Knowledge shared by our community

A shared technical vision to manage your technical debt

Managing technical debt can be difficult, but it is important to find time to create and pursue a shared technical vision that all engineers can buy into. To do this, it is important to give engineers a voice, look ahead to what will impact the business in the future, establish a decision-making framework, and steer the team towards understanding the business. This will help the team reach their own conclusions about which technical tasks are the most important.

Specified Candidate Pools for Hiring Product Managers

When looking for a new product manager, the best approach is to attend niche hackathons, leverage trustworthy promoters and product hunters, and contact competitors. It is important to find someone who is great at product and passionate about the mission, and having a seasoned product manager can bring a systematic way of doing things. The head of product can still have strategic input while the product manager manages the products.

Managing Expectations and the Growth of Reports in a Matrix System

In a matrix system, it can be difficult to manage teams and expectations for projects that you are not managing. To optimize for the company's goals, it is important to be clear and transparent about expectations, set performance goals, and present opportunities for growth. Additionally, it is important to be in the weeds with the team to understand what stories the engineers are working on in order to evaluate for future productivity and performance.

Interviewing for Management- Answering and Then Asking

Interviews for leadership and management positions are important for both the interviewer and the interviewee. This article provides two example interview questions and tips on how to effectively answer them. It also provides tips on how to conduct yourself in an interview, such as asking leading questions and offering hooks for the interviewer to learn more about you. Additionally, it suggests two books to read to help you better understand the art of management.

Do You Know What Motivates and Drives Your Junior Developers?

As a manager of junior developers, it is important to tailor a different approach to each individual, build trust, and use one-on-one time to have them reflect on their own personal growth. Ask abstract questions to get them to think beyond their day-to-day tasks and build out a framework for what it looks like to move progressively upward in the company. Ultimately, the junior engineer needs to be intrinsically motivated for their own success and growth.

Shaping Metric Improvements

This article outlines ways to set and hold teams accountable to metrics. It suggests centralizing teams working on the same metric, picking metrics ahead of time and publicly, A/B testing components, and focusing on metric lifts rather than absolute numbers. It also emphasizes the importance of having a great product manager who can help brainstorm ideas and take stress off the team.

Negative or Positive - How to Manage the Influential Impact Engineers Have on a Team

In engineering teams, one or two people can have a large influence on the team, either positively or negatively. To address this issue, it is important to build a better rapport with the primary influencer, have them understand the negative impact their attitude is having on the team, and get them to buy into the idea of creating a team of high performers. If that doesn't work, reach out to the second most influential person or the most junior person to drive motivation through competition. It is important to be open and honest with the influencer to make them realize the impression they are leaving on the company and those around them.

Engineers - How to Best Support Product Managers During an Integration

As an engineer, it is important to build overlap with other teams and move projects forward. To do this, it is important to ask the PM trick questions to help them understand the process and come up with a better method. It is also important to be repetitive and start with the basics when explaining a process. This will help the PM understand the product better and be able to explain it to the customer. A PM is like a Swiss Army knife, in that while it may not be the best tool, it can be used if opened.

Improving Product Release and Functionality

This article discusses the common mistake of releasing a product with too many features that nobody will use. It outlines the steps taken to launch the first version of the product, get feedback from users, and make changes in a simple and modular way. It also highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of getting direct feedback from users, the difficulty of making changes to heavily intertwined code, and the benefits of making shortcut decisions to manage technical debt.

Advice for Engineers as First Time Managers

Making the transition from an engineering role to a managerial one can be daunting, but it is possible to make the change successfully. It is important to understand the role and its expectations, as well as to analyze where the excitement lies for you. Scoping should be the extent of your technical contribution, and you should value and judge your work through the execution of the team. It is also important to build trust with your team and to take advantage of feedback to measure your own success. Ultimately, the bulk of your learning will come from personal experiences.

Remaining Stable and Collaborative While Scaling

This article discusses strategies for keeping engineers motivated and committed while scaling a startup. It suggests using squad/cross-functional team organizations, delegating ownership, tracking performance expectations, doing continuous deployment, tracking KPIs, introducing a squad weekly summary, and allowing engineers to switch squads at a semester frequency. It also emphasizes the importance of giving engineers the right context to make decisions, investing in one-on-one meetings, and avoiding changing organization too often.

