Knowledge shared by our community

Ensuring Teams Deliver Value

In order to address an issue of teams not knowing what they were doing, I identified how we could add value to the business, organized people and processes around that, and used Agile processes, stand-ups, duration planning, retros, and demos to encourage teams to think about their work and how they could get it done. This approach helped to increase morale and enabled teams to do work they were proud of. The lesson learned is that teams need to understand why they are doing the rituals and if they support the company's goals.

Sharing The Company’s Vision With Everyone

Neto faced a challenge in making the company's strategy relevant to individuals, so the CEO used Salesforce's V2MOM (Visions, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) to create a high-level strategy document. Each department head and team then built their own V2MOM that was relevant to them, but aligned with the CEO's vision. This gave purpose to individuals and teams, and helped them to become high-performing. Using V2MOM has been a productive mechanism for making the company's vision relevant at an individual level and helping teams understand how their work contributes to the business's success.

Gaining Team Insights During Restructuring

After Neto secured its third round of funding, the engineering team underwent a restructure to realign with business outcomes. To gauge how the team felt about the change, a temperature survey and word cloud were created. The results of the survey were higher than expected and the word cloud highlighted that while there was some frustration, people were enjoying new challenges and learning new things. This exercise showed that the problem was not as big as initially thought and that the team changes should be more consultative.

Growing With An Organization

This article discusses the difficulty of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager. It explains that as a company grows, roles and responsibilities need to change and be delegated in order for the company to be successful. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing why different roles are important and being willing to let go of certain roles and responsibilities as the company grows.

Decisive Firing

A reportee was an average performer, so a performance improvement plan was put in place to assess if he could sustain growth. However, the changes leveled off, so it was decided to let him go. The lesson learned was to find a balance between being hopeful and decisive when firing someone, and to have good evidence to support the decision.

An Amicable Firing

A manager gave an engineer feedback, discussed issues in one-on-one's, and gave her specific tasks to work on, but she still didn't meet the expected standard. A formal performance improvement plan was put in place, with goals and measurements, and the manager met with her for 3-4 hours a week to coach her. Despite improvements, sustained improvements were not seen, so the manager increased the urgency of feedback. It was realized the role was not a good fit for her, so the manager communicated that she should be let go and she was understanding.

Holding Out Too Long To Fire

In this situation, the engineer was not performing to the standard expected of them and was given feedback and incentives to try and change their behavior. However, after two years, the engineer's output started to affect other people on their team and team morale, so the manager ended up firing them. This situation taught the manager that two years is far too long to put up with bad performance and that there is a difference between barely meeting expectations and underperformance.

Rising Through The Ranks

The author started as the first engineer at Betterment and was responsible for shipping the next thing. As the engineering team grew, the author had to shift into a lead role and take on more responsibility for the output of the team and the growth of individuals. The author learned that they had to focus on helping their team be better and making sure people were making the best use of their skill set.

From Waterfall To Agile

This article discusses the process of transitioning from a Waterfall to an Agile software development life cycle. It explains the actions taken by two different companies, Inuit and LexisNexis, to make the transition successful. The article also highlights the lessons learned from the process, such as starting with both the product and engineering teams, and not relying on external consultants.

The Difficulties Of Providing Constructive Feedback

A manager had to give constructive feedback to an employee who was also a personal friend. The manager tried different approaches such as putting the employee on an individual project and having weekly checkpoints, but the employee still struggled to deliver on time. Ultimately, the manager had to put the employee on a Performance Improvement Plan, which resulted in the employee resigning. The lesson learned is that managers should be transparent about expectations and have consistent checkpoints to ensure quality and that the employee is invested in improving.

Engaging Training Sessions

This article outlines how the author improved their team's training program by identifying the real pain points and making the content more relevant and interactive. As a result, the team's velocity and cycle-time increased and the code-review process was more streamlined. The author's key lesson is to identify the real pain points and make sure the team understands why it's important to learn how to deal with them.

Shipping Enterprise Software

My company produces Enterprise Software and has implemented a continuous integration and delivery system to ensure quality and testing at all levels. We ship our code every two weeks and cut up larger builds into smaller pieces to deliver to customers earlier. This model has improved quality and customer feedback, as customers are now getting continuous value and upgrades faster.

Why You Should Measure Productivity

Engineering leaders often view measuring productivity as a bad thing, but it is necessary to help teams be as productive as possible. Volume metrics and milestones are useful indicators of productivity, and can help detect anomalies. However, metrics should not be used to penalize teams, and should be used to raise conversations about how to improve productivity.

Scaling your teams and yourself

This article discusses how to manage stress in engineering teams. It suggests that the best way to prevent stress is to hire and value the right people. When someone is dealing with stress, it is important to diagnose the source of the stress and use the appropriate technique to resolve it. These techniques can range from situational leadership to the ladder of inference. It is important to note that some sources of stress are not fixable and the best approach is to be compassionate and supportive.

Building A Great Culture

When hiring, it is important to focus on the character attributes of potential employees rather than just their technical abilities. To build a great team culture, ask your team what makes them feel good and use that to inform your interview process. Open-ended projects are a great way to assess how well someone can manage, understand, and meet standards.

Using Rubrics For Diversity

Establishing fairness on a diverse team is key, and can be achieved by creating rubrics for job expectations, behavioral attributes, and compensation. These rubrics should be as specific as possible to avoid bias, and should be informed by company values and the attributes of the best people on the team. If consistently used, these rubrics will create a bias towards diversity, fairness, and inclusion.

Asked To Fire A Technically Competent Manager

A network engineering manager was asked to fire the manager of the DC office, but instead of doing so, he took the time to understand the situation and offered the other manager advice on how to improve his communication skills. After a year and a half, the other manager was promoted to the position and kept it for seven more years. The lesson learned was to question more before making a final decision and to not take HR direction from seniors at face value.

A Better Way To Onboard

This article discusses the problem of a lack of seniority on a team and how to properly onboard junior engineers. The solution was to introduce a buddy system, where junior engineers are put through a rotation of three different teams and then paired with a mentor. Additionally, specific projects were assigned to the junior engineers to help them adjust to working in a team and getting their code reviewed. This approach has improved onboarding and mentorship relationships, and is a good way to show junior engineers that they are valued.

A Different Approach To Estimation & Tech Debt Prioritization

This case study outlines the process of an engineering team that was struggling to manage a five-year program replacing an old legacy system. The team came up with the hypothesis that it would be easier to manage the prioritization and development of tasks if they broke everything down into similar size work units and put them into a backlog. They also identified the challenge of articulating the value of resolving tech debt to the business stakeholders and created a business case to present to the project stakeholders. The team found that they were much better at same-sizing tasks than estimating and that creating a business case to present to the project stakeholders was an effective way to prioritize tech debt.

Providing Constructive Feedback

This article discusses the importance of giving effective feedback as an engineering leader. It outlines the steps to take when giving feedback, such as starting with positive feedback, providing clear examples of areas of improvement, and employing a coaching approach. It also emphasizes the importance of being vulnerable as a leader and investing in the growth of the individual receiving the feedback.

Ensuring Teams Deliver Value

In order to address an issue of teams not knowing what they were doing, I identified how we could add value to the business, organized people and processes around that, and used Agile processes, stand-ups, duration planning, retros, and demos to encourage teams to think about their work and how they could get it done. This approach helped to increase morale and enabled teams to do work they were proud of. The lesson learned is that teams need to understand why they are doing the rituals and if they support the company's goals.

Sharing The Company’s Vision With Everyone

Neto faced a challenge in making the company's strategy relevant to individuals, so the CEO used Salesforce's V2MOM (Visions, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) to create a high-level strategy document. Each department head and team then built their own V2MOM that was relevant to them, but aligned with the CEO's vision. This gave purpose to individuals and teams, and helped them to become high-performing. Using V2MOM has been a productive mechanism for making the company's vision relevant at an individual level and helping teams understand how their work contributes to the business's success.

Gaining Team Insights During Restructuring

After Neto secured its third round of funding, the engineering team underwent a restructure to realign with business outcomes. To gauge how the team felt about the change, a temperature survey and word cloud were created. The results of the survey were higher than expected and the word cloud highlighted that while there was some frustration, people were enjoying new challenges and learning new things. This exercise showed that the problem was not as big as initially thought and that the team changes should be more consultative.

Growing With An Organization

This article discusses the difficulty of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager. It explains that as a company grows, roles and responsibilities need to change and be delegated in order for the company to be successful. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing why different roles are important and being willing to let go of certain roles and responsibilities as the company grows.

Decisive Firing

A reportee was an average performer, so a performance improvement plan was put in place to assess if he could sustain growth. However, the changes leveled off, so it was decided to let him go. The lesson learned was to find a balance between being hopeful and decisive when firing someone, and to have good evidence to support the decision.

An Amicable Firing

A manager gave an engineer feedback, discussed issues in one-on-one's, and gave her specific tasks to work on, but she still didn't meet the expected standard. A formal performance improvement plan was put in place, with goals and measurements, and the manager met with her for 3-4 hours a week to coach her. Despite improvements, sustained improvements were not seen, so the manager increased the urgency of feedback. It was realized the role was not a good fit for her, so the manager communicated that she should be let go and she was understanding.

Holding Out Too Long To Fire

In this situation, the engineer was not performing to the standard expected of them and was given feedback and incentives to try and change their behavior. However, after two years, the engineer's output started to affect other people on their team and team morale, so the manager ended up firing them. This situation taught the manager that two years is far too long to put up with bad performance and that there is a difference between barely meeting expectations and underperformance.

Rising Through The Ranks

The author started as the first engineer at Betterment and was responsible for shipping the next thing. As the engineering team grew, the author had to shift into a lead role and take on more responsibility for the output of the team and the growth of individuals. The author learned that they had to focus on helping their team be better and making sure people were making the best use of their skill set.

From Waterfall To Agile

This article discusses the process of transitioning from a Waterfall to an Agile software development life cycle. It explains the actions taken by two different companies, Inuit and LexisNexis, to make the transition successful. The article also highlights the lessons learned from the process, such as starting with both the product and engineering teams, and not relying on external consultants.

The Difficulties Of Providing Constructive Feedback

A manager had to give constructive feedback to an employee who was also a personal friend. The manager tried different approaches such as putting the employee on an individual project and having weekly checkpoints, but the employee still struggled to deliver on time. Ultimately, the manager had to put the employee on a Performance Improvement Plan, which resulted in the employee resigning. The lesson learned is that managers should be transparent about expectations and have consistent checkpoints to ensure quality and that the employee is invested in improving.

Engaging Training Sessions

This article outlines how the author improved their team's training program by identifying the real pain points and making the content more relevant and interactive. As a result, the team's velocity and cycle-time increased and the code-review process was more streamlined. The author's key lesson is to identify the real pain points and make sure the team understands why it's important to learn how to deal with them.

Shipping Enterprise Software

My company produces Enterprise Software and has implemented a continuous integration and delivery system to ensure quality and testing at all levels. We ship our code every two weeks and cut up larger builds into smaller pieces to deliver to customers earlier. This model has improved quality and customer feedback, as customers are now getting continuous value and upgrades faster.

Why You Should Measure Productivity

Engineering leaders often view measuring productivity as a bad thing, but it is necessary to help teams be as productive as possible. Volume metrics and milestones are useful indicators of productivity, and can help detect anomalies. However, metrics should not be used to penalize teams, and should be used to raise conversations about how to improve productivity.

Scaling your teams and yourself

This article discusses how to manage stress in engineering teams. It suggests that the best way to prevent stress is to hire and value the right people. When someone is dealing with stress, it is important to diