Knowledge shared by our community

Quick, Compassionate, and Diverse Hiring at a High Growth Company

This article discusses the importance of being honest and communicative during the hiring process. It outlines the importance of thanking candidates for their time, being truthful about why they weren't chosen, and providing direct feedback. It also suggests sending emails at various intervals to keep the candidate informed and expressing why they would be a good fit for the role.

Dealing with Difficult People

This article reflects on the author's experience working in dysfunctional companies, where decisions were made through confrontation, blaming and bullying. The author suggests that instead of fighting with those in power, it is better to make them feel listened to and to come to meetings prepared with data. The author also emphasizes the importance of creating a culture of accountability and open communication, where employees feel empowered to make a difference and are not afraid to speak their mind.

Compromising in the Face of Conflict

Working with channeled partners is a great way for startups to leverage large partners to sell their product. However, conflicts may arise between the company's strategic priorities and those of the partner. To resolve this issue, companies must compromise and be aware of the pros and cons of the channel-based sales model. The pros include gaining leverage and not having to hire a sales team, while the cons include losing control over the distribution channel and having to use the partner's payment device. To ensure success, companies should pick the battles they want to fight and look ahead to where they want to be with the partner in five years.

How to prepare for the rapid growth of your company

The company experienced rapid growth and did not have a formal support structure in place, leading to a stressful period of taking on support calls throughout the day. To address this, they leveraged existing talent and hired self-starters who were comfortable with ambiguity and could take on their own responsibility. The lessons learned were that you can't always prepare for rapid growth, hiring self-starters is important, and it's not always wise to hire from a big company.

How To Effectively Manage Remote Employees At A Start-Up

In a start-up, managing remote employees requires a different approach. To compensate for the lack of in-office conversations, the author selected employees who were self-managers and stressed the value of over-communication. The author also implemented daily team stand-ups, weekly one-on-ones, and quarterly visits to the office to ensure that remote employees were connected with their teams. The author learned that it is important to choose the right people to work remotely with and to use face-to-face communication tools to ensure effective communication.

Create your engineering culture with your first engineers

A new CTO was faced with the challenge of creating an engineering culture for their team. They took input from the team and implemented processes such as weekly sprints with Trello and Google slides, and Creative Day, a day dedicated to working on anything within three categories. Through this process, the team was able to create a culture that they felt ownership of and that fit the criteria of humility, hard work, and curiosity.

Getting Your Hands Dirty as a CTO

As a CTO, the author learned the importance of humility, curiosity, and showing up for their team. They realized that they don't need to know everything, but they should be honest about their limitations and put their confidence in their team. They also learned to expand their technical knowledge by learning a little bit from each area, and to be honest, ask for help, and show up for their team.

How to Sync Your Priorities with Overlapping Roadmaps

This article discusses how to prioritize features and roadmaps when working with multiple teams. It suggests implementing a loose coupling for the assembly of products, ensuring clean boundaries between companies, and creating a shared human context. It also emphasizes the importance of active listening, empathy, and being organized and punctual to avoid wasting time.

Does One Have to Standardize Management Standards?

This article discusses the dilemma of whether to set management standards across the board or to have individual managerial standards for each team. It suggests a hybrid solution of allowing individual teams to have a bit of independence while also having a level of standardized practices across all teams. It also provides lessons learned such as fostering knowledge among the managers, setting a weekly engineering manager meeting, and leading by example.

Outlining Trajectories of Growth for Senior Engineers

A senior engineer was becoming unmotivated and unhappy in his job, so the company looked deeper to understand the source of his distress. It was found that he felt like he was hitting the perceived ceiling of growth in the company, so the company strategized ways in which he could continue growing with the organization. This included having a well-defined career ladder and assigning an expertise acquiring project, having the engineer build an open or closed source project, and having them share their subject matter expertise. Additionally, the engineer was asked if they wanted to stay on the engineering track or move to the people management track. The company also learned to remember what was motivating to them as an individual contributor and to show their senior engineers their value.

Get ready for tomorrow, without losing out on today’s battles

This article discusses the challenge of addressing unplanned activities and ensuring completion of committed deliverables. The author allocated one person every sprint cycle for unplanned activities and collected data on the quantum of unplanned activities. This data was used to form a 'call of duty' service, where a team of developers would work on unplanned tasks, stories put in the backburner, and additional tooling. The author learned that allocating a dedicated engineer every sprint cycle reduces context switching, having a dedicated developer helps with critical analysis of applications, and collecting data on unplanned activities helps quantify the work and take corrective actions.

If They Aren’t the Right Fit, Let Them Quit

A report expressed discontent with their job at Asana, and the manager handled the situation by expressing their opinion that the report should look for other jobs and offering assistance in the form of introductions to other, more fitting jobs. The manager learned that it is important to tackle tricky underlying issues and not be afraid to let people quit if it is not a good fit, and to have strong, positive relationships with employees.

When Hiring, Hyper Growth and Haste Do Not Go Hand-in-Hand

This story is about a company that wanted to build a world-class Product team. To do this, they had to bring in enough candidates to grow the team substantially, while maintaining a high bar for entry. After 5 months of unsuccessful recruiting, they changed their approach by assigning one person to be responsible for PM recruiting and setting up a weekly pipeline review meeting. Within 3 months, they had 3 candidates join the team. The lessons learned were that in a fast-growing startup, you need an owner, you can apply a user funnel to recruiting, and public review of action items provides an incentive for owners to keep on top of things.

You’re Probably Not Reviewing Your OKRs Enough

This article discusses the importance of running a formal weekly goals review to set the tempo for a team. It suggests collecting a "confidence score" for each goal or key result, along with a qualitative assessment, and using the review process as an opportunity to review and update the quantitative metrics for key results. Doing this behavior every week will help teams ask important questions, understand patterns around success and failure, and set the tempo for the team.

When Being An Engineering Manager Gets Lonely

Engineering managers often feel isolated and unable to express their negative emotions due to the slow and imprecise feedback they receive. To cope with this, the author changed their frame of mind to focus on the good things that happened in their day and found a peer to talk to. This helped them to differentiate between things that were annoying but not a problem, and those that needed to be addressed. This was a valuable lesson in allowing themselves to experience their negative emotions.