What to do when you are leading a turnaround in your company

This is a story of a healthcare company with a product that had 7 versions of software supporting 1800 healthcare systems. The organization had embarked on a very ambitious new version release with large ownership given to the India Leadership team. Due to complexities, regulatory changes, and first time leadership, the release was delayed by 10 months. The current India Engg leadership was moved out and the author volunteered to step in. Through deep dive sessions, Open AMA sessions, and creating 12 teams of max 9 people, the author was able to commit to a full version release in 6 months and the product was successfully submitted for regulatory approval. The author learned that teams in the trenches always know what's going well and not, to localize and empower teams, to allow teams to take ownership, to create metrics that matter and enable the data to be seen by the team, to always communicate strongly and reiterate the goal and commitment, and to take decisions and keep moving forward.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

A shared technical vision to manage your technical debt

Managing technical debt can be difficult, but it is important to find time to create and pursue a shared technical vision that all engineers can buy into. To do this, it is important to give engineers a voice, look ahead to what will impact the business in the future, establish a decision-making framework, and steer the team towards understanding the business. This will help the team reach their own conclusions about which technical tasks are the most important.

Specified Candidate Pools for Hiring Product Managers

When looking for a new product manager, the best approach is to attend niche hackathons, leverage trustworthy promoters and product hunters, and contact competitors. It is important to find someone who is great at product and passionate about the mission, and having a seasoned product manager can bring a systematic way of doing things. The head of product can still have strategic input while the product manager manages the products.

Managing Expectations and the Growth of Reports in a Matrix System

In a matrix system, it can be difficult to manage teams and expectations for projects that you are not managing. To optimize for the company's goals, it is important to be clear and transparent about expectations, set performance goals, and present opportunities for growth. Additionally, it is important to be in the weeds with the team to understand what stories the engineers are working on in order to evaluate for future productivity and performance.

Interviewing for Management- Answering and Then Asking

Interviews for leadership and management positions are important for both the interviewer and the interviewee. This article provides two example interview questions and tips on how to effectively answer them. It also provides tips on how to conduct yourself in an interview, such as asking leading questions and offering hooks for the interviewer to learn more about you. Additionally, it suggests two books to read to help you better understand the art of management.

Do You Know What Motivates and Drives Your Junior Developers?

As a manager of junior developers, it is important to tailor a different approach to each individual, build trust, and use one-on-one time to have them reflect on their own personal growth. Ask abstract questions to get them to think beyond their day-to-day tasks and build out a framework for what it looks like to move progressively upward in the company. Ultimately, the junior engineer needs to be intrinsically motivated for their own success and growth.

Shaping Metric Improvements

This article outlines ways to set and hold teams accountable to metrics. It suggests centralizing teams working on the same metric, picking metrics ahead of time and publicly, A/B testing components, and focusing on metric lifts rather than absolute numbers. It also emphasizes the importance of having a great product manager who can help brainstorm ideas and take stress off the team.

Negative or Positive - How to Manage the Influential Impact Engineers Have on a Team

In engineering teams, one or two people can have a large influence on the team, either positively or negatively. To address this issue, it is important to build a better rapport with the primary influencer, have them understand the negative impact their attitude is having on the team, and get them to buy into the idea of creating a team of high performers. If that doesn't work, reach out to the second most influential person or the most junior person to drive motivation through competition. It is important to be open and honest with the influencer to make them realize the impression they are leaving on the company and those around them.

Engineers - How to Best Support Product Managers During an Integration

As an engineer, it is important to build overlap with other teams and move projects forward. To do this, it is important to ask the PM trick questions to help them understand the process and come up with a better method. It is also important to be repetitive and start with the basics when explaining a process. This will help the PM understand the product better and be able to explain it to the customer. A PM is like a Swiss Army knife, in that while it may not be the best tool, it can be used if opened.

Improving Product Release and Functionality

This article discusses the common mistake of releasing a product with too many features that nobody will use. It outlines the steps taken to launch the first version of the product, get feedback from users, and make changes in a simple and modular way. It also highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of getting direct feedback from users, the difficulty of making changes to heavily intertwined code, and the benefits of making shortcut decisions to manage technical debt.

Advice for Engineers as First Time Managers

Making the transition from an engineering role to a managerial one can be daunting, but it is possible to make the change successfully. It is important to understand the role and its expectations, as well as to analyze where the excitement lies for you. Scoping should be the extent of your technical contribution, and you should value and judge your work through the execution of the team. It is also important to build trust with your team and to take advantage of feedback to measure your own success. Ultimately, the bulk of your learning will come from personal experiences.

Remaining Stable and Collaborative While Scaling

This article discusses strategies for keeping engineers motivated and committed while scaling a startup. It suggests using squad/cross-functional team organizations, delegating ownership, tracking performance expectations, doing continuous deployment, tracking KPIs, introducing a squad weekly summary, and allowing engineers to switch squads at a semester frequency. It also emphasizes the importance of giving engineers the right context to make decisions, investing in one-on-one meetings, and avoiding changing organization too often.

What to do when you are leading a turnaround in your company

This is a story of a healthcare company with a product that had 7 versions of software supporting 1800 healthcare systems. The organization had embarked on a very ambitious new version release with large ownership given to the India Leadership team. Due to complexities, regulatory changes, and first time leadership, the release was delayed by 10 months. The current India Engg leadership was moved out and the author volunteered to step in. Through deep dive sessions, Open AMA sessions, and creating 12 teams of max 9 people, the author was able to commit to a full version release in 6 months and the product was successfully submitted for regulatory approval. The author learned that teams in the trenches always know what's going well and not, to localize and empower teams, to allow teams to take ownership, to create metrics that matter and enable the data to be seen by the team, to always communicate strongly and reiterate the goal and commitment, and to take decisions and keep moving forward.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

A shared technical vision to manage your technical debt

Managing technical debt can be difficult, but it is important to find time to create and pursue a shared technical vision that all engineers can buy into. To do this, it is important to give engineers a voice, look ahead to what will impact the business in the future, establish a decision-making framework, and steer the team towards understanding the business. This will help the team reach their own conclusions about which technical tasks are the most important.

Specified Candidate Pools for Hiring Product Managers

When looking for a new product manager, the best approach is to attend niche hackathons, leverage trustworthy promoters and product hunters, and contact competitors. It is important to find someone who is great at product and passionate about the mission, and having a seasoned product manager can bring a systematic way of doing things. The head of product can still have strategic input while the product manager manages the products.

Managing Expectations and the Growth of Reports in a Matrix System

In a matrix system, it can be difficult to manage teams and expectations for projects that you are not managing. To optimize for the company's goals, it is important to be clear and transparent about expectations, set performance goals, and present opportunities for growth. Additionally, it is important to be in the weeds with the team to understand what stories the engineers are working on in order to evaluate for future productivity and performance.

Interviewing for Management- Answering and Then Asking

Interviews for leadership and management positions are important for both the interviewer and the interviewee. This article provides two example interview questions and tips on how to effectively answer them. It also provides tips on how to conduct yourself in an interview, such as asking leading questions and offering hooks for the interviewer to learn more about you. Additionally, it suggests two books to read to help you better understand the art of management.

Do You Know What Motivates and Drives Your Junior Developers?

As a manager of junior developers, it is important to tailor a different approach to each individual, build trust, and use one-on-one time to have them reflect on their own personal growth. Ask abstract questions to get them to think beyond their day-to-day tasks and build out a framework for what it looks like to move progressively upward in the company. Ultimately, the junior engineer needs to be intrinsically motivated for their own success and growth.

Shaping Metric Improvements

This article outlines ways to set and hold teams accountable to metrics. It suggests centralizing teams working on the same metric, picking metrics ahead of time and publicly, A/B testing components, and focusing on metric lifts rather than absolute numbers. It also emphasizes the importance of having a great product manager who can help brainstorm ideas and take stress off the team.

Negative or Positive - How to Manage the Influential Impact Engineers Have on a Team

In engineering teams, one or two people can have a large influence on the team, either positively or negatively. To address this issue, it is important to build a better rapport with the primary influencer, have them understand the negative impact their attitude is having on the team, and get them to buy into the idea of creating a team of high performers. If that doesn't work, reach out to the second most influential person or the most junior person to drive motivation through competition. It is important to be open and honest with the influencer to make them realize the impression they are leaving on the company and those around them.

Engineers - How to Best Support Product Managers During an Integration

As an engineer, it is important to build overlap with other teams and move projects forward. To do this, it is important to ask the PM trick questions to help them understand the process and come up with a better method. It is also important to be repetitive and start with the basics when explaining a process. This will help the PM understand the product better and be able to explain it to the customer. A PM is like a Swiss Army knife, in that while it may not be the best tool, it can be used if opened.

