The term Black Swan was made famous by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name, which he describes as an event that has three attributes: (1) it is an outlier, outside the realm of regular expectations; (2) it carries an extreme impact; and (3) in spite of being at outlier, we devise an explanation for its occurrence after the fact.

Be Resilient

VP Engineering

HONEYCOMB.IO - Charity Majors, CEO and Co-founder
APPDIRECT - Ron Pragides, VP Engineering
ZENEFITS - Laks Srini, CTO and Co-founder
MODERATOR: NEXTWORLD CAPITAL - Ben Fu, General Partner

1to100 - 2018 - NextWorld Capital  Conference

ENGINEERING: FROM MVP TO SUPPORTING THE BIGGEST CUSTOMERS (1to100 Conference)

In this episode, Carta's VP of Engineering and Plato Mentor (Ron Pragides) shares his thoughts on the current COVID-19 crisis and offers advice to engineering managers.

"Dealing with the COVID-19 crisis as a leader" with Carta's VP of Engineering, Ron Pragides

YouTube channel

Data Coach

This is my personal blog where I talk about data engineering.

Data newsletter and blog

LinkedIn Profile

Senior Director of Product and Engineering / GM Argentina

There will be two opinions when I talk about people management with product management functions. One will say when did product managers bother about people issues. Are they not superhumans to resolve all people management issues? The second will say, yes! It is a critical function, but have we not got a director who has extensive people management experience to address all these scenarios. Unfortunately, the answer is neither or somewhere in between or ignored and pushed under the carpet. As the numbers are in percentage terms so low, it will not affect the attrition numbers. Hence, organizations ignore it. Here is a study by McKinsey on the Software Product Management function and its talent management. 

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-product-management-talent-dilemma

I leave people to review the study for themselves but let me talk about how much organizations understand product managers working with them.


PM Process: The People

Founding Director

If you are associated with the software industry, you must have experienced a cult following the agile process framework. So much so, organizations ramped up product management hiring and started designating them as product owners for various product development groups. I will not delve into the process in detail but would rather talk about the rationale of the agile framework and what does it achieve. Two decades back, agile programming was not quite popular. There were experimental pair programming or extreme programming efforts by some pioneers yet, that was not mainstream and looked down upon by some naysayers. About a decade and a half back, it suddenly started to see the light and pretty much became mainstream a decade ago. Excellent tracking tools for scrum and extreme programming were available. These gave the larger organizations the confidence to adopt the methodologies.

PM Process: Agile Framework

Compliance is an act of adherence to rules, regulations, environments, or even laws. When is product management so much involved in meeting compliance needs? Is it not the purview of the legal or engineering departments in the organization that drive the compliance needs? I guess most of you must be wondering the same. However, I have experienced compliance is a need that better be analyzed by product managers ahead of time before other parts of the organization invest any energy on it. In some businesses, compliance is the prime driver to the business and cannot be discounted. So your fundamental need to be in the market is decided by your ability to meet the compliance requirements.

PM Process: Compliance

Most organizations are innovative. They try to do things differently from their competition. Have something in them that is core to their DNA and different from others in the same business. But, how you express that to the world. A few years back, I read marketing collateral of two leading giants of the domain; call them A and B. A was relatively new in business and claimed B is old and not nimble as they were and A was more innovative. B had put up a marketing campaign around the same time showing a portfolio of patents they carried to showdown A in terms of their innovation capabilities. Who was telling the truth? Why is it so important for such high-profile organizations to claim one-upmanship on patent numbers?

PM Process: IPR

A few months back a student from a premium institute in India was put under the scanner of laws as he violated the laws of the Indian Railways in providing railway ticket booking services. Similarly, a much-awaited court case between Oracle and Google was reviewed by the US Supreme Court. What are the similarities in these cases? At a surface level, there is very little actually, but if you delve deeper they are kind of similar. Let’s take the first case, many sites provide railway booking services in coordination with IRCTC why was this student singled out. Similarly, many organizations build collaborative solutions but why should Google and Oracle get into a legal wrangle?