Developer Pairings within Bounded Contexts on Full Stack Teams

A company was rapidly growing and expanding, so a team was brought in to help with the hiring and growth. The team was split into their skill sets, but this caused them to become siloed and created friction between the front and back end teams. To solve this, the team was restructured around bounded contexts relevant to business needs, with teams taking on domains of ownership and pairing front-end and back-end developers. This allowed the team to work in small units, reducing rework and increasing velocity. The process took three months, but resulted in improved internal communication, pride of ownership, and team happiness.

Manage Up with Communication Structure

This case study outlines the challenges faced by a large telecommunications company with their e-commerce website, which had significant technical debt and a culture of over-committing and under-delivering. The author created a stakeholder communication plan to baseline expectations and keep stakeholders informed and accountable. After 12 months, the team had a mature agile cadence established, resulting in faster decisions, less fatigue and churn, and higher team morale. The author learned that a solid communication structure is vital to a high performing team and organization.

Identifying and letting underperforming engineers go

This story is about an engineering manager who inherited a team that was growing quickly and had hired contractors. After spending a month, the manager realized the skills gap between the team and the new engineer. The manager took action by pairing the tech lead with the new engineer, giving feedback in 1-1s, and recommending courses and books. Despite this, the engineer was still falling behind and spending too much time at the foosball and ping pong table. Ultimately, the manager had to let the engineer go in his probation period. The manager learned to never lower the bar on hiring, to put a strong probation process in place, to pair new developers with strong leads, and to trust their spidey sense.

Identifying engineering talent in unusual places

This story is about a hiring manager who was challenged to find qualified talent during the dot com boom. He took a chance on the company's best foosball player, who had no programming background or degree in computer science, and invested heavily in teaching him the technical skills and industry best practices. Two years later, the foosball player was able to step into the manager's place as the engineering manager of the team. The lesson learned is to be open minded and self-aware when hiring, and to distinguish between skills that must be innate to the candidate versus skills that can be taught.

How to better manage your time and responsibilities as a new manager

This article details the steps taken by a manager of 14 people to stay on top of inbound requests and managerial duties. The manager used a physical notebook to organize notes and action items, and delegated some of their responsibilities to free up time and sanity. Through delegating, the manager was able to create a new engineering role and staff a new team before the need became obvious. The article also highlights the importance of delegation and ownership in any given task.

Quick, Compassionate, and Diverse Hiring at a High Growth Company

This article discusses the importance of being honest and communicative during the hiring process. It outlines the importance of thanking candidates for their time, being truthful about why they weren't chosen, and providing direct feedback. It also suggests sending emails at various intervals to keep the candidate informed and expressing why they would be a good fit for the role.

Dealing with Difficult People

This article reflects on the author's experience working in dysfunctional companies, where decisions were made through confrontation, blaming and bullying. The author suggests that instead of fighting with those in power, it is better to make them feel listened to and to come to meetings prepared with data. The author also emphasizes the importance of creating a culture of accountability and open communication, where employees feel empowered to make a difference and are not afraid to speak their mind.

Compromising in the Face of Conflict

Working with channeled partners is a great way for startups to leverage large partners to sell their product. However, conflicts may arise between the company's strategic priorities and those of the partner. To resolve this issue, companies must compromise and be aware of the pros and cons of the channel-based sales model. The pros include gaining leverage and not having to hire a sales team, while the cons include losing control over the distribution channel and having to use the partner's payment device. To ensure success, companies should pick the battles they want to fight and look ahead to where they want to be with the partner in five years.

How to prepare for the rapid growth of your company

The company experienced rapid growth and did not have a formal support structure in place, leading to a stressful period of taking on support calls throughout the day. To address this, they leveraged existing talent and hired self-starters who were comfortable with ambiguity and could take on their own responsibility. The lessons learned were that you can't always prepare for rapid growth, hiring self-starters is important, and it's not always wise to hire from a big company.

How To Effectively Manage Remote Employees At A Start-Up

In a start-up, managing remote employees requires a different approach. To compensate for the lack of in-office conversations, the author selected employees who were self-managers and stressed the value of over-communication. The author also implemented daily team stand-ups, weekly one-on-ones, and quarterly visits to the office to ensure that remote employees were connected with their teams. The author learned that it is important to choose the right people to work remotely with and to use face-to-face communication tools to ensure effective communication.

Create your engineering culture with your first engineers

A new CTO was faced with the challenge of creating an engineering culture for their team. They took input from the team and implemented processes such as weekly sprints with Trello and Google slides, and Creative Day, a day dedicated to working on anything within three categories. Through this process, the team was able to create a culture that they felt ownership of and that fit the criteria of humility, hard work, and curiosity.

Getting Your Hands Dirty as a CTO

As a CTO, the author learned the importance of humility, curiosity, and showing up for their team. They realized that they don't need to know everything, but they should be honest about their limitations and put their confidence in their team. They also learned to expand their technical knowledge by learning a little bit from each area, and to be honest, ask for help, and show up for their team.

How to Sync Your Priorities with Overlapping Roadmaps

This article discusses how to prioritize features and roadmaps when working with multiple teams. It suggests implementing a loose coupling for the assembly of products, ensuring clean boundaries between companies, and creating a shared human context. It also emphasizes the importance of active listening, empathy, and being organized and punctual to avoid wasting time.

Does One Have to Standardize Management Standards?

This article discusses the dilemma of whether to set management standards across the board or to have individual managerial standards for each team. It suggests a hybrid solution of allowing individual teams to have a bit of independence while also having a level of standardized practices across all teams. It also provides lessons learned such as fostering knowledge among the managers, setting a weekly engineering manager meeting, and leading by example.

Outlining Trajectories of Growth for Senior Engineers

A senior engineer was becoming unmotivated and unhappy in his job, so the company looked deeper to understand the source of his distress. It was found that he felt like he was hitting the perceived ceiling of growth in the company, so the company strategized ways in which he could continue growing with the organization. This included having a well-defined career ladder and assigning an expertise acquiring project, having the engineer build an open or closed source project, and having them share their subject matter expertise. Additionally, the engineer was asked if they wanted to stay on the engineering track or move to the people management track. The company also learned to remember what was motivating to them as an individual contributor and to show their senior engineers their value.

Get ready for tomorrow, without losing out on today’s battles

This article discusses the challenge of addressing unplanned activities and ensuring completion of committed deliverables. The author allocated one person every sprint cycle for unplanned activities and collected data on the quantum of unplanned activities. This data was used to form a 'call of duty' service, where a team of developers would work on unplanned tasks, stories put in the backburner, and additional tooling. The author learned that allocating a dedicated engineer every sprint cycle reduces context switching, having a dedicated developer helps with critical analysis of applications, and collecting data on unplanned activities helps quantify the work and take corrective actions.