Improving Product Release and Functionality

This article discusses the common mistake of releasing a product with too many features that nobody will use. It outlines the steps taken to launch the first version of the product, get feedback from users, and make changes in a simple and modular way. It also highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of getting direct feedback from users, the difficulty of making changes to heavily intertwined code, and the benefits of making shortcut decisions to manage technical debt.

Advice for Engineers as First Time Managers

Making the transition from an engineering role to a managerial one can be daunting, but it is possible to make the change successfully. It is important to understand the role and its expectations, as well as to analyze where the excitement lies for you. Scoping should be the extent of your technical contribution, and you should value and judge your work through the execution of the team. It is also important to build trust with your team and to take advantage of feedback to measure your own success. Ultimately, the bulk of your learning will come from personal experiences.

Remaining Stable and Collaborative While Scaling

This article discusses strategies for keeping engineers motivated and committed while scaling a startup. It suggests using squad/cross-functional team organizations, delegating ownership, tracking performance expectations, doing continuous deployment, tracking KPIs, introducing a squad weekly summary, and allowing engineers to switch squads at a semester frequency. It also emphasizes the importance of giving engineers the right context to make decisions, investing in one-on-one meetings, and avoiding changing organization too often.

What to do when you are leading a turnaround in your company

This is a story of a healthcare company with a product that had 7 versions of software supporting 1800 healthcare systems. The organization had embarked on a very ambitious new version release with large ownership given to the India Leadership team. Due to complexities, regulatory changes, and first time leadership, the release was delayed by 10 months. The current India Engg leadership was moved out and the author volunteered to step in. Through deep dive sessions, Open AMA sessions, and creating 12 teams of max 9 people, the author was able to commit to a full version release in 6 months and the product was successfully submitted for regulatory approval. The author learned that teams in the trenches always know what's going well and not, to localize and empower teams, to allow teams to take ownership, to create metrics that matter and enable the data to be seen by the team, to always communicate strongly and reiterate the goal and commitment, and to take decisions and keep moving forward.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

A shared technical vision to manage your technical debt

Managing technical debt can be difficult, but it is important to find time to create and pursue a shared technical vision that all engineers can buy into. To do this, it is important to give engineers a voice, look ahead to what will impact the business in the future, establish a decision-making framework, and steer the team towards understanding the business. This will help the team reach their own conclusions about which technical tasks are the most important.

Specified Candidate Pools for Hiring Product Managers

When looking for a new product manager, the best approach is to attend niche hackathons, leverage trustworthy promoters and product hunters, and contact competitors. It is important to find someone who is great at product and passionate about the mission, and having a seasoned product manager can bring a systematic way of doing things. The head of product can still have strategic input while the product manager manages the products.

Managing Expectations and the Growth of Reports in a Matrix System

In a matrix system, it can be difficult to manage teams and expectations for projects that you are not managing. To optimize for the company's goals, it is important to be clear and transparent about expectations, set performance goals, and present opportunities for growth. Additionally, it is important to be in the weeds with the team to understand what stories the engineers are working on in order to evaluate for future productivity and performance.

Interviewing for Management- Answering and Then Asking

Interviews for leadership and management positions are important for both the interviewer and the interviewee. This article provides two example interview questions and tips on how to effectively answer them. It also provides tips on how to conduct yourself in an interview, such as asking leading questions and offering hooks for the interviewer to learn more about you. Additionally, it suggests two books to read to help you better understand the art of management.

Do You Know What Motivates and Drives Your Junior Developers?

As a manager of junior developers, it is important to tailor a different approach to each individual, build trust, and use one-on-one time to have them reflect on their own personal growth. Ask abstract questions to get them to think beyond their day-to-day tasks and build out a framework for what it looks like to move progressively upward in the company. Ultimately, the junior engineer needs to be intrinsically motivated for their own success and growth.

Shaping Metric Improvements

This article outlines ways to set and hold teams accountable to metrics. It suggests centralizing teams working on the same metric, picking metrics ahead of time and publicly, A/B testing components, and focusing on metric lifts rather than absolute numbers. It also emphasizes the importance of having a great product manager who can help brainstorm ideas and take stress off the team.