PM Process: Contracts

Many product managers focus on finding the best interface for easier user engagement with the product. While some insist on using design tools, mock-up tools, prototyping interactions, some insist such must be left to the UX designers to provide the best possible proposals. I will like to debate if we actually captured the requirement at the right level. A lot of that is to do with how you described your problem in the first place. If you are excited about writing user stories right, read on and let me know what you feel.

PM Process: User Interface

The marketing mix is composed of product, price, promotion, and place (Philip Kotler). While the product is clearly a Product Management function, most PMs get tired of discussing pricing. And more so discussing discounting, bundling, unbundling, creating suites, etc, special pricing options — looks familiar? No PM is immune to such demands in any organization. Many call these pricing strategies, for some they are outright winning formulas. Practically, there are only three components when deciding to price. They are absolutely driven by 3 principles stated in the book Business Market Management, by Anderson, Narus, Narayandas, and Seshadri. Lucky to be taught the principles by Prof Seshadri himself a decade and a half back. Why talk about such basic concepts in today’s market? Because the fundamentals are so significant that even today in B2B marketing they are the easiest benchmarks to compare against. Use them, you will not be disappointed.

PM Process: Pricing

To every organization or service provider, the claim is the customer comes first. But, I am writing the customer part in the Product Management process in the end. One primary reason is to ensure, your house is in order before you invite your guests. Some of you may agree, and some disagree. Feel free to provide your opinions. After all, discussions only build a better understanding of systems and processes.

PM Process: The Customer

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.

The above is the perfect description of the product called The One Ring of the JRR Tolkien fame. It is an almost perfect definition of a product; it describes the exact boundary and limitations of the product, yet not a product vision. There is no aspiration, no process to reach the goal, and no mention of competition.

PM Process: Product Vision

Whenever there is a discussion on strategy, there is always confusion; are we discussing organization strategy or competitive advantages? Invariably there is a lack of clarity. Organizations are perpetual entities; they will remain in existence for generations to come. While products have a limited life cycle, there is inception, growth, and eventual death. Such misunderstandings lead to discussions on strategy, delving into too much implementation or tactical details. I feel a qualitative outline is always well understood and appreciated over a detailed analysis paralysis for an organization. A larger organization will have full-time corporate strategy groups or strategic consultants addressing detail analytic needs. In such cases, a product manager may have to defend her product-related decisions or provide alternate viewpoints to the strategic decision-makers. Understanding some of the strategic management tools and their qualitative nuances is helpful for product managers. You may not need detailed quantitative assessments as a strategic consultant may use.

PM Process: Strategy

A few months back, when I started writing these articles on product management, some of you tried to find out what made me write those articles. Someone asked me if the concepts of product management are domain-specific. Or they are learnings that one can apply to other domains. Is the Product Management discipline a new paradigm, which is different from traditional management principles? While trying to mull over some of these thoughts, I felt at least the PM literature I have read or the activities I have exposure to in my 16 years of PM experience: can be broadly classified into ten broad processes. Aggregated, I will like to call them The Practice of Product Management. The practice is not entirely different. It’s centered around the Industry Analysis framework by Michael Porter. Though proposed in the 80s, the framework remains one of the most promising, researched, and often challenged frameworks. A generation of managers and MBA graduates grew up with it. The strategy consultants still vouch for it and use the tools as part of their analysis. Secondly, I intend to bring PM discipline within the purview of other management processes and have a reasonable understanding for all the managers to understand what PMs are supposed to do.

The Practice of Product Management

Thinking In Systems

Engineering Manager

 The most common mistake is by overpromising and under delivering, which make you loose trust with stakeholders and even your team, depending if you promise something to them too.

Why I like to work on weekends

Director of Engineering

What I find more exciting is being part of the creation of the abstractions, dealing with real problems at scale, and being close to the company’s core product.


Why didn’t I choose a FAANG to start my career? — Career — Appendix I

Some people are just running away from their problems in their current company, this is why I focus more on trying to hire people who don’t want to leave their company.


