeks prior. The new manager took a 'listen first' attitude, which was seen as inferior by some of the engineers. To gain the trust of the team, the manager stayed loyal to them and put their foot down on executive orders. The manager also learned that it would have been smarter to come in with a plan and communicate more frequently with the team.

Hiring Pipeline for Passion and Talent

The CTO of a new company in Brazil was tasked with hiring a team that was representative of the entrepreneur's vision. He created a pipeline of tests to filter out potential candidates, including IQ tests, smoke tests, and paid challenges. He learned that it is more important to hire talented and motivated individuals than those with specific skill sets, and was able to assemble a successful team with high retention rates.

Sourcing Interested Candidates in QA

This article discusses how to identify candidates who are truly interested in a QA career. The author suggests posing an interview question that requires the candidate to think about how an architecture will break, and looking for a system level thinker who can think at the component level and introduce chaos into the system. Additionally, the author suggests leveling all QA engineers at the same level and salary range as software engineers, and creating a company culture that supports QA career growth.

Building a Dev Team From the Bottom Up

This article outlines the steps taken to build a successful development team, from defining the development process and culture to hiring interns and repurposing a project manager. It also highlights the importance of having a well-defined process and culture in order to attract and retain developers, as well as the benefits of having a junior take over support escalations to prevent senior resources from being interrupted. Finally, it suggests hiring interns as a way to build a pipeline of juniors as the team grows.

Becoming a great Product Manager

This article discusses the qualities of a great Product Manager, which include empathy, understanding the grey area, being a helper, and being a leader without authority. It suggests that becoming great is a 10,000 hour problem and that it takes 2 years of being lost and 3-5 years of making mistakes before one can really understand the difficulty of being great. It also suggests studying empathy, considering how to bring it to the whole team, wrestling with when to move to the next phase of development, and considering one's role as a culture creator.

Intuition Demystified: Why being data-driven and using your intuition aren’t as different as you think

This article discusses how teams can decide what to do next by using a combination of data-driven and data-informed approaches, such as KPIs, success metrics, A/B testing, prototypes, insights, intuition, market research, surveys, usability testing, and user empathy. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user and gathering the necessary data to build empathy for them in order to create innovative solutions that will truly serve them.

Kicking off an AI project

This article outlines the steps taken by a company to empower their platform with AI capabilities. The steps included hiring AI specialists, researching the domain, and creating a chatbot prototype. After 4 months, the team had a showcase ready and reached out to customers for feedback. After 3 more months, the product was in Beta and ready for launch. The takeaway from this process is that a balance of hiring and knowledge gathering can be effective in boosting the ramp up time of new technologies, but it is important to get customer feedback early on.

How to Manage Product Managers

When managing Product Managers with different strengths, it is important to review their performance individually. This can be done by looking at two categories of performance indicators: skill and engagement. Depending on the employee's skill and engagement level, the manager must adjust their management style accordingly. For employees with high skill and low engagement, it is important to look at a 360 degree view of what could be affecting their performance, such as personal issues or misaligned expectations. It is also important to make expectations objective, so that the goal posts do not keep changing.

Building a Product Management Team from 1 to 2 Employees

When a start-up company grows, it can be difficult for the CEO or co-founder to keep up with all the decisions. To help, it is important to hire a counterpart who can fill in the gaps in skills and knowledge. However, it is also important to find someone you trust and to delegate tasks slowly and carefully. It is important to be clear about what decisions need manager input and what decisions can be made by the employee.

Building the Right Team Early On

A team of thirty remote employees was brought on to build a clickable prototype, but it became clear that they would not be able to deliver the expected results in the given time and budget. To solve this, the team was let go and specialized contractors were hired instead. The key lesson learned was that it is not the size of the team that matters, but the value and output they can produce. To ensure the original vision is kept, a core group of management should direct the decisions and create a culture that empowers the team to make decisions that are good for the company and user base.

