Knowledge shared by our community

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

The Power of Acquisitions

This article outlines the steps taken to acquire businesses, customers, content, and users. It emphasizes the importance of research, sending emails, asking business questions, and building relationships. It also encourages CEOs to look for other points of leverage besides money when making acquisitions.

Transitioning Roles from IC to Manager

This article outlines the journey of an individual transitioning from an individual contributor (IC) to a manager. It discusses the importance of discussing aspirations with a manager, building relationships outside of the team, and taking on additional responsibilities in the current role to prepare for the next. It also provides examples of how to build relationships and brand, such as brown-bags, speaking at conferences, hackathons, and organizing meetups.

Reacting to a Critical Team Member Who Wants to Quit

When a critical team member expressed interest in transitioning roles to an outside startup company, the manager took the opportunity to understand the employee's motives and worked with him to map out the benefits and losses of the move. With the help of the director, they found a new role within the company for the employee and he ended up staying with the company in his new role. The manager learned the importance of making the employee feel supported and not just trying to retain them, but helping them make the best decision.

The Importance of Asking Questions Prior to Diving Into a New Project

After joining a new team, the manager asked the new team member to redesign a process. Without asking questions, the new team member dove in and came up with a plan. After several ideas were turned down, the team member found out that the manager's main concern was timing and that the project needed to be completed within six months. The team member worked with someone else to find an internal team to execute the project and provided designers with three options. The lesson learned was to jump into something with eyes wide open and to take the time to hear out the manager's needs and details up front.

How to Build a Distributed Engineering Team

At Doximity, they decided to cultivate a culture of inclusion by building a geographically distributed team. To do this, they fine-tuned their recruiting practices, established a personal connection with their teammates, treated collocated and distributed employees equally, created a virtual water cooler, and focused on delivery teams. They also leveraged the right technology, such as videoconferencing, asynchronous chat, screen-sharing, and voice calls. Through this process, they learned that a distributed team is less about saving money and more about hiring top talent, and that trust, collaboration, and creativity are key to success.

10 simple ways to make meetings more effective

This article outlines 10 ways to make meetings more effective for everyone involved, such as providing an agenda, sending out meeting documentation in advance, respecting everyone's time, and considering the maker vs. manager schedule. These tips should help make meetings more productive and successful.

Is Group Chat Killing your Flow?

This article discusses the issue of constant interruptions in the workplace and how it can be detrimental to productivity. Three strategies are proposed to help reduce the number of interruptions, such as considering if an answer is needed immediately, researching the answer before asking, and avoiding the "ASAP" culture. The article concludes that reducing interruptions can help foster creativity and focus, and enable people to feel fulfilled by their work.

The Next Steps for your Product Success

This article discusses how to stay informed about customer needs and decide what actions to take next when investing in a product. It suggests gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, talking to users, and understanding the environment in which the product works best. It also advises to trust instincts, dig deeper when something doesn't add up, and have a yearly retrospective.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

The Power of Acquisitions

This article outlines the steps taken to acquire businesses, customers, content, and users. It emphasizes the importance of research, sending emails, asking business questions, and building relationships. It also encourages CEOs to look for other points of leverage besides money when making acquisitions.

Transitioning Roles from IC to Manager

This article outlines the journey of an individual transitioning from an individual contributor (IC) to a manager. It discusses the importance of discussing aspirations with a manager, building relationships outside of the team, and taking on additional responsibilities in the current role to prepare for the next. It also provides examples of how to build relationships and brand, such as brown-bags, speaking at conferences, hackathons, and organizing meetups.

Reacting to a Critical Team Member Who Wants to Quit

When a critical team member expressed interest in transitioning roles to an outside startup company, the manager took the opportunity to understand the employee's motives and worked with him to map out the benefits and losses of the move. With the help of the director, they found a new role within the company for the employee and he ended up staying with the company in his new role. The manager learned the importance of making the employee feel supported and not just trying to retain them, but helping them make the best decision.

The Importance of Asking Questions Prior to Diving Into a New Project

After joining a new team, the manager asked the new team member to redesign a process. Without asking questions, the new team member dove in and came up with a plan. After several ideas were turned down, the team member found out that the manager's main concern was timing and that the project needed to be completed within six months. The team member worked with someone else to find an internal team to execute the project and provided designers with three options. The lesson learned was to jump into something with eyes wide open and to take the time to hear out the manager's needs and details up front.