If They Aren’t the Right Fit, Let Them Quit

A report expressed discontent with their job at Asana, and the manager handled the situation by expressing their opinion that the report should look for other jobs and offering assistance in the form of introductions to other, more fitting jobs. The manager learned that it is important to tackle tricky underlying issues and not be afraid to let people quit if it is not a good fit, and to have strong, positive relationships with employees.

When Hiring, Hyper Growth and Haste Do Not Go Hand-in-Hand

This story is about a company that wanted to build a world-class Product team. To do this, they had to bring in enough candidates to grow the team substantially, while maintaining a high bar for entry. After 5 months of unsuccessful recruiting, they changed their approach by assigning one person to be responsible for PM recruiting and setting up a weekly pipeline review meeting. Within 3 months, they had 3 candidates join the team. The lessons learned were that in a fast-growing startup, you need an owner, you can apply a user funnel to recruiting, and public review of action items provides an incentive for owners to keep on top of things.

You’re Probably Not Reviewing Your OKRs Enough

This article discusses the importance of running a formal weekly goals review to set the tempo for a team. It suggests collecting a "confidence score" for each goal or key result, along with a qualitative assessment, and using the review process as an opportunity to review and update the quantitative metrics for key results. Doing this behavior every week will help teams ask important questions, understand patterns around success and failure, and set the tempo for the team.

When Being An Engineering Manager Gets Lonely

Engineering managers often feel isolated and unable to express their negative emotions due to the slow and imprecise feedback they receive. To cope with this, the author changed their frame of mind to focus on the good things that happened in their day and found a peer to talk to. This helped them to differentiate between things that were annoying but not a problem, and those that needed to be addressed. This was a valuable lesson in allowing themselves to experience their negative emotions.

Developer Pairings within Bounded Contexts on Full Stack Teams

A company was rapidly growing and expanding, so a team was brought in to help with the hiring and growth. The team was split into their skill sets, but this caused them to become siloed and created friction between the front and back end teams. To solve this, the team was restructured around bounded contexts relevant to business needs, with teams taking on domains of ownership and pairing front-end and back-end developers. This allowed the team to work in small units, reducing rework and increasing velocity. The process took three months, but resulted in improved internal communication, pride of ownership, and team happiness.

Manage Up with Communication Structure

This case study outlines the challenges faced by a large telecommunications company with their e-commerce website, which had significant technical debt and a culture of over-committing and under-delivering. The author created a stakeholder communication plan to baseline expectations and keep stakeholders informed and accountable. After 12 months, the team had a mature agile cadence established, resulting in faster decisions, less fatigue and churn, and higher team morale. The author learned that a solid communication structure is vital to a high performing team and organization.

Identifying and letting underperforming engineers go

This story is about an engineering manager who inherited a team that was growing quickly and had hired contractors. After spending a month, the manager realized the skills gap between the team and the new engineer. The manager took action by pairing the tech lead with the new engineer, giving feedback in 1-1s, and recommending courses and books. Despite this, the engineer was still falling behind and spending too much time at the foosball and ping pong table. Ultimately, the manager had to let the engineer go in his probation period. The manager learned to never lower the bar on hiring, to put a strong probation process in place, to pair new developers with strong leads, and to trust their spidey sense.

Identifying engineering talent in unusual places

This story is about a hiring manager who was challenged to find qualified talent during the dot com boom. He took a chance on the company's best foosball player, who had no programming background or degree in computer science, and invested heavily in teaching him the technical skills and industry best practices. Two years later, the foosball player was able to step into the manager's place as the engineering manager of the team. The lesson learned is to be open minded and self-aware when hiring, and to distinguish between skills that must be innate to the candidate versus skills that can be taught.

How to better manage your time and responsibilities as a new manager

This article details the steps taken by a manager of 14 people to stay on top of inbound requests and managerial duties. The manager used a physical notebook to organize notes and action items, and delegated some of their responsibilities to free up time and sanity. Through delegating, the manager was able to create a new engineering role and staff a new team before the need became obvious. The article also highlights the importance of delegation and ownership in any given task.

Quick, Compassionate, and Diverse Hiring at a High Growth Company

This article discusses the importance of being honest and communicative during the hiring process. It outlines the importance of thanking candidates for their time, being truthful about why they weren't chosen, and providing direct feedback. It also suggests sending emails at various intervals to keep the candidate informed and expressing why they would be a good fit for the role.

Dealing with Difficult People

This article reflects on the author's experience working in dysfunctional companies, where decisions were made through confrontation, blaming and bullying. The author suggests that instead of fighting with those in power, it is better to make them feel listened to and to come to meetings prepared with data. The author also emphasizes the importance of creating a culture of accountability and open communication, where employees feel empowered to make a difference and are not afraid to speak their mind.

Compromising in the Face of Conflict

Working with channeled partners is a great way for startups to leverage large partners to sell their product. However, conflicts may arise between the company's strategic priorities and those of the partner. To resolve this issue, companies must compromise and be aware of the pros and cons of the channel-based sales model. The pros include gaining leverage and not having to hire a sales team, while the cons include losing control over the distribution channel and having to use the partner's payment device. To ensure success, companies should pick the battles they want to fight and look ahead to where they want to be with the partner in five years.

How to prepare for the rapid growth of your company

The company experienced rapid growth and did not have a formal support structure in place, leading to a stressful period of taking on support calls throughout the day. To address this, they leveraged existing talent and hired self-starters who were comfortable with ambiguity and could take on their own responsibility. The lessons learned were that you can't always prepare for rapid growth, hiring self-starters is important, and it's not always wise to hire from a big company.

How To Effectively Manage Remote Employees At A Start-Up

In a start-up, managing remote employees requires a different approach. To compensate for the lack of in-office conversations, the author selected employees who were self-managers and stressed the value of over-communication. The author also implemented daily team stand-ups, weekly one-on-ones, and quarterly visits to the office to ensure that remote employees were connected with their teams. The author learned that it is important to choose the right people to work remotely with and to use face-to-face communication tools to ensure effective communication.