Surviving the Transition From IC to Management

This article discusses the transition from individual contributor to management and the challenges that come with it. It outlines the importance of learning to delegate, taking inspiration from those who have done it before, and improving upon soft skills such as listening. It also emphasizes the importance of focusing on people instead of projects and maintaining technical knowledge.

Why Your Engineers Should Spend More Time Writing Open Source Software Code

As a leader, the author challenges their team to take a step away from their own technical stack and focus time on contributing to open source projects. Through an experiment, the team contributed to three projects with numerous pull requests, and the results were remarkable. The author shares five reasons why other leaders should consider giving their team time to focus on open source, such as boosting engineer morale, helping to write better code, creating industry thought leaders, and attracting top talent. Open source contribution can lead to many opportunities and help build a better future.

Startup CEOs who fail to define this persona can waste millions in sales dollars

This article discusses the importance of identifying the Blocker Persona in B2B companies. This is different from the Negative/Exclusionary Persona, which is an organization that should be avoided. The Blocker Persona is a person within an organization who is blocking a sale. An example is given of a software test automation company who was unable to close a number of deals due to a Blocker Persona. Steps are outlined to identify the Blocker Persona, such as conducting buyer interviews and win/loss analysis. With the Blocker Persona in mind, counter-measures can be taken to help close the sale.

Transitioning from IC to Management

This article is about the journey of transitioning from an IC role to a management role. The author took the initiative to learn about leadership, empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychology in order to better understand the role of a manager. After applying for a managerial role, the author faced difficulty adjusting to the new role and managing people who were previously peers. Through management training and questioning from an IC perspective, the author was able to become a successful manager. The author learned that management and IC roles are different, and that prioritizing people over projects is key. Additionally, the author learned that diverse teams are essential for success, and that being authentic and transparent helps to build trust with the team.

Being managed by a non-technical manager

When managed by a non-technical person, it is important to understand their perspective and frame solutions in understandable ways. Get a better frame of reference, frame solutions in understandable ways, build a shared understanding on engineering as an investment thesis, own the technical decisions, and be a good partner with peers. This will help build a strong relationship with the non-technical manager and ensure successful communication.

Restructuring or Reorganizing an Organization

A leader had to restructure a team and combine several teams, which required training and a long-term vision. The leader had to understand the business need for the restructure and get input from stakeholders. Lessons learned include looking beyond what a manager would normally envision, restructuring for the right reasons, and getting input from senior engineers and product people.

Developing and Sustaining Diversity Within a Company

This article discusses the importance of hiring a diverse team and outlines the steps taken to achieve this. It suggests having a diverse interview panel, avoiding terms that label candidates, creating a grassroots organization, and using social networks as a hiring resource. It also suggests having a template that represents real voices from within the company to create a welcoming impact.

Handling distributed development sites

This article discusses three common scenarios for distributed development teams: extended work bench, innovation center, and local branch. It emphasizes the importance of alignment processes and transparent communication between the site and the headquarter to ensure the company's strategy is not compromised. It also recommends that each business function missing on the site should have at least one weekly sync and a physical presence at least once per quarter.

How to Apply Good Design to Healthcare Technology

This article discusses the challenges of data management in healthcare due to HIPAA regulations. It explains how Leo rewrote the system by taking a full stack approach to create a platform that is flexible to support the information access requirements of patients and staff. It also outlines the top ten lessons learned about designing a successful healthcare technology, such as accuracy, real-time data availability, personalization, security, clarity, comprehensiveness, collaboration, portability, and historical accuracy.

Sourcing, Interviewing, and Hiring When Time is Sensitive

The manager was faced with a difficult situation when three engineers quit just before their arrival and four more within the first week. To combat this, they worked tirelessly to recruit new engineers, becoming friends with recruiting agencies, using Vettery as their preferred method of recruiting, and revamping the interview process. Through their hard work, they were able to hire nine engineers in 100 days and three more shortly thereafter. They also learned the importance of extending interview requests, understanding a candidate's coding ability, and creating harder questions to ensure a successful hire.

Gaining Team Respect as a New Manager

A new engineering manager was not receiving the same respect as the other manager who had started two weeks prior. The new manager took a 'listen first' attitude, which was seen as inferior by some of the engineers. To gain the trust of the team, the manager stayed loyal to them and put their foot down on executive orders. The manager also learned that it would have been smarter to come in with a plan and communicate more frequently with the team.

Hiring Pipeline for Passion and Talent

The CTO of a new company in Brazil was tasked with hiring a team that was representative of the entrepreneur's vision. He created a pipeline of tests to filter out potential candidates, including IQ tests, smoke tests, and paid challenges. He learned that it is more important to hire talented and motivated individuals than those with specific skill sets, and was able to assemble a successful team with high retention rates.

Sourcing Interested Candidates in QA

This article discusses how to identify candidates who are truly interested in a QA career. The author suggests posing an interview question that requires the candidate to think about how an architecture will break, and looking for a system level thinker who can think at the component level and introduce chaos into the system. Additionally, the author suggests leveling all QA engineers at the same level and salary range as software engineers, and creating a company culture that supports QA career growth.

Building a Dev Team From the Bottom Up

This article outlines the steps taken to build a successful development team, from defining the development process and culture to hiring interns and repurposing a project manager. It also highlights the importance of having a well-defined process and culture in order to attract and retain developers, as well as the benefits of having a junior take over support escalations to prevent senior resources from being interrupted. Finally, it suggests hiring interns as a way to build a pipeline of juniors as the team grows.

Becoming a great Product Manager

This article discusses the qualities of a great Product Manager, which include empathy, understanding the grey area, being a helper, and being a leader without authority. It suggests that becoming great is a 10,000 hour problem and that it takes 2 years of being lost and 3-5 years of making mistakes before one can really understand the difficulty of being great. It also suggests studying empathy, considering how to bring it to the whole team, wrestling with when to move to the next phase of development, and considering one's role as a culture creator.

Intuition Demystified: Why being data-driven and using your intuition aren’t as different as you think

This article discusses how teams can decide what to do next by using a combination of data-driven and data-informed approaches, such as KPIs, success metrics, A/B testing, prototypes, insights, intuition, market research, surveys, usability testing, and user empathy. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user and gathering the necessary data to build empathy for them in order to create innovative solutions that will truly serve them.

Kicking off an AI project

This article outlines the steps taken by a company to empower their platform with AI capabilities. The steps included hiring AI specialists, researching the domain, and creating a chatbot prototype. After 4 months, the team had a showcase ready and reached out to customers for feedback. After 3 more months, the product was in Beta and ready for launch. The takeaway from this process is that a balance of hiring and knowledge gathering can be effective in boosting the ramp up time of new technologies, but it is important to get customer feedback early on.

How to Manage Product Managers

When managing Product Managers with different strengths, it is important to review their performance individually. This can be done by looking at two categories of performance indicators: skill and engagement. Depending on the employee's skill and engagement level, the manager must adjust their management style accordingly. For employees with high skill and low engagement, it is important to look at a 360 degree view of what could be affecting their performance, such as personal issues or misaligned expectations. It is also important to make expectations objective, so that the goal posts do not keep changing.

Building a Product Management Team from 1 to 2 Employees

When a start-up company grows, it can be difficult for the CEO or co-founder to keep up with all the decisions. To help, it is important to hire a counterpart who can fill in the gaps in skills and knowledge. However, it is also important to find someone you trust and to delegate tasks slowly and carefully. It is important to be clear about what decisions need manager input and what decisions can be made by the employee.

Building the Right Team Early On

A team of thirty remote employees was brought on to build a clickable prototype, but it became clear that they would not be able to deliver the expected results in the given time and budget. To solve this, the team was let go and specialized contractors were hired instead. The key lesson learned was that it is not the size of the team that matters, but the value and output they can produce. To ensure the original vision is kept, a core group of management should direct the decisions and create a culture that empowers the team to make decisions that are good for the company and user base.