How to Build a Distributed Engineering Team

At Doximity, they decided to cultivate a culture of inclusion by building a geographically distributed team. To do this, they fine-tuned their recruiting practices, established a personal connection with their teammates, treated collocated and distributed employees equally, created a virtual water cooler, and focused on delivery teams. They also leveraged the right technology, such as videoconferencing, asynchronous chat, screen-sharing, and voice calls. Through this process, they learned that a distributed team is less about saving money and more about hiring top talent, and that trust, collaboration, and creativity are key to success.

10 simple ways to make meetings more effective

This article outlines 10 ways to make meetings more effective for everyone involved, such as providing an agenda, sending out meeting documentation in advance, respecting everyone's time, and considering the maker vs. manager schedule. These tips should help make meetings more productive and successful.

Is Group Chat Killing your Flow?

This article discusses the issue of constant interruptions in the workplace and how it can be detrimental to productivity. Three strategies are proposed to help reduce the number of interruptions, such as considering if an answer is needed immediately, researching the answer before asking, and avoiding the "ASAP" culture. The article concludes that reducing interruptions can help foster creativity and focus, and enable people to feel fulfilled by their work.

The Next Steps for your Product Success

This article discusses how to stay informed about customer needs and decide what actions to take next when investing in a product. It suggests gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, talking to users, and understanding the environment in which the product works best. It also advises to trust instincts, dig deeper when something doesn't add up, and have a yearly retrospective.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

The Power of Acquisitions

This article outlines the steps taken to acquire businesses, customers, content, and users. It emphasizes the importance of research, sending emails, asking business questions, and building relationships. It also encourages CEOs to look for other points of leverage besides money when making acquisitions.

Transitioning Roles from IC to Manager

This article outlines the journey of an individual transitioning from an individual contributor (IC) to a manager. It discusses the importance of discussing aspirations with a manager, building relationships outside of the team, and taking on additional responsibilities in the current role to prepare for the next. It also provides examples of how to build relationships and brand, such as brown-bags, speaking at conferences, hackathons, and organizing meetups.

Reacting to a Critical Team Member Who Wants to Quit

When a critical team member expressed interest in transitioning roles to an outside startup company, the manager took the opportunity to understand the employee's motives and worked with him to map out the benefits and losses of the move. With the help of the director, they found a new role within the company for the employee and he ended up staying with the company in his new role. The manager learned the importance of making the employee feel supported and not just trying to retain them, but helping them make the best decision.

The Importance of Asking Questions Prior to Diving Into a New Project

After joining a new team, the manager asked the new team member to redesign a process. Without asking questions, the new team member dove in and came up with a plan. After several ideas were turned down, the team member found out that the manager's main concern was timing and that the project needed to be completed within six months. The team member worked with someone else to find an internal team to execute the project and provided designers with three options. The lesson learned was to jump into something with eyes wide open and to take the time to hear out the manager's needs and details up front.

How to Build a Distributed Engineering Team

At Doximity, they decided to cultivate a culture of inclusion by building a geographically distributed team. To do this, they fine-tuned their recruiting practices, established a personal connection with their teammates, treated collocated and distributed employees equally, created a virtual water cooler, and focused on delivery teams. They also leveraged the right technology, such as videoconferencing, asynchronous chat, screen-sharing, and voice calls. Through this process, they learned that a distributed team is less about saving money and more about hiring top talent, and that trust, collaboration, and creativity are key to success.

10 simple ways to make meetings more effective

This article outlines 10 ways to make meetings more effective for everyone involved, such as providing an agenda, sending out meeting documentation in advance, respecting everyone's time, and considering the maker vs. manager schedule. These tips should help make meetings more productive and successful.

Is Group Chat Killing your Flow?

This article discusses the issue of constant interruptions in the workplace and how it can be detrimental to productivity. Three strategies are proposed to help reduce the number of interruptions, such as considering if an answer is needed immediately, researching the answer before asking, and avoiding the "ASAP" culture. The article concludes that reducing interruptions can help foster creativity and focus, and enable people to feel fulfilled by their work.