Create your engineering culture with your first engineers

A new CTO was faced with the challenge of creating an engineering culture for their team. They took input from the team and implemented processes such as weekly sprints with Trello and Google slides, and Creative Day, a day dedicated to working on anything within three categories. Through this process, the team was able to create a culture that they felt ownership of and that fit the criteria of humility, hard work, and curiosity.

Getting Your Hands Dirty as a CTO

As a CTO, the author learned the importance of humility, curiosity, and showing up for their team. They realized that they don't need to know everything, but they should be honest about their limitations and put their confidence in their team. They also learned to expand their technical knowledge by learning a little bit from each area, and to be honest, ask for help, and show up for their team.

How to Sync Your Priorities with Overlapping Roadmaps

This article discusses how to prioritize features and roadmaps when working with multiple teams. It suggests implementing a loose coupling for the assembly of products, ensuring clean boundaries between companies, and creating a shared human context. It also emphasizes the importance of active listening, empathy, and being organized and punctual to avoid wasting time.

Does One Have to Standardize Management Standards?

This article discusses the dilemma of whether to set management standards across the board or to have individual managerial standards for each team. It suggests a hybrid solution of allowing individual teams to have a bit of independence while also having a level of standardized practices across all teams. It also provides lessons learned such as fostering knowledge among the managers, setting a weekly engineering manager meeting, and leading by example.

Outlining Trajectories of Growth for Senior Engineers

A senior engineer was becoming unmotivated and unhappy in his job, so the company looked deeper to understand the source of his distress. It was found that he felt like he was hitting the perceived ceiling of growth in the company, so the company strategized ways in which he could continue growing with the organization. This included having a well-defined career ladder and assigning an expertise acquiring project, having the engineer build an open or closed source project, and having them share their subject matter expertise. Additionally, the engineer was asked if they wanted to stay on the engineering track or move to the people management track. The company also learned to remember what was motivating to them as an individual contributor and to show their senior engineers their value.

Get ready for tomorrow, without losing out on today’s battles

This article discusses the challenge of addressing unplanned activities and ensuring completion of committed deliverables. The author allocated one person every sprint cycle for unplanned activities and collected data on the quantum of unplanned activities. This data was used to form a 'call of duty' service, where a team of developers would work on unplanned tasks, stories put in the backburner, and additional tooling. The author learned that allocating a dedicated engineer every sprint cycle reduces context switching, having a dedicated developer helps with critical analysis of applications, and collecting data on unplanned activities helps quantify the work and take corrective actions.

If They Aren’t the Right Fit, Let Them Quit

A report expressed discontent with their job at Asana, and the manager handled the situation by expressing their opinion that the report should look for other jobs and offering assistance in the form of introductions to other, more fitting jobs. The manager learned that it is important to tackle tricky underlying issues and not be afraid to let people quit if it is not a good fit, and to have strong, positive relationships with employees.

When Hiring, Hyper Growth and Haste Do Not Go Hand-in-Hand

This story is about a company that wanted to build a world-class Product team. To do this, they had to bring in enough candidates to grow the team substantially, while maintaining a high bar for entry. After 5 months of unsuccessful recruiting, they changed their approach by assigning one person to be responsible for PM recruiting and setting up a weekly pipeline review meeting. Within 3 months, they had 3 candidates join the team. The lessons learned were that in a fast-growing startup, you need an owner, you can apply a user funnel to recruiting, and public review of action items provides an incentive for owners to keep on top of things.

You’re Probably Not Reviewing Your OKRs Enough

This article discusses the importance of running a formal weekly goals review to set the tempo for a team. It suggests collecting a "confidence score" for each goal or key result, along with a qualitative assessment, and using the review process as an opportunity to review and update the quantitative metrics for key results. Doing this behavior every week will help teams ask important questions, understand patterns around success and failure, and set the tempo for the team.

When Being An Engineering Manager Gets Lonely

Engineering managers often feel isolated and unable to express their negative emotions due to the slow and imprecise feedback they receive. To cope with this, the author changed their frame of mind to focus on the good things that happened in their day and found a peer to talk to. This helped them to differentiate between things that were annoying but not a problem, and those that needed to be addressed. This was a valuable lesson in allowing themselves to experience their negative emotions.

Developer Pairings within Bounded Contexts on Full Stack Teams

A company was rapidly growing and expanding, so a team was brought in to help with the hiring and growth. The team was split into their skill sets, but this caused them to become siloed and created friction between the front and back end teams. To solve this, the team was restructured around bounded contexts relevant to business needs, with teams taking on domains of ownership and pairing front-end and back-end developers. This allowed the team to work in small units, reducing rework and increasing velocity. The process took three months, but resulted in improved internal communication, pride of ownership, and team happiness.

Manage Up with Communication Structure

This case study outlines the challenges faced by a large telecommunications company with their e-commerce website, which had significant technical debt and a culture of over-committing and under-delivering. The author created a stakeholder communication plan to baseline expectations and keep stakeholders informed and accountable. After 12 months, the team had a mature agile cadence established, resulting in faster decisions, less fatigue and churn, and higher team morale. The author learned that a solid communication structure is vital to a high performing team and organization.

Identifying and letting underperforming engineers go

This story is about an engineering manager who inherited a team that was growing quickly and had hired contractors. After spending a month, the manager realized the skills gap between the team and the new engineer. The manager took action by pairing the tech lead with the new engineer, giving feedback in 1-1s, and recommending courses and books. Despite this, the engineer was still falling behind and spending too much time at the foosball and ping pong table. Ultimately, the manager had to let the engineer go in his probation period. The manager learned to never lower the bar on hiring, to put a strong probation process in place, to pair new developers with strong leads, and to trust their spidey sense.

Identifying engineering talent in unusual places

This story is about a hiring manager who was challenged to find qualified talent during the dot com boom. He took a chance on the company's best foosball player, who had no programming background or degree in computer science, and invested heavily in teaching him the technical skills and industry best practices. Two years later, the foosball player was able to step into the manager's place as the engineering manager of the team. The lesson learned is to be open minded and self-aware when hiring, and to distinguish between skills that must be innate to the candidate versus skills that can be taught.

How to better manage your time and responsibilities as a new manager

This article details the steps taken by a manager of 14 people to stay on top of inbound requests and managerial duties. The manager used a physical notebook to organize notes and action items, and delegated some of their responsibilities to free up time and sanity. Through delegating, the manager was able to create a new engineering role and staff a new team before the need became obvious. The article also highlights the importance of delegation and ownership in any given task.