Surviving the Transition From IC to Management

This article discusses the transition from individual contributor to management and the challenges that come with it. It outlines the importance of learning to delegate, taking inspiration from those who have done it before, and improving upon soft skills such as listening. It also emphasizes the importance of focusing on people instead of projects and maintaining technical knowledge.

Why Your Engineers Should Spend More Time Writing Open Source Software Code

As a leader, the author challenges their team to take a step away from their own technical stack and focus time on contributing to open source projects. Through an experiment, the team contributed to three projects with numerous pull requests, and the results were remarkable. The author shares five reasons why other leaders should consider giving their team time to focus on open source, such as boosting engineer morale, helping to write better code, creating industry thought leaders, and attracting top talent. Open source contribution can lead to many opportunities and help build a better future.

Startup CEOs who fail to define this persona can waste millions in sales dollars

This article discusses the importance of identifying the Blocker Persona in B2B companies. This is different from the Negative/Exclusionary Persona, which is an organization that should be avoided. The Blocker Persona is a person within an organization who is blocking a sale. An example is given of a software test automation company who was unable to close a number of deals due to a Blocker Persona. Steps are outlined to identify the Blocker Persona, such as conducting buyer interviews and win/loss analysis. With the Blocker Persona in mind, counter-measures can be taken to help close the sale.

Transitioning from IC to Management

This article is about the journey of transitioning from an IC role to a management role. The author took the initiative to learn about leadership, empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychology in order to better understand the role of a manager. After applying for a managerial role, the author faced difficulty adjusting to the new role and managing people who were previously peers. Through management training and questioning from an IC perspective, the author was able to become a successful manager. The author learned that management and IC roles are different, and that prioritizing people over projects is key. Additionally, the author learned that diverse teams are essential for success, and that being authentic and transparent helps to build trust with the team.

Being managed by a non-technical manager

When managed by a non-technical person, it is important to understand their perspective and frame solutions in understandable ways. Get a better frame of reference, frame solutions in understandable ways, build a shared understanding on engineering as an investment thesis, own the technical decisions, and be a good partner with peers. This will help build a strong relationship with the non-technical manager and ensure successful communication.

Restructuring or Reorganizing an Organization

A leader had to restructure a team and combine several teams, which required training and a long-term vision. The leader had to understand the business need for the restructure and get input from stakeholders. Lessons learned include looking beyond what a manager would normally envision, restructuring for the right reasons, and getting input from senior engineers and product people.

Developing and Sustaining Diversity Within a Company

This article discusses the importance of hiring a diverse team and outlines the steps taken to achieve this. It suggests having a diverse interview panel, avoiding terms that label candidates, creating a grassroots organization, and using social networks as a hiring resource. It also suggests having a template that represents real voices from within the company to create a welcoming impact.

Handling distributed development sites

This article discusses three common scenarios for distributed development teams: extended work bench, innovation center, and local branch. It emphasizes the importance of alignment processes and transparent communication between the site and the headquarter to ensure the company's strategy is not compromised. It also recommends that each business function missing on the site should have at least one weekly sync and a physical presence at least once per quarter.

How to Apply Good Design to Healthcare Technology

This article discusses the challenges of data management in healthcare due to HIPAA regulations. It explains how Leo rewrote the system by taking a full stack approach to create a platform that is flexible to support the information access requirements of patients and staff. It also outlines the top ten lessons learned about designing a successful healthcare technology, such as accuracy, real-time data availability, personalization, security, clarity, comprehensiveness, collaboration, portability, and historical accuracy.

Sourcing, Interviewing, and Hiring When Time is Sensitive

The manager was faced with a difficult situation when three engineers quit just before their arrival and four more within the first week. To combat this, they worked tirelessly to recruit new engineers, becoming friends with recruiting agencies, using Vettery as their preferred method of recruiting, and revamping the interview process. Through their hard work, they were able to hire nine engineers in 100 days and three more shortly thereafter. They also learned the importance of extending interview requests, understanding a candidate's coding ability, and creating harder questions to ensure a successful hire.