The Next Steps for your Product Success

This article discusses how to stay informed about customer needs and decide what actions to take next when investing in a product. It suggests gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, talking to users, and understanding the environment in which the product works best. It also advises to trust instincts, dig deeper when something doesn't add up, and have a yearly retrospective.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

The Power of Acquisitions

This article outlines the steps taken to acquire businesses, customers, content, and users. It emphasizes the importance of research, sending emails, asking business questions, and building relationships. It also encourages CEOs to look for other points of leverage besides money when making acquisitions.

Transitioning Roles from IC to Manager

This article outlines the journey of an individual transitioning from an individual contributor (IC) to a manager. It discusses the importance of discussing aspirations with a manager, building relationships outside of the team, and taking on additional responsibilities in the current role to prepare for the next. It also provides examples of how to build relationships and brand, such as brown-bags, speaking at conferences, hackathons, and organizing meetups.

Reacting to a Critical Team Member Who Wants to Quit

When a critical team member expressed interest in transitioning roles to an outside startup company, the manager took the opportunity to understand the employee's motives and worked with him to map out the benefits and losses of the move. With the help of the director, they found a new role within the company for the employee and he ended up staying with the company in his new role. The manager learned the importance of making the employee feel supported and not just trying to retain them, but helping them make the best decision.

The Importance of Asking Questions Prior to Diving Into a New Project

After joining a new team, the manager asked the new team member to redesign a process. Without asking questions, the new team member dove in and came up with a plan. After several ideas were turned down, the team member found out that the manager's main concern was timing and that the project needed to be completed within six months. The team member worked with someone else to find an internal team to execute the project and provided designers with three options. The lesson learned was to jump into something with eyes wide open and to take the time to hear out the manager's needs and details up front.

How to Build a Distributed Engineering Team

At Doximity, they decided to cultivate a culture of inclusion by building a geographically distributed team. To do this, they fine-tuned their recruiting practices, established a personal connection with their teammates, treated collocated and distributed employees equally, created a virtual water cooler, and focused on delivery teams. They also leveraged the right technology, such as videoconferencing, asynchronous chat, screen-sharing, and voice calls. Through this process, they learned that a distributed team is less about saving money and more about hiring top talent, and that trust, collaboration, and creativity are key to success.

10 simple ways to make meetings more effective

This article outlines 10 ways to make meetings more effective for everyone involved, such as providing an agenda, sending out meeting documentation in advance, respecting everyone's time, and considering the maker vs. manager schedule. These tips should help make meetings more productive and successful.

Is Group Chat Killing your Flow?

This article discusses the issue of constant interruptions in the workplace and how it can be detrimental to productivity. Three strategies are proposed to help reduce the number of interruptions, such as considering if an answer is needed immediately, researching the answer before asking, and avoiding the "ASAP" culture. The article concludes that reducing interruptions can help foster creativity and focus, and enable people to feel fulfilled by their work.

The Next Steps for your Product Success

This article discusses how to stay informed about customer needs and decide what actions to take next when investing in a product. It suggests gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, talking to users, and understanding the environment in which the product works best. It also advises to trust instincts, dig deeper when something doesn't add up, and have a yearly retrospective.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

The Power of Acquisitions

This article outlines the steps taken to acquire businesses, customers, content, and users. It emphasizes the importance of research, sending emails, asking business questions, and building relationships. It also encourages CEOs to look for other points of leverage besides money when making acquisitions.

Transitioning Roles from IC to Manager

This article outlines the journey of an individual transitioning from an individual contributor (IC) to a manager. It discusses the importance of discussing aspirations with a manager, building relationships outside of the team, and taking on additional responsibilities in the current role to prepare for the next. It also provides examples of how to build relationships and brand, such as brown-bags, speaking at conferences, hackathons, and organizing meetups.

Reacting to a Critical Team Member Who Wants to Quit

When a critical team member expressed interest in transitioning roles to an outside startup company, the manager took the opportunity to understand the employee's motives and worked with him to map out the benefits and losses of the move. With the help of the director, they found a new role within the company for the employee and he ended up staying with the company in his new role. The manager learned the importance of making the employee feel supported and not just trying to retain them, but helping them make the best decision.

The Importance of Asking Questions Prior to Diving Into a New Project

After joining a new team, the manager asked the new team member to redesign a process. Without asking questions, the new team member dove in and came up with a plan. After several ideas were turned down, the team member found out that the manager's main concern was timing and that the project needed to be completed within six months. The team member worked with someone else to find an internal team to execute the project and provided designers with three options. The lesson learned was to jump into something with eyes wide open and to take the time to hear out the manager's needs and details up front.