Quick, Compassionate, and Diverse Hiring at a High Growth Company

This article discusses the importance of being honest and communicative during the hiring process. It outlines the importance of thanking candidates for their time, being truthful about why they weren't chosen, and providing direct feedback. It also suggests sending emails at various intervals to keep the candidate informed and expressing why they would be a good fit for the role.

Dealing with Difficult People

This article reflects on the author's experience working in dysfunctional companies, where decisions were made through confrontation, blaming and bullying. The author suggests that instead of fighting with those in power, it is better to make them feel listened to and to come to meetings prepared with data. The author also emphasizes the importance of creating a culture of accountability and open communication, where employees feel empowered to make a difference and are not afraid to speak their mind.

Compromising in the Face of Conflict

Working with channeled partners is a great way for startups to leverage large partners to sell their product. However, conflicts may arise between the company's strategic priorities and those of the partner. To resolve this issue, companies must compromise and be aware of the pros and cons of the channel-based sales model. The pros include gaining leverage and not having to hire a sales team, while the cons include losing control over the distribution channel and having to use the partner's payment device. To ensure success, companies should pick the battles they want to fight and look ahead to where they want to be with the partner in five years.

How to prepare for the rapid growth of your company

The company experienced rapid growth and did not have a formal support structure in place, leading to a stressful period of taking on support calls throughout the day. To address this, they leveraged existing talent and hired self-starters who were comfortable with ambiguity and could take on their own responsibility. The lessons learned were that you can't always prepare for rapid growth, hiring self-starters is important, and it's not always wise to hire from a big company.

How To Effectively Manage Remote Employees At A Start-Up

In a start-up, managing remote employees requires a different approach. To compensate for the lack of in-office conversations, the author selected employees who were self-managers and stressed the value of over-communication. The author also implemented daily team stand-ups, weekly one-on-ones, and quarterly visits to the office to ensure that remote employees were connected with their teams. The author learned that it is important to choose the right people to work remotely with and to use face-to-face communication tools to ensure effective communication.

Create your engineering culture with your first engineers

A new CTO was faced with the challenge of creating an engineering culture for their team. They took input from the team and implemented processes such as weekly sprints with Trello and Google slides, and Creative Day, a day dedicated to working on anything within three categories. Through this process, the team was able to create a culture that they felt ownership of and that fit the criteria of humility, hard work, and curiosity.

Getting Your Hands Dirty as a CTO

As a CTO, the author learned the importance of humility, curiosity, and showing up for their team. They realized that they don't need to know everything, but they should be honest about their limitations and put their confidence in their team. They also learned to expand their technical knowledge by learning a little bit from each area, and to be honest, ask for help, and show up for their team.

How to Sync Your Priorities with Overlapping Roadmaps

This article discusses how to prioritize features and roadmaps when working with multiple teams. It suggests implementing a loose coupling for the assembly of products, ensuring clean boundaries between companies, and creating a shared human context. It also emphasizes the importance of active listening, empathy, and being organized and punctual to avoid wasting time.

Does One Have to Standardize Management Standards?

This article discusses the dilemma of whether to set management standards across the board or to have individual managerial standards for each team. It suggests a hybrid solution of allowing individual teams to have a bit of independence while also having a level of standardized practices across all teams. It also provides lessons learned such as fostering knowledge among the managers, setting a weekly engineering manager meeting, and leading by example.

Outlining Trajectories of Growth for Senior Engineers

A senior engineer was becoming unmotivated and unhappy in his job, so the company looked deeper to understand the source of his distress. It was found that he felt like he was hitting the perceived ceiling of growth in the company, so the company strategized ways in which he could continue growing with the organization. This included having a well-defined career ladder and assigning an expertise acquiring project, having the engineer build an open or closed source project, and having them share their subject matter expertise. Additionally, the engineer was asked if they wanted to stay on the engineering track or move to the people management track. The company also learned to remember what was motivating to them as an individual contributor and to show their senior engineers their value.

Get ready for tomorrow, without losing out on today’s battles

This article discusses the challenge of addressing unplanned activities and ensuring completion of committed deliverables. The author allocated one person every sprint cycle for unplanned activities and collected data on the quantum of unplanned activities. This data was used to form a 'call of duty' service, where a team of developers would work on unplanned tasks, stories put in the backburner, and additional tooling. The author learned that allocating a dedicated engineer every sprint cycle reduces context switching, having a dedicated developer helps with critical analysis of applications, and collecting data on unplanned activities helps quantify the work and take corrective actions.

If They Aren’t the Right Fit, Let Them Quit

A report expressed discontent with their job at Asana, and the manager handled the situation by expressing their opinion that the report should look for other jobs and offering assistance in the form of introductions to other, more fitting jobs. The manager learned that it is important to tackle tricky underlying issues and not be afraid to let people quit if it is not a good fit, and to have strong, positive relationships with employees.

When Hiring, Hyper Growth and Haste Do Not Go Hand-in-Hand

This story is about a company that wanted to build a world-class Product team. To do this, they had to bring in enough candidates to grow the team substantially, while maintaining a high bar for entry. After 5 months of unsuccessful recruiting, they changed their approach by assigning one person to be responsible for PM recruiting and setting up a weekly pipeline review meeting. Within 3 months, they had 3 candidates join the team. The lessons learned were that in a fast-growing startup, you need an owner, you can apply a user funnel to recruiting, and public review of action items provides an incentive for owners to keep on top of things.

You’re Probably Not Reviewing Your OKRs Enough

This article discusses the importance of running a formal weekly goals review to set the tempo for a team. It suggests collecting a "confidence score" for each goal or key result, along with a qualitative assessment, and using the review process as an opportunity to review and update the quantitative metrics for key results. Doing this behavior every week will help teams ask important questions, understand patterns around success and failure, and set the tempo for the team.

When Being An Engineering Manager Gets Lonely

Engineering managers often feel isolated and unable to express their negative emotions due to the slow and imprecise feedback they receive. To cope with this, the author changed their frame of mind to focus on the good things that happened in their day and found a peer to talk to. This helped them to differentiate between things that were annoying but not a problem, and those that needed to be addressed. This was a valuable lesson in allowing themselves to experience their negative emotions.