Gaining Team Respect as a New Manager

A new engineering manager was not receiving the same respect as the other manager who had started two weeks prior. The new manager took a 'listen first' attitude, which was seen as inferior by some of the engineers. To gain the trust of the team, the manager stayed loyal to them and put their foot down on executive orders. The manager also learned that it would have been smarter to come in with a plan and communicate more frequently with the team.

Hiring Pipeline for Passion and Talent

The CTO of a new company in Brazil was tasked with hiring a team that was representative of the entrepreneur's vision. He created a pipeline of tests to filter out potential candidates, including IQ tests, smoke tests, and paid challenges. He learned that it is more important to hire talented and motivated individuals than those with specific skill sets, and was able to assemble a successful team with high retention rates.

Sourcing Interested Candidates in QA

This article discusses how to identify candidates who are truly interested in a QA career. The author suggests posing an interview question that requires the candidate to think about how an architecture will break, and looking for a system level thinker who can think at the component level and introduce chaos into the system. Additionally, the author suggests leveling all QA engineers at the same level and salary range as software engineers, and creating a company culture that supports QA career growth.

Building a Dev Team From the Bottom Up

This article outlines the steps taken to build a successful development team, from defining the development process and culture to hiring interns and repurposing a project manager. It also highlights the importance of having a well-defined process and culture in order to attract and retain developers, as well as the benefits of having a junior take over support escalations to prevent senior resources from being interrupted. Finally, it suggests hiring interns as a way to build a pipeline of juniors as the team grows.

Becoming a great Product Manager

This article discusses the qualities of a great Product Manager, which include empathy, understanding the grey area, being a helper, and being a leader without authority. It suggests that becoming great is a 10,000 hour problem and that it takes 2 years of being lost and 3-5 years of making mistakes before one can really understand the difficulty of being great. It also suggests studying empathy, considering how to bring it to the whole team, wrestling with when to move to the next phase of development, and considering one's role as a culture creator.

Intuition Demystified: Why being data-driven and using your intuition aren’t as different as you think

This article discusses how teams can decide what to do next by using a combination of data-driven and data-informed approaches, such as KPIs, success metrics, A/B testing, prototypes, insights, intuition, market research, surveys, usability testing, and user empathy. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user and gathering the necessary data to build empathy for them in order to create innovative solutions that will truly serve them.

Kicking off an AI project

This article outlines the steps taken by a company to empower their platform with AI capabilities. The steps included hiring AI specialists, researching the domain, and creating a chatbot prototype. After 4 months, the team had a showcase ready and reached out to customers for feedback. After 3 more months, the product was in Beta and ready for launch. The takeaway from this process is that a balance of hiring and knowledge gathering can be effective in boosting the ramp up time of new technologies, but it is important to get customer feedback early on.

How to Manage Product Managers

When managing Product Managers with different strengths, it is important to review their performance individually. This can be done by looking at two categories of performance indicators: skill and engagement. Depending on the employee's skill and engagement level, the manager must adjust their management style accordingly. For employees with high skill and low engagement, it is important to look at a 360 degree view of what could be affecting their performance, such as personal issues or misaligned expectations. It is also important to make expectations objective, so that the goal posts do not keep changing.

Building a Product Management Team from 1 to 2 Employees

When a start-up company grows, it can be difficult for the CEO or co-founder to keep up with all the decisions. To help, it is important to hire a counterpart who can fill in the gaps in skills and knowledge. However, it is also important to find someone you trust and to delegate tasks slowly and carefully. It is important to be clear about what decisions need manager input and what decisions can be made by the employee.