Negative or Positive - How to Manage the Influential Impact Engineers Have on a Team

In engineering teams, one or two people can have a large influence on the team, either positively or negatively. To address this issue, it is important to build a better rapport with the primary influencer, have them understand the negative impact their attitude is having on the team, and get them to buy into the idea of creating a team of high performers. If that doesn't work, reach out to the second most influential person or the most junior person to drive motivation through competition. It is important to be open and honest with the influencer to make them realize the impression they are leaving on the company and those around them.

Engineers - How to Best Support Product Managers During an Integration

As an engineer, it is important to build overlap with other teams and move projects forward. To do this, it is important to ask the PM trick questions to help them understand the process and come up with a better method. It is also important to be repetitive and start with the basics when explaining a process. This will help the PM understand the product better and be able to explain it to the customer. A PM is like a Swiss Army knife, in that while it may not be the best tool, it can be used if opened.

Improving Product Release and Functionality

This article discusses the common mistake of releasing a product with too many features that nobody will use. It outlines the steps taken to launch the first version of the product, get feedback from users, and make changes in a simple and modular way. It also highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of getting direct feedback from users, the difficulty of making changes to heavily intertwined code, and the benefits of making shortcut decisions to manage technical debt.

Advice for Engineers as First Time Managers

Making the transition from an engineering role to a managerial one can be daunting, but it is possible to make the change successfully. It is important to understand the role and its expectations, as well as to analyze where the excitement lies for you. Scoping should be the extent of your technical contribution, and you should value and judge your work through the execution of the team. It is also important to build trust with your team and to take advantage of feedback to measure your own success. Ultimately, the bulk of your learning will come from personal experiences.

Remaining Stable and Collaborative While Scaling

This article discusses strategies for keeping engineers motivated and committed while scaling a startup. It suggests using squad/cross-functional team organizations, delegating ownership, tracking performance expectations, doing continuous deployment, tracking KPIs, introducing a squad weekly summary, and allowing engineers to switch squads at a semester frequency. It also emphasizes the importance of giving engineers the right context to make decisions, investing in one-on-one meetings, and avoiding changing organization too often.

What to do when you are leading a turnaround in your company

This is a story of a healthcare company with a product that had 7 versions of software supporting 1800 healthcare systems. The organization had embarked on a very ambitious new version release with large ownership given to the India Leadership team. Due to complexities, regulatory changes, and first time leadership, the release was delayed by 10 months. The current India Engg leadership was moved out and the author volunteered to step in. Through deep dive sessions, Open AMA sessions, and creating 12 teams of max 9 people, the author was able to commit to a full version release in 6 months and the product was successfully submitted for regulatory approval. The author learned that teams in the trenches always know what's going well and not, to localize and empower teams, to allow teams to take ownership, to create metrics that matter and enable the data to be seen by the team, to always communicate strongly and reiterate the goal and commitment, and to take decisions and keep moving forward.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

A shared technical vision to manage your technical debt

Managing technical debt can be difficult, but it is important to find time to create and pursue a shared technical vision that all engineers can buy into. To do this, it is important to give engineers a voice, look ahead to what will impact the business in the future, establish a decision-making framework, and steer the team towards understanding the business. This will help the team reach their own conclusions about which technical tasks are the most important.

Specified Candidate Pools for Hiring Product Managers

When looking for a new product manager, the best approach is to attend niche hackathons, leverage trustworthy promoters and product hunters, and contact competitors. It is important to find someone who is great at product and passionate about the mission, and having a seasoned product manager can bring a systematic way of doing things. The head of product can still have strategic input while the product manager manages the products.

Managing Expectations and the Growth of Reports in a Matrix System

In a matrix system, it can be difficult to manage teams and expectations for projects that you are not managing. To optimize for the company's goals, it is important to be clear and transparent about expectations, set performance goals, and present opportunities for growth. Additionally, it is important to be in the weeds with the team to understand what stories the engineers are working on in order to evaluate for future productivity and performance.

Interviewing for Management- Answering and Then Asking

Interviews for leadership and management positions are important for both the interviewer and the interviewee. This article provides two example interview questions and tips on how to effectively answer them. It also provides tips on how to conduct yourself in an interview, such as asking leading questions and offering hooks for the interviewer to learn more about you. Additionally, it suggests two books to read to help you better understand the art of management.

Do You Know What Motivates and Drives Your Junior Developers?