Developer Pairings within Bounded Contexts on Full Stack Teams

A company was rapidly growing and expanding, so a team was brought in to help with the hiring and growth. The team was split into their skill sets, but this caused them to become siloed and created friction between the front and back end teams. To solve this, the team was restructured around bounded contexts relevant to business needs, with teams taking on domains of ownership and pairing front-end and back-end developers. This allowed the team to work in small units, reducing rework and increasing velocity. The process took three months, but resulted in improved internal communication, pride of ownership, and team happiness.

Manage Up with Communication Structure

This case study outlines the challenges faced by a large telecommunications company with their e-commerce website, which had significant technical debt and a culture of over-committing and under-delivering. The author created a stakeholder communication plan to baseline expectations and keep stakeholders informed and accountable. After 12 months, the team had a mature agile cadence established, resulting in faster decisions, less fatigue and churn, and higher team morale. The author learned that a solid communication structure is vital to a high performing team and organization.

Identifying and letting underperforming engineers go

This story is about an engineering manager who inherited a team that was growing quickly and had hired contractors. After spending a month, the manager realized the skills gap between the team and the new engineer. The manager took action by pairing the tech lead with the new engineer, giving feedback in 1-1s, and recommending courses and books. Despite this, the engineer was still falling behind and spending too much time at the foosball and ping pong table. Ultimately, the manager had to let the engineer go in his probation period. The manager learned to never lower the bar on hiring, to put a strong probation process in place, to pair new developers with strong leads, and to trust their spidey sense.

Identifying engineering talent in unusual places

This story is about a hiring manager who was challenged to find qualified talent during the dot com boom. He took a chance on the company's best foosball player, who had no programming background or degree in computer science, and invested heavily in teaching him the technical skills and industry best practices. Two years later, the foosball player was able to step into the manager's place as the engineering manager of the team. The lesson learned is to be open minded and self-aware when hiring, and to distinguish between skills that must be innate to the candidate versus skills that can be taught.

How to better manage your time and responsibilities as a new manager

This article details the steps taken by a manager of 14 people to stay on top of inbound requests and managerial duties. The manager used a physical notebook to organize notes and action items, and delegated some of their responsibilities to free up time and sanity. Through delegating, the manager was able to create a new engineering role and staff a new team before the need became obvious. The article also highlights the importance of delegation and ownership in any given task.

Quick, Compassionate, and Diverse Hiring at a High Growth Company

This article discusses the importance of being honest and communicative during the hiring process. It outlines the importance of thanking candidates for their time, being truthful about why they weren't chosen, and providing direct feedback. It also suggests sending emails at various intervals to keep the candidate informed and expressing why they would be a good fit for the role.

Dealing with Difficult People

This article reflects on the author's experience working in dysfunctional companies, where decisions were made through confrontation, blaming and bullying. The author suggests that instead of fighting with those in power, it is better to make them feel listened to and to come to meetings prepared with data. The author also emphasizes the importance of creating a culture of accountability and open communication, where employees feel empowered to make a difference and are not afraid to speak their mind.

Compromising in the Face of Conflict

Working with channeled partners is a great way for startups to leverage large partners to sell their product. However, conflicts may arise between the company's strategic priorities and those of the partner. To resolve this issue, companies must compromise and be aware of the pros and cons of the channel-based sales model. The pros include gaining leverage and not having to hire a sales team, while the cons include losing control over the distribution channel and having to use the partner's payment device. To ensure success, companies should pick the battles they want to fight and look ahead to where they want to be with the partner in five years.

How to prepare for the rapid growth of your company

The company experienced rapid growth and did not have a formal support structure in place, leading to a stressful period of taking on support calls throughout the day. To address this, they leveraged existing talent and hired self-starters who were comfortable with ambiguity and could take on their own responsibility. The lessons learned were that you can't always prepare for rapid growth, hiring self-starters is important, and it's not always wise to hire from a big company.

How To Effectively Manage Remote Employees At A Start-Up

In a start-up, managing remote employees requires a different approach. To compensate for the lack of in-office conversations, the author selected employees who were self-managers and stressed the value of over-communication. The author also implemented daily team stand-ups, weekly one-on-ones, and quarterly visits to the office to ensure that remote employees were connected with their teams. The author learned that it is important to choose the right people to work remotely with and to use face-to-face communication tools to ensure effective communication.

Create your engineering culture with your first engineers

A new CTO was faced with the challenge of creating an engineering culture for their team. They took input from the team and implemented processes such as weekly sprints with Trello and Google slides, and Creative Day, a day dedicated to working on anything within three categories. Through this process, the team was able to create a culture that they felt ownership of and that fit the criteria of humility, hard work, and curiosity.

Getting Your Hands Dirty as a CTO

As a CTO, the author learned the importance of humility, curiosity, and showing up for their team. They realized that they don't need to know everything, but they should be honest about their limitations and put their confidence in their team. They also learned to expand their technical knowledge by learning a little bit from each area, and to be honest, ask for help, and show up for their team.

How to Sync Your Priorities with Overlapping Roadmaps

This article discusses how to prioritize features and roadmaps when working with multiple teams. It suggests implementing a loose coupling for the assembly of products, ensuring clean boundaries between companies, and creating a shared human context. It also emphasizes the importance of active listening, empathy, and being organized and punctual to avoid wasting time.

Does One Have to Standardize Management Standards?

This article discusses the dilemma of whether to set management standards across the board or to have individual managerial standards for each team. It suggests a hybrid solution of allowing individual teams to have a bit of independence while also having a level of standardized practices across all teams. It also provides lessons learned such as fostering knowledge among the managers, setting a weekly engineering manager meeting, and leading by example.

Outlining Trajectories of Growth for Senior Engineers

A senior engineer was becoming unmotivated and unhappy in his job, so the company looked deeper to understand the source of his distress. It was found that he felt like he was hitting the perceived ceiling of growth in the company, so the company strategized ways in which he could continue growing with the organization. This included having a well-defined career ladder and assigning an expertise acquiring project, having the engineer build an open or closed source project, and having them share their subject matter expertise. Additionally, the engineer was asked if they wanted to stay on the engineering track or move to the people management track. The company also learned to remember what was motivating to them as an individual contributor and to show their senior engineers their value.

Get ready for tomorrow, without losing out on today’s battles

This article discusses the challenge of addressing unplanned activities and ensuring completion of committed deliverables. The author allocated one person every sprint cycle for unplanned activities and collected data on the quantum of unplanned activities. This data was used to form a 'call of duty' service, where a team of developers would work on unplanned tasks, stories put in the backburner, and additional tooling. The author learned that allocating a dedicated engineer every sprint cycle reduces context switching, having a dedicated developer helps with critical analysis of applications, and collecting data on unplanned activities helps quantify the work and take corrective actions.

