Feedback & Reviews

Why You Should Encourage Criticism

In 2004, the company I worked for wanted to rewrite their UI using Struts, but the existing XSL-based UI wouldn't work with the framework. I was open and honest about the preconditions that needed to be met, and the company was open to hearing my feedback regardless of my position. I learned that it's important to build trust and rapport with colleagues so that they feel comfortable speaking their mind and providing constructive criticism.

Preparing Your Pitch and Specifying Your Process for Hiring

When hiring software engineers, it is important to have a well-honed pitch that explains the company's mission and the engineering team's opportunities for autonomy and mastery. The hiring process should be kept to a minimum of interactions, and the candidate should be checked for close-ability from the start. Time-boxing the offer and tracking the process are also important. Other best practices include practicing the pitch often, being responsive and sensitive to the candidate, and using an online tool for code challenges.

Building a collaborative roadmap and aligning priorities

GetNinjas, a local services marketplace in LATAM, faced the challenge of defining and prioritizing opportunities in their roadmap. To address this, they categorized opportunities into three buckets, made their roadmap public and accessible to anyone in the company using Notion.so, and encouraged everyone to read and comment on it. Despite a rough start, they have seen success in this new collaborative approach and will likely never go back to the traditional way of creating and communicating a roadmap.

Measuring the Success of a Software Engineering Team

Software developers often don't like being asked questions around metrics and measurements, as it doesn't tell the complete story. To monitor productivity, Scrum burndown and burnup charts can be used to measure velocity and progress. Additionally, tools such as Git and Jira can be used to measure check-ins and code rework. Lastly, teams should be encouraged to come up with their own metrics, such as performance characteristics and bug leakage issues.

Dealing with a “Hero” Situation

The team was tasked to investigate and fix a performance issue on the website, but the Senior Engineer proposed a solution that was difficult to review. The manager stepped in and showed the engineer how to break up the code into smaller, more workable segments. The manager also discussed the importance of collaboration and included the matter in the engineer's quarterly review. The key lessons learned from this scenario are the importance of communication and collaboration, and the need for managers to understand what motivates a person or team in order to set them up for success.

Introducing OKRs: A Lesson in Compromise

A team of first-time managers lacked focus and technical quality, so the leader decided to introduce the OKR framework. Through collaboration and guidance, the team was able to come up with their own goal-setting system that was similar to OKRs, but less solid. With this imperfect system, the team was able to improve their stability and quality metrics significantly. The leader learned that strong relationships, collaboration, and teamwork are essential for successful project implementation, and that people need more than encouragement when doing something for the first time.