Why hire people who don’t want to leave their company — Hiring 

When is the right time to build platform teams and how to make them successful at working along with business areas?


Platform teams — when to build and how to make them successful — Part I

With clear responsibilities it’s easier to say no, and your team will know when they are doing their job or just helping others.

You don’t need to hire people — Hiring Part II

Managers are investors in the same company, playing different games, assuming more or less risk, which simply means living in different contexts.

Hiring — The risk management approach — Part I

Part 2 of When is the right time to build platform teams and how to make them successful at working along with business areas?

How to measure success of your platform teams — part II

If you want to know more about me, here's a little bit of my journey!

About me — written by others

An Ever Evolving Company Requires an Ever Evolving Communication Plan

Director, Engineering Effectiveness

A multi-year effort where we worked on overhauling the IC interview pipeline.

Using Structured Interviews to Improve Equity

Developer productivity in a large organization can take many forms. I’ll share what it looks like at Yelp scale (500+ engineers). I’ll also share some best practices that we have discovered over the years and how to think about implementing them in your own organizations depending on the scale that you are currently at.

Developer Productivity at Scale

Kirk talks about his journey through Edtech and what it means to show students and teachers empathy.

‎Frontier Podcast by Gun.io: EdTech and the ‘empathy-based’ technology vision

How to help your manager help you grow in your software career

Help Me Help You @ Develop Denver

My personal blog where I share my thoughts about Diversity, Inclusion, Payments, Privacy, Security and Product Management. 

The blog of Sergio Rodriguez , Product Manager

Lead Product Manager - Payments and Finance | ex-PayPal

Listen to the first episode of my podcast. I interview people living and working in Tech in France and ask them about their journey and why they decided to relocate to France. 

What's like living and working in the French Tech ecosystem? 

Divisional Vice President Nick Cheever speaks to co-hosts McKenna and Greg on honing communication skills to guide individuals on his team, the process of working through the challenges that we all face, and how those challenges reveal what's truly important, and functioning through hard times by picking each other up.

Empowering Leaders and Coaches to Be More Effective

Divisional Vice President, Global Supply Chain Technology

Tune in to listen to Nick Cheever,  Divisional Vice President, Global Supply Chain Technology at Trimble Transportation (Trimble.com), share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

Lead with Transparency and Openness with Nick Cheever

Albert Lie on Xendit's Founding Engineer, Unsexy Markets

Former Tech Lead

Ask Me Anything (AMA)

What does a long term career in engineering look like? How do you decide to switch into management? What skills are useful in both? This was a talk I gave for Women Who Code. The video for the talk is available in my Videos.

Manager or Individual Contribute: Choose Your Own Adventure

Senior Staff Software Engineer

What does a long term career in engineering look like? How do you decide to switch into management? What skills are useful in both? This was a talk I gave for Women Who Code. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlUVJmGm6Sk

The slides are available under my Links.

Manager or Individual Contributor: Choose Your Own Adventure

I share concrete strategies to help leaders create and scale test automation with your developers in mind. 

Ask Me Anything: Niranjani Manoharan, DevOps and Automation Strategist

Jossie Haines, VP of Engineering and Head of DEI at Tile, uncovers how to retain diverse talent by emphasizing the importance of impact job descriptions and bias busters, among others.

Retaining Diverse Talent

VP of Software Eng; Head of DEI

Herman Man, CPO at BlueVine, picks his three ever-favorites -- ranging from fresh-from-the-press to classic must-reads -- that will make your summer packed with inspiring and worthwhile advice.

Top Three Books That Should Be on Your Summer Reading List 

Ehsan Imran, Engineering Manager at thinkmoney, picks five game-changing books from his bookshelf that made his transition to a management role more successful.

Five Game-Changing Books for First-Time Managers 

DrChrono

How DrChrono transformed a flat engineering into a functional structure with Plato

Diego Quiroga is a Senior Engineering Manager at Sauce Labs, working on devices virtualization for the world's largest automated test cloud for web and mobile applications. Prior to Sauce Labs, he led engineering teams at AWS, OLX, and Google building large scale distributed systems. He mentors engineering leaders through the Vancouver SDMs group and PlatoHQ.