If They Aren’t the Right Fit, Let Them Quit

A report expressed discontent with their job at Asana, and the manager handled the situation by expressing their opinion that the report should look for other jobs and offering assistance in the form of introductions to other, more fitting jobs. The manager learned that it is important to tackle tricky underlying issues and not be afraid to let people quit if it is not a good fit, and to have strong, positive relationships with employees.

When Hiring, Hyper Growth and Haste Do Not Go Hand-in-Hand

This story is about a company that wanted to build a world-class Product team. To do this, they had to bring in enough candidates to grow the team substantially, while maintaining a high bar for entry. After 5 months of unsuccessful recruiting, they changed their approach by assigning one person to be responsible for PM recruiting and setting up a weekly pipeline review meeting. Within 3 months, they had 3 candidates join the team. The lessons learned were that in a fast-growing startup, you need an owner, you can apply a user funnel to recruiting, and public review of action items provides an incentive for owners to keep on top of things.

You’re Probably Not Reviewing Your OKRs Enough

This article discusses the importance of running a formal weekly goals review to set the tempo for a team. It suggests collecting a "confidence score" for each goal or key result, along with a qualitative assessment, and using the review process as an opportunity to review and update the quantitative metrics for key results. Doing this behavior every week will help teams ask important questions, understand patterns around success and failure, and set the tempo for the team.

When Being An Engineering Manager Gets Lonely

Engineering managers often feel isolated and unable to express their negative emotions due to the slow and imprecise feedback they receive. To cope with this, the author changed their frame of mind to focus on the good things that happened in their day and found a peer to talk to. This helped them to differentiate between things that were annoying but not a problem, and those that needed to be addressed. This was a valuable lesson in allowing themselves to experience their negative emotions.

Developer Pairings within Bounded Contexts on Full Stack Teams

A company was rapidly growing and expanding, so a team was brought in to help with the hiring and growth. The team was split into their skill sets, but this caused them to become siloed and created friction between the front and back end teams. To solve this, the team was restructured around bounded contexts relevant to business needs, with teams taking on domains of ownership and pairing front-end and back-end developers. This allowed the team to work in small units, reducing rework and increasing velocity. The process took three months, but resulted in improved internal communication, pride of ownership, and team happiness.

Manage Up with Communication Structure

This case study outlines the challenges faced by a large telecommunications company with their e-commerce website, which had significant technical debt and a culture of over-committing and under-delivering. The author created a stakeholder communication plan to baseline expectations and keep stakeholders informed and accountable. After 12 months, the team had a mature agile cadence established, resulting in faster decisions, less fatigue and churn, and higher team morale. The author learned that a solid communication structure is vital to a high performing team and organization.

Identifying and letting underperforming engineers go

This story is about an engineering manager who inherited a team that was growing quickly and had hired contractors. After spending a month, the manager realized the skills gap between the team and the new engineer. The manager took action by pairing the tech lead with the new engineer, giving feedback in 1-1s, and recommending courses and books. Despite this, the engineer was still falling behind and spending too much time at the foosball and ping pong table. Ultimately, the manager had to let the engineer go in his probation period. The manager learned to never lower the bar on hiring, to put a strong probation process in place, to pair new developers with strong leads, and to trust their spidey sense.

Identifying engineering talent in unusual places

This story is about a hiring manager who was challenged to find qualified talent during the dot com boom. He took a chance on the company's best foosball player, who had no programming background or degree in computer science, and invested heavily in teaching him the technical skills and industry best practices. Two years later, the foosball player was able to step into the manager's place as the engineering manager of the team. The lesson learned is to be open minded and self-aware when hiring, and to distinguish between skills that must be innate to the candidate versus skills that can be taught.

How to better manage your time and responsibilities as a new manager

This article details the steps taken by a manager of 14 people to stay on top of inbound requests and managerial duties. The manager used a physical notebook to organize notes and action items, and delegated some of their responsibilities to free up time and sanity. Through delegating, the manager was able to create a new engineering role and staff a new team before the need became obvious. The article also highlights the importance of delegation and ownership in any given task.

Quick, Compassionate, and Diverse Hiring at a High Growth Company

This article discusses the importance of being honest and communicative during the hiring process. It outlines the importance of thanking candidates for their time, being truthful about why they weren't chosen, and providing direct feedback. It also suggests sending emails at various intervals to keep the candidate informed and expressing why they would be a good fit for the role.

Dealing with Difficult People

This article reflects on the author's experience working in dysfunctional companies, where decisions were made through confrontation, blaming and bullying. The author suggests that instead of fighting with those in power, it is better to make them feel listened to and to come to meetings prepared with data. The author also emphasizes the importance of creating a culture of accountability and open communication, where employees feel empowered to make a difference and are not afraid to speak their mind.

Compromising in the Face of Conflict

Working with channeled partners is a great way for startups to leverage large partners to sell their product. However, conflicts may arise between the company's strategic priorities and those of the partner. To resolve this issue, companies must compromise and be aware of the pros and cons of the channel-based sales model. The pros include gaining leverage and not having to hire a sales team, while the cons include losing control over the distribution channel and having to use the partner's payment device. To ensure success, companies should pick the battles they want to fight and look ahead to where they want to be with the partner in five years.

How to prepare for the rapid growth of your company

The company experienced rapid growth and did not have a formal support structure in place, leading to a stressful period of taking on support calls throughout the day. To address this, they leveraged existing talent and hired self-starters who were comfortable with ambiguity and could take on their own responsibility. The lessons learned were that you can't always prepare for rapid growth, hiring self-starters is important, and it's not always wise to hire from a big company.

How To Effectively Manage Remote Employees At A Start-Up

In a start-up, managing remote employees requires a different approach. To compensate for the lack of in-office conversations, the author selected employees who were self-managers and stressed the value of over-communication. The author also implemented daily team stand-ups, weekly one-on-ones, and quarterly visits to the office to ensure that remote employees were connected with their teams. The author learned that it is important to choose the right people to work remotely with and to use face-to-face communication tools to ensure effective communication.