Building the Right Team Early On

A team of thirty remote employees was brought on to build a clickable prototype, but it became clear that they would not be able to deliver the expected results in the given time and budget. To solve this, the team was let go and specialized contractors were hired instead. The key lesson learned was that it is not the size of the team that matters, but the value and output they can produce. To ensure the original vision is kept, a core group of management should direct the decisions and create a culture that empowers the team to make decisions that are good for the company and user base.

Surviving the Transition From IC to Management

This article discusses the transition from individual contributor to management and the challenges that come with it. It outlines the importance of learning to delegate, taking inspiration from those who have done it before, and improving upon soft skills such as listening. It also emphasizes the importance of focusing on people instead of projects and maintaining technical knowledge.

Why Your Engineers Should Spend More Time Writing Open Source Software Code

As a leader, the author challenges their team to take a step away from their own technical stack and focus time on contributing to open source projects. Through an experiment, the team contributed to three projects with numerous pull requests, and the results were remarkable. The author shares five reasons why other leaders should consider giving their team time to focus on open source, such as boosting engineer morale, helping to write better code, creating industry thought leaders, and attracting top talent. Open source contribution can lead to many opportunities and help build a better future.

Startup CEOs who fail to define this persona can waste millions in sales dollars

This article discusses the importance of identifying the Blocker Persona in B2B companies. This is different from the Negative/Exclusionary Persona, which is an organization that should be avoided. The Blocker Persona is a person within an organization who is blocking a sale. An example is given of a software test automation company who was unable to close a number of deals due to a Blocker Persona. Steps are outlined to identify the Blocker Persona, such as conducting buyer interviews and win/loss analysis. With the Blocker Persona in mind, counter-measures can be taken to help close the sale.

Transitioning from IC to Management

This article is about the journey of transitioning from an IC role to a management role. The author took the initiative to learn about leadership, empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychology in order to better understand the role of a manager. After applying for a managerial role, the author faced difficulty adjusting to the new role and managing people who were previously peers. Through management training and questioning from an IC perspective, the author was able to become a successful manager. The author learned that management and IC roles are different, and that prioritizing people over projects is key. Additionally, the author learned that diverse teams are essential for success, and that being authentic and transparent helps to build trust with the team.

Being managed by a non-technical manager

When managed by a non-technical person, it is important to understand their perspective and frame solutions in understandable ways. Get a better frame of reference, frame solutions in understandable ways, build a shared understanding on engineering as an investment thesis, own the technical decisions, and be a good partner with peers. This will help build a strong relationship with the non-technical manager and ensure successful communication.

Restructuring or Reorganizing an Organization

A leader had to restructure a team and combine several teams, which required training and a long-term vision. The leader had to understand the business need for the restructure and get input from stakeholders. Lessons learned include looking beyond what a manager would normally envision, restructuring for the right reasons, and getting input from senior engineers and product people.

Developing and Sustaining Diversity Within a Company

This article discusses the importance of hiring a diverse team and outlines the steps taken to achieve this. It suggests having a diverse interview panel, avoiding terms that label candidates, creating a grassroots organization, and using social networks as a hiring resource. It also suggests having a template that represents real voices from within the company to create a welcoming impact.

Handling distributed development sites

This article discusses three common scenarios for distributed development teams: extended work bench, innovation center, and local branch. It emphasizes the importance of alignment processes and transparent communication between the site and the headquarter to ensure the company's strategy is not compromised. It also recommends that each business function missing on the site should have at least one weekly sync and a physical presence at least once per quarter.

How to Apply Good Design to Healthcare Technology

This article discusses the challenges of data management in healthcare due to HIPAA regulations. It explains how Leo rewrote the system by taking a full stack approach to create a platform that is flexible to support the information access requirements of patients and staff. It also outlines the top ten lessons learned about designing a successful healthcare technology, such as accuracy, real-time data availability, personalization, security, clarity, comprehensiveness, collaboration, portability, and historical accuracy.