As a manager of junior developers, it is important to tailor a different approach to each individual, build trust, and use one-on-one time to have them reflect on their own personal growth. Ask abstract questions to get them to think beyond their day-to-day tasks and build out a framework for what it looks like to move progressively upward in the company. Ultimately, the junior engineer needs to be intrinsically motivated for their own success and growth.

Shaping Metric Improvements

This article outlines ways to set and hold teams accountable to metrics. It suggests centralizing teams working on the same metric, picking metrics ahead of time and publicly, A/B testing components, and focusing on metric lifts rather than absolute numbers. It also emphasizes the importance of having a great product manager who can help brainstorm ideas and take stress off the team.

Negative or Positive - How to Manage the Influential Impact Engineers Have on a Team

In engineering teams, one or two people can have a large influence on the team, either positively or negatively. To address this issue, it is important to build a better rapport with the primary influencer, have them understand the negative impact their attitude is having on the team, and get them to buy into the idea of creating a team of high performers. If that doesn't work, reach out to the second most influential person or the most junior person to drive motivation through competition. It is important to be open and honest with the influencer to make them realize the impression they are leaving on the company and those around them.

Engineers - How to Best Support Product Managers During an Integration

As an engineer, it is important to build overlap with other teams and move projects forward. To do this, it is important to ask the PM trick questions to help them understand the process and come up with a better method. It is also important to be repetitive and start with the basics when explaining a process. This will help the PM understand the product better and be able to explain it to the customer. A PM is like a Swiss Army knife, in that while it may not be the best tool, it can be used if opened.

Improving Product Release and Functionality

This article discusses the common mistake of releasing a product with too many features that nobody will use. It outlines the steps taken to launch the first version of the product, get feedback from users, and make changes in a simple and modular way. It also highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of getting direct feedback from users, the difficulty of making changes to heavily intertwined code, and the benefits of making shortcut decisions to manage technical debt.

Advice for Engineers as First Time Managers

Making the transition from an engineering role to a managerial one can be daunting, but it is possible to make the change successfully. It is important to understand the role and its expectations, as well as to analyze where the excitement lies for you. Scoping should be the extent of your technical contribution, and you should value and judge your work through the execution of the team. It is also important to build trust with your team and to take advantage of feedback to measure your own success. Ultimately, the bulk of your learning will come from personal experiences.

Remaining Stable and Collaborative While Scaling

This article discusses strategies for keeping engineers motivated and committed while scaling a startup. It suggests using squad/cross-functional team organizations, delegating ownership, tracking performance expectations, doing continuous deployment, tracking KPIs, introducing a squad weekly summary, and allowing engineers to switch squads at a semester frequency. It also emphasizes the importance of giving engineers the right context to make decisions, investing in one-on-one meetings, and avoiding changing organization too often.

What to do when you are leading a turnaround in your company

This is a story of a healthcare company with a product that had 7 versions of software supporting 1800 healthcare systems. The organization had embarked on a very ambitious new version release with large ownership given to the India Leadership team. Due to complexities, regulatory changes, and first time leadership, the release was delayed by 10 months. The current India Engg leadership was moved out and the author volunteered to step in. Through deep dive sessions, Open AMA sessions, and creating 12 teams of max 9 people, the author was able to commit to a full version release in 6 months and the product was successfully submitted for regulatory approval. The author learned that teams in the trenches always know what's going well and not, to localize and empower teams, to allow teams to take ownership, to create metrics that matter and enable the data to be seen by the team, to always communicate strongly and reiterate the goal and commitment, and to take decisions and keep moving forward.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

A shared technical vision to manage your technical debt

Managing technical debt can be difficult, but it is important to find time to create and pursue a shared technical vision that all engineers can buy into. To do this, it is important to give engineers a voice, look ahead to what will impact the business in the future, establish a decision-making framework, and steer the team towards understanding the business. This will help the team reach their own conclusions about which technical tasks are the most important.

Specified Candidate Pools for Hiring Product Managers

When looking for a new product manager, the best approach is to attend niche hackathons, leverage trustworthy promoters and product hunters, and contact competitors. It is important to find someone who is great at product and passionate about the mission, and having a seasoned product manager can bring a systematic way of doing things. The head of product can still have strategic input while the product manager manages the products.