How to Build a Distributed Engineering Team

At Doximity, they decided to cultivate a culture of inclusion by building a geographically distributed team. To do this, they fine-tuned their recruiting practices, established a personal connection with their teammates, treated collocated and distributed employees equally, created a virtual water cooler, and focused on delivery teams. They also leveraged the right technology, such as videoconferencing, asynchronous chat, screen-sharing, and voice calls. Through this process, they learned that a distributed team is less about saving money and more about hiring top talent, and that trust, collaboration, and creativity are key to success.

10 simple ways to make meetings more effective

This article outlines 10 ways to make meetings more effective for everyone involved, such as providing an agenda, sending out meeting documentation in advance, respecting everyone's time, and considering the maker vs. manager schedule. These tips should help make meetings more productive and successful.

Is Group Chat Killing your Flow?

This article discusses the issue of constant interruptions in the workplace and how it can be detrimental to productivity. Three strategies are proposed to help reduce the number of interruptions, such as considering if an answer is needed immediately, researching the answer before asking, and avoiding the "ASAP" culture. The article concludes that reducing interruptions can help foster creativity and focus, and enable people to feel fulfilled by their work.

The Next Steps for your Product Success

This article discusses how to stay informed about customer needs and decide what actions to take next when investing in a product. It suggests gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, talking to users, and understanding the environment in which the product works best. It also advises to trust instincts, dig deeper when something doesn't add up, and have a yearly retrospective.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

The Power of Acquisitions

This article outlines the steps taken to acquire businesses, customers, content, and users. It emphasizes the importance of research, sending emails, asking business questions, and building relationships. It also encourages CEOs to look for other points of leverage besides money when making acquisitions.

Transitioning Roles from IC to Manager

This article outlines the journey of an individual transitioning from an individual contributor (IC) to a manager. It discusses the importance of discussing aspirations with a manager, building relationships outside of the team, and taking on additional responsibilities in the current role to prepare for the next. It also provides examples of how to build relationships and brand, such as brown-bags, speaking at conferences, hackathons, and organizing meetups.

Reacting to a Critical Team Member Who Wants to Quit

When a critical team member expressed interest in transitioning roles to an outside startup company, the manager took the opportunity to understand the employee's motives and worked with him to map out the benefits and losses of the move. With the help of the director, they found a new role within the company for the employee and he ended up staying with the company in his new role. The manager learned the importance of making the employee feel supported and not just trying to retain them, but helping them make the best decision.

The Importance of Asking Questions Prior to Diving Into a New Project

After joining a new team, the manager asked the new team member to redesign a process. Without asking questions, the new team member dove in and came up with a plan. After several ideas were turned down, the team member found out that the manager's main concern was timing and that the project needed to be completed within six months. The team member worked with someone else to find an internal team to execute the project and provided designers with three options. The lesson learned was to jump into something with eyes wide open and to take the time to hear out the manager's needs and details up front.

How to Build a Distributed Engineering Team

At Doximity, they decided to cultivate a culture of inclusion by building a geographically distributed team. To do this, they fine-tuned their recruiting practices, established a personal connection with their teammates, treated collocated and distributed employees equally, created a virtual water cooler, and focused on delivery teams. They also leveraged the right technology, such as videoconferencing, asynchronous chat, screen-sharing, and voice calls. Through this process, they learned that a distributed team is less about saving money and more about hiring top talent, and that trust, collaboration, and creativity are key to success.

10 simple ways to make meetings more effective

This article outlines 10 ways to make meetings more effective for everyone involved, such as providing an agenda, sending out meeting documentation in advance, respecting everyone's time, and considering the maker vs. manager schedule. These tips should help make meetings more productive and successful.

Is Group Chat Killing your Flow?

This article discusses the issue of constant interruptions in the workplace and how it can be detrimental to productivity. Three strategies are proposed to help reduce the number of interruptions, such as considering if an answer is needed immediately, researching the answer before asking, and avoiding the "ASAP" culture. The article concludes that reducing interruptions can help foster creativity and focus, and enable people to feel fulfilled by their work.

The Next Steps for your Product Success

This article discusses how to stay informed about customer needs and decide what actions to take next when investing in a product. It suggests gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, talking to users, and understanding the environment in which the product works best. It also advises to trust instincts, dig deeper when something doesn't add up, and have a yearly retrospective.