Diego Quiroga on SpeakerDeck

Principal Software Engineering Manager

Akeneo

How Akeneo improved its Engineering velocity by 30% while scaling rapidly

Managing low performing employees is a topic that vexes leaders at all levels. How much time and effort should we invest to help them improve? How do you know when further efforts are pointless? When do you switch from “managing them up“ to ”managing them out“? Inevitably working with low performers will be stressful and likely create anger, anxiety, and sadness for the manager. 

Managing Low Performers

Calendly

How Calendly solved its top challenges while rapidly scaling its engineering department

Insights from the Sr. VP of Engineering at Coursera - Richard Wong

Transitioning from a Director to the VP of Engineering? - Three great takeaways to help you progress

Insights from Jackie Bavaro - Ex Product Leader at Asana, Google, Microsoft & Co-author of books “Cracking the PM interview” and “Cracking the PM career”

A Product Manager's guide to success

From Kathryn Koehler (Director of Engineering at Netflix) & Madhav Nair (SVP of Engineering at Zoominfo)

4 pillars to measure your engineering team's success

MaestroQA

How MaestroQA acquired a leadership mentality, thanks to Plato

Learnings on how to grow your team, processes, organization, and more from Dave Burgess (Head of Data Engineering at Pinterest) & Derek Knudsen (CTO at Alteryx)

5 things that break while rapidly scaling tech-organizations (And how to fix them)

Battle-tested advice from Cathy Polinsky - VP of Engineering at Shopify

4 game-changing feedback loops every organization should incorporate

5 pillars of success - from Monika Bajaj (Sr. Director of Engineering at Workday) & Praful Kaul - (VP of Engineering at Rally Health)


How to retain your stellar employees even in a remote setting

Answers to the 3 big “WHATs” from the leaders at Facebook and Dolby (Daphra Holder and Venu Kalluri)

Building a strong relationship between Product and Engineering

5-step strategy to manage change from the  “Stripe’s Head of Engineering for Money Movement - Neetika Bansal”

Know-hows of achieving high performance in times of change

Real-life solutions from Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range

Managing meetings without succumbing to Zoom fatigue

Engineering leadership consultant

Rakuten

Why Rakuten Rewards chose Plato over internal mentorship and leadership training programs

Actionable Tips from Dana Lawson - VP of Engineering at GitHub, and Mandar Bapaye - VP of Engineering at MasterClass


How to connect your teams’ work to company goals

VP, Engineering

Guidelines from the Cofounder and CEO of Bond, Roy Ng

Building a customer-focused engineering team

Advice from Pooja Brown (VP of Engineering at Stitch Fix) and Luc Vincent (EVP of Engineering at Lyft)

Assessing the health of an engineering organization

Advice from the Director of Engineering for API Systems at Netflix, Bruce Wang


Building an impactful team as an Engineering Leader

Tips from Rukmini Reddy - Vice President of Engineering at Slack

Leading with empathy in the age of COVID

SheerID

Game, Set, Match! How Plato accelerated SheerID’s growth by 500%

Apartment List

How Apartment List reduced its annual engineering attrition from 10% to 1% 

SchoolMint

How SchoolMint is upskilling its leaders with Plato

Vendasta

How Vendasta is providing its senior engineers with networking opportunities in Saskatoon, Canada.

Mews

How Mews is preparing for its upcoming growth with Plato

DataCamp

How DataCamp is helping its engineers successfully transition into senior roles with Plato

Tips from the Director of Engineering at Calm, Ellen Wong and the Director of Engineering at Venmo, Papanii Okai

Building a great remote hiring and onboarding process for engineers

Calm

Director of Engineering & Architecture

Tips from the Director of Engineering at the NY Times, Said Ketchman

How to grow & motivate your team during a pandemic

What guides your scaling decisions? Get tips from Vijaya Kaza, Airbnb's Head of Engineering for Trust and Safety.