Sourcing, Interviewing, and Hiring When Time is Sensitive

The manager was faced with a difficult situation when three engineers quit just before their arrival and four more within the first week. To combat this, they worked tirelessly to recruit new engineers, becoming friends with recruiting agencies, using Vettery as their preferred method of recruiting, and revamping the interview process. Through their hard work, they were able to hire nine engineers in 100 days and three more shortly thereafter. They also learned the importance of extending interview requests, understanding a candidate's coding ability, and creating harder questions to ensure a successful hire.

Gaining Team Respect as a New Manager

A new engineering manager was not receiving the same respect as the other manager who had started two weeks prior. The new manager took a 'listen first' attitude, which was seen as inferior by some of the engineers. To gain the trust of the team, the manager stayed loyal to them and put their foot down on executive orders. The manager also learned that it would have been smarter to come in with a plan and communicate more frequently with the team.

Hiring Pipeline for Passion and Talent

The CTO of a new company in Brazil was tasked with hiring a team that was representative of the entrepreneur's vision. He created a pipeline of tests to filter out potential candidates, including IQ tests, smoke tests, and paid challenges. He learned that it is more important to hire talented and motivated individuals than those with specific skill sets, and was able to assemble a successful team with high retention rates.

Sourcing Interested Candidates in QA

This article discusses how to identify candidates who are truly interested in a QA career. The author suggests posing an interview question that requires the candidate to think about how an architecture will break, and looking for a system level thinker who can think at the component level and introduce chaos into the system. Additionally, the author suggests leveling all QA engineers at the same level and salary range as software engineers, and creating a company culture that supports QA career growth.

Building a Dev Team From the Bottom Up

This article outlines the steps taken to build a successful development team, from defining the development process and culture to hiring interns and repurposing a project manager. It also highlights the importance of having a well-defined process and culture in order to attract and retain developers, as well as the benefits of having a junior take over support escalations to prevent senior resources from being interrupted. Finally, it suggests hiring interns as a way to build a pipeline of juniors as the team grows.

Becoming a great Product Manager

This article discusses the qualities of a great Product Manager, which include empathy, understanding the grey area, being a helper, and being a leader without authority. It suggests that becoming great is a 10,000 hour problem and that it takes 2 years of being lost and 3-5 years of making mistakes before one can really understand the difficulty of being great. It also suggests studying empathy, considering how to bring it to the whole team, wrestling with when to move to the next phase of development, and considering one's role as a culture creator.

Intuition Demystified: Why being data-driven and using your intuition aren’t as different as you think

This article discusses how teams can decide what to do next by using a combination of data-driven and data-informed approaches, such as KPIs, success metrics, A/B testing, prototypes, insights, intuition, market research, surveys, usability testing, and user empathy. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user and gathering the necessary data to build empathy for them in order to create innovative solutions that will truly serve them.

Kicking off an AI project

This article outlines the steps taken by a company to empower their platform with AI capabilities. The steps included hiring AI specialists, researching the domain, and creating a chatbot prototype. After 4 months, the team had a showcase ready and reached out to customers for feedback. After 3 more months, the product was in Beta and ready for launch. The takeaway from this process is that a balance of hiring and knowledge gathering can be effective in boosting the ramp up time of new technologies, but it is important to get customer feedback early on.

How to Manage Product Managers

When managing Product Managers with different strengths, it is important to review their performance individually. This can be done by looking at two categories of performance indicators: skill and engagement. Depending on the employee's skill and engagement level, the manager must adjust their management style accordingly. For employees with high skill and low engagement, it is important to look at a 360 degree view of what could be affecting their performance, such as personal issues or misaligned expectations. It is also important to make expectations objective, so that the goal posts do not keep changing.

Building a Product Management Team from 1 to 2 Employees

When a start-up company grows, it can be difficult for the CEO or co-founder to keep up with all the decisions. To help, it is important to hire a counterpart who can fill in the gaps in skills and knowledge. However, it is also important to find someone you trust and to delegate tasks slowly and carefully. It is important to be clear about what decisions need manager input and what decisions can be made by the employee.