Managing Expectations and the Growth of Reports in a Matrix System

In a matrix system, it can be difficult to manage teams and expectations for projects that you are not managing. To optimize for the company's goals, it is important to be clear and transparent about expectations, set performance goals, and present opportunities for growth. Additionally, it is important to be in the weeds with the team to understand what stories the engineers are working on in order to evaluate for future productivity and performance.

Interviewing for Management- Answering and Then Asking

Interviews for leadership and management positions are important for both the interviewer and the interviewee. This article provides two example interview questions and tips on how to effectively answer them. It also provides tips on how to conduct yourself in an interview, such as asking leading questions and offering hooks for the interviewer to learn more about you. Additionally, it suggests two books to read to help you better understand the art of management.

Do You Know What Motivates and Drives Your Junior Developers?

As a manager of junior developers, it is important to tailor a different approach to each individual, build trust, and use one-on-one time to have them reflect on their own personal growth. Ask abstract questions to get them to think beyond their day-to-day tasks and build out a framework for what it looks like to move progressively upward in the company. Ultimately, the junior engineer needs to be intrinsically motivated for their own success and growth.

Shaping Metric Improvements

This article outlines ways to set and hold teams accountable to metrics. It suggests centralizing teams working on the same metric, picking metrics ahead of time and publicly, A/B testing components, and focusing on metric lifts rather than absolute numbers. It also emphasizes the importance of having a great product manager who can help brainstorm ideas and take stress off the team.

Negative or Positive - How to Manage the Influential Impact Engineers Have on a Team

In engineering teams, one or two people can have a large influence on the team, either positively or negatively. To address this issue, it is important to build a better rapport with the primary influencer, have them understand the negative impact their attitude is having on the team, and get them to buy into the idea of creating a team of high performers. If that doesn't work, reach out to the second most influential person or the most junior person to drive motivation through competition. It is important to be open and honest with the influencer to make them realize the impression they are leaving on the company and those around them.

Engineers - How to Best Support Product Managers During an Integration

As an engineer, it is important to build overlap with other teams and move projects forward. To do this, it is important to ask the PM trick questions to help them understand the process and come up with a better method. It is also important to be repetitive and start with the basics when explaining a process. This will help the PM understand the product better and be able to explain it to the customer. A PM is like a Swiss Army knife, in that while it may not be the best tool, it can be used if opened.

Improving Product Release and Functionality

This article discusses the common mistake of releasing a product with too many features that nobody will use. It outlines the steps taken to launch the first version of the product, get feedback from users, and make changes in a simple and modular way. It also highlights the lessons learned from this process, such as the importance of getting direct feedback from users, the difficulty of making changes to heavily intertwined code, and the benefits of making shortcut decisions to manage technical debt.

Advice for Engineers as First Time Managers

Making the transition from an engineering role to a managerial one can be daunting, but it is possible to make the change successfully. It is important to understand the role and its expectations, as well as to analyze where the excitement lies for you. Scoping should be the extent of your technical contribution, and you should value and judge your work through the execution of the team. It is also important to build trust with your team and to take advantage of feedback to measure your own success. Ultimately, the bulk of your learning will come from personal experiences.

Remaining Stable and Collaborative While Scaling

This article discusses strategies for keeping engineers motivated and committed while scaling a startup. It suggests using squad/cross-functional team organizations, delegating ownership, tracking performance expectations, doing continuous deployment, tracking KPIs, introducing a squad weekly summary, and allowing engineers to switch squads at a semester frequency. It also emphasizes the importance of giving engineers the right context to make decisions, investing in one-on-one meetings, and avoiding changing organization too often.

What to do when you are leading a turnaround in your company

This is a story of a healthcare company with a product that had 7 versions of software supporting 1800 healthcare systems. The organization had embarked on a very ambitious new version release with large ownership given to the India Leadership team. Due to complexities, regulatory changes, and first time leadership, the release was delayed by 10 months. The current India Engg leadership was moved out and the author volunteered to step in. Through deep dive sessions, Open AMA sessions, and creating 12 teams of max 9 people, the author was able to commit to a full version release in 6 months and the product was successfully submitted for regulatory approval. The author learned that teams in the trenches always know what's going well and not, to localize and empower teams, to allow teams to take ownership, to create metrics that matter and enable the data to be seen by the team, to always communicate strongly and reiterate the goal and commitment, and to take decisions and keep moving forward.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.