Achieving scale as an engineering leader — from technology to teams to culture

Building diverse and inclusive engineering teams starts with a hiring process that limits bias. After all, hiring is the engine that builds your team. If you’re not hiring a diverse set of candidates, you can’t have a diverse team. And if you’re not cultivating an inclusive environment, even the diverse teams you build could begin to deteriorate. 


How to Build Diverse and Inclusive Teams, According to Leaders at Airtable and Box

OKRs have become the go-to solution for the World class Product Organizations to drive their roadmap and teams.

How-to successfully setup OKRs for the first time to align and drive Product teams

Product Strategy & GTM Advisor @ fast-growing SaaS/Marketplace tech startups + Former VP Product

Karat

Back in January, Karat partnered with Harris Poll to conduct a survey of 253 engineering leaders and hiring decision-makers. We used those results as benchmarks to compare to a second survey of 100 additional leaders last month to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on hiring trends.

Think you know how to conduct a technical interview? Think again.

A free mentorship initiative that connects people from underrepresented communities to world-class tech leaders through intimate group mentorship

Free mentorship for 2,000 people from underrepresented communities

It can be tempting to handle high performers in a “fire & forget” mode — after all they are the ones you can count on to be self-sufficient and get things done. However, experienced managers learn that their high performers can require as much of their attention as low performers. Moreover, if you accept the premise that the role of a leader is to build leadership, then growing your high performers is a key responsibility.

Managing High Performers

Tips from GitHub's VP of Engineering on managing remote teams

Managing in a remote world - tips from GitHub's VP of Engineering

Stitch Fix's VP of Engineering, Pooja Brown, offers advice on how to manage in a remote world.

Ask-Me-Anything with Pooja Brown

GitHub's VP of Engineering, Dana Lawson, shares tips on how to manage in a remote world.

Ask-Me-Anything with Dana Lawson

InVision

Tips from an engineering leader who's been remote for 15 years — InVision's Director of Engineering

Managing in a remote world  -  Tips from InVision's director of engineering

Ron Pragides gives us a glimpse of Carta's history in a touching farewell.

The Long and Winding Road

Get tips on leading remote teams from a seasoned VP of Engineering

“Managing in a Remote World” — Tips from a manager of 100+ people across 20 countries

InVision's Director of Engineering, Ryan Scheuermann, has been working remotely for 15 years and he offers advice on how to lead remote teams in this Ask-Me-Anything video session.

Ask-Me-Anything on "Managing in a Remote World" with Ryan Scheuermann

Archana Chaudhary is an Engineering Manager at Adobe. In this episode of Women In Tech, Archana talks about her career path, some of the challenges she has faced as a woman in tech, and how she helps younger women by mentoring them.

Women In Tech - Archana Chaudhary, Engineering Manager at Adobe

Michael Lopp, aka Rands, is the VP of Product Engineering at Slack. At Elevate 2019, he gave a talk on the Product Triangle - his framework for building a successful organization.

The Product Triangle - Michael Lopp from Slack at Elevate 2019

YouTube

Coinbase

Triplebyte

Robinhood

During Elevate, Ammon Bartram, cofounder of TripleByte, talked to Denali Lumma, Director of Engineering at Robinhood, Tim Wagner, VP Engineering at Coinbase, and Prachi Gupta, Director of Engineering at YouTube, about best practices for hiring engineers.

The Ins and Outs of Evaluating Engineers - Elevate 2019

For our third talk of the day at Plato Elevate, our recurring event for engineering and product leaders, Loïc Houssier moderated a panel with Dana Lawson, Luc Vincent, and Prashant Pandey, on how to survive rapid scaling.

Surviving Rapid Scaling - Loïc Houssier, Dana Lawson, Luc Vincent, and Prashant Pandey at Elevate 2019

This week’s episode of Decisive Moments is titled: “Fundamental Learnings for Engineering Managers” featuring DocuSign’s VP of Engineering, Loïc Houssier

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