Building the Right Team Early On

A team of thirty remote employees was brought on to build a clickable prototype, but it became clear that they would not be able to deliver the expected results in the given time and budget. To solve this, the team was let go and specialized contractors were hired instead. The key lesson learned was that it is not the size of the team that matters, but the value and output they can produce. To ensure the original vision is kept, a core group of management should direct the decisions and create a culture that empowers the team to make decisions that are good for the company and user base.

Surviving the Transition From IC to Management

This article discusses the transition from individual contributor to management and the challenges that come with it. It outlines the importance of learning to delegate, taking inspiration from those who have done it before, and improving upon soft skills such as listening. It also emphasizes the importance of focusing on people instead of projects and maintaining technical knowledge.

Why Your Engineers Should Spend More Time Writing Open Source Software Code

As a leader, the author challenges their team to take a step away from their own technical stack and focus time on contributing to open source projects. Through an experiment, the team contributed to three projects with numerous pull requests, and the results were remarkable. The author shares five reasons why other leaders should consider giving their team time to focus on open source, such as boosting engineer morale, helping to write better code, creating industry thought leaders, and attracting top talent. Open source contribution can lead to many opportunities and help build a better future.

Startup CEOs who fail to define this persona can waste millions in sales dollars

This article discusses the importance of identifying the Blocker Persona in B2B companies. This is different from the Negative/Exclusionary Persona, which is an organization that should be avoided. The Blocker Persona is a person within an organization who is blocking a sale. An example is given of a software test automation company who was unable to close a number of deals due to a Blocker Persona. Steps are outlined to identify the Blocker Persona, such as conducting buyer interviews and win/loss analysis. With the Blocker Persona in mind, counter-measures can be taken to help close the sale.

Transitioning from IC to Management

This article is about the journey of transitioning from an IC role to a management role. The author took the initiative to learn about leadership, empathy, emotional intelligence, and psychology in order to better understand the role of a manager. After applying for a managerial role, the author faced difficulty adjusting to the new role and managing people who were previously peers. Through management training and questioning from an IC perspective, the author was able to become a successful manager. The author learned that management and IC roles are different, and that prioritizing people over projects is key. Additionally, the author learned that diverse teams are essential for success, and that being authentic and transparent helps to build trust with the team.

Being managed by a non-technical manager

When managed by a non-technical person, it is important to understand their perspective and frame solutions in understandable ways. Get a better frame of reference, frame solutions in understandable ways, build a shared understanding on engineering as an investment thesis, own the technical decisions, and be a good partner with peers. This will help build a strong relationship with the non-technical manager and ensure successful communication.

Restructuring or Reorganizing an Organization

A leader had to restructure a team and combine several teams, which required training and a long-term vision. The leader had to understand the business need for the restructure and get input from stakeholders. Lessons learned include looking beyond what a manager would normally envision, restructuring for the right reasons, and getting input from senior engineers and product people.

Developing and Sustaining Diversity Within a Company

This article discusses the importance of hiring a diverse team and outlines the steps taken to achieve this. It suggests having a diverse interview panel, avoiding terms that label candidates, creating a grassroots organization, and using social networks as a hiring resource. It also suggests having a template that represents real voices from within the company to create a welcoming impact.

Handling distributed development sites

This article discusses three common scenarios for distributed development teams: extended work bench, innovation center, and local branch. It emphasizes the importance of alignment processes and transparent communication between the site and the headquarter to ensure the company's strategy is not compromised. It also recommends that each business function missing on the site should have at least one weekly sync and a physical presence at least once per quarter.

How to Apply Good Design to Healthcare Technology

This article discusses the challenges of data management in healthcare due to HIPAA regulations. It explains how Leo rewrote the system by taking a full stack approach to create a platform that is flexible to support the information access requirements of patients and staff. It also outlines the top ten lessons learned about designing a successful healthcare technology, such as accuracy, real-time data availability, personalization, security, clarity, comprehensiveness, collaboration, portability, and historical accuracy.