Create your engineering culture with your first engineers

A new CTO was faced with the challenge of creating an engineering culture for their team. They took input from the team and implemented processes such as weekly sprints with Trello and Google slides, and Creative Day, a day dedicated to working on anything within three categories. Through this process, the team was able to create a culture that they felt ownership of and that fit the criteria of humility, hard work, and curiosity.

Getting Your Hands Dirty as a CTO

As a CTO, the author learned the importance of humility, curiosity, and showing up for their team. They realized that they don't need to know everything, but they should be honest about their limitations and put their confidence in their team. They also learned to expand their technical knowledge by learning a little bit from each area, and to be honest, ask for help, and show up for their team.

How to Sync Your Priorities with Overlapping Roadmaps

This article discusses how to prioritize features and roadmaps when working with multiple teams. It suggests implementing a loose coupling for the assembly of products, ensuring clean boundaries between companies, and creating a shared human context. It also emphasizes the importance of active listening, empathy, and being organized and punctual to avoid wasting time.

Does One Have to Standardize Management Standards?

This article discusses the dilemma of whether to set management standards across the board or to have individual managerial standards for each team. It suggests a hybrid solution of allowing individual teams to have a bit of independence while also having a level of standardized practices across all teams. It also provides lessons learned such as fostering knowledge among the managers, setting a weekly engineering manager meeting, and leading by example.

Outlining Trajectories of Growth for Senior Engineers

A senior engineer was becoming unmotivated and unhappy in his job, so the company looked deeper to understand the source of his distress. It was found that he felt like he was hitting the perceived ceiling of growth in the company, so the company strategized ways in which he could continue growing with the organization. This included having a well-defined career ladder and assigning an expertise acquiring project, having the engineer build an open or closed source project, and having them share their subject matter expertise. Additionally, the engineer was asked if they wanted to stay on the engineering track or move to the people management track. The company also learned to remember what was motivating to them as an individual contributor and to show their senior engineers their value.

Get ready for tomorrow, without losing out on today’s battles

This article discusses the challenge of addressing unplanned activities and ensuring completion of committed deliverables. The author allocated one person every sprint cycle for unplanned activities and collected data on the quantum of unplanned activities. This data was used to form a 'call of duty' service, where a team of developers would work on unplanned tasks, stories put in the backburner, and additional tooling. The author learned that allocating a dedicated engineer every sprint cycle reduces context switching, having a dedicated developer helps with critical analysis of applications, and collecting data on unplanned activities helps quantify the work and take corrective actions.

If They Aren’t the Right Fit, Let Them Quit

A report expressed discontent with their job at Asana, and the manager handled the situation by expressing their opinion that the report should look for other jobs and offering assistance in the form of introductions to other, more fitting jobs. The manager learned that it is important to tackle tricky underlying issues and not be afraid to let people quit if it is not a good fit, and to have strong, positive relationships with employees.

When Hiring, Hyper Growth and Haste Do Not Go Hand-in-Hand

This story is about a company that wanted to build a world-class Product team. To do this, they had to bring in enough candidates to grow the team substantially, while maintaining a high bar for entry. After 5 months of unsuccessful recruiting, they changed their approach by assigning one person to be responsible for PM recruiting and setting up a weekly pipeline review meeting. Within 3 months, they had 3 candidates join the team. The lessons learned were that in a fast-growing startup, you need an owner, you can apply a user funnel to recruiting, and public review of action items provides an incentive for owners to keep on top of things.

You’re Probably Not Reviewing Your OKRs Enough

This article discusses the importance of running a formal weekly goals review to set the tempo for a team. It suggests collecting a "confidence score" for each goal or key result, along with a qualitative assessment, and using the review process as an opportunity to review and update the quantitative metrics for key results. Doing this behavior every week will help teams ask important questions, understand patterns around success and failure, and set the tempo for the team.

When Being An Engineering Manager Gets Lonely

Engineering managers often feel isolated and unable to express their negative emotions due to the slow and imprecise feedback they receive. To cope with this, the author changed their frame of mind to focus on the good things that happened in their day and found a peer to talk to. This helped them to differentiate between things that were annoying but not a problem, and those that needed to be addressed. This was a valuable lesson in allowing themselves to experience their negative emotions.

Developer Pairings within Bounded Contexts on Full Stack Teams

A company was rapidly growing and expanding, so a team was brought in to help with the hiring and growth. The team was split into their skill sets, but this caused them to become siloed and created friction between the front and back end teams. To solve this, the team was restructured around bounded contexts relevant to business needs, with teams taking on domains of ownership and pairing front-end and back-end developers. This allowed the team to work in small units, reducing rework and increasing velocity. The process took three months, but resulted in improved internal communication, pride of ownership, and team happiness.

Manage Up with Communication Structure

This case study outlines the challenges faced by a large telecommunications company with their e-commerce website, which had significant technical debt and a culture of over-committing and under-delivering. The author created a stakeholder communication plan to baseline expectations and keep stakeholders informed and accountable. After 12 months, the team had a mature agile cadence established, resulting in faster decisions, less fatigue and churn, and higher team morale. The author learned that a solid communication structure is vital to a high performing team and organization.

Identifying and letting underperforming engineers go

This story is about an engineering manager who inherited a team that was growing quickly and had hired contractors. After spending a month, the manager realized the skills gap between the team and the new engineer. The manager took action by pairing the tech lead with the new engineer, giving feedback in 1-1s, and recommending courses and books. Despite this, the engineer was still falling behind and spending too much time at the foosball and ping pong table. Ultimately, the manager had to let the engineer go in his probation period. The manager learned to never lower the bar on hiring, to put a strong probation process in place, to pair new developers with strong leads, and to trust their spidey sense.

Identifying engineering talent in unusual places

This story is about a hiring manager who was challenged to find qualified talent during the dot com boom. He took a chance on the company's best foosball player, who had no programming background or degree in computer science, and invested heavily in teaching him the technical skills and industry best practices. Two years later, the foosball player was able to step into the manager's place as the engineering manager of the team. The lesson learned is to be open minded and self-aware when hiring, and to distinguish between skills that must be innate to the candidate versus skills that can be taught.

How to better manage your time and responsibilities as a new manager

This article details the steps taken by a manager of 14 people to stay on top of inbound requests and managerial duties. The manager used a physical notebook to organize notes and action items, and delegated some of their responsibilities to free up time and sanity. Through delegating, the manager was able to create a new engineering role and staff a new team before the need became obvious. The article also highlights the importance of delegation and ownership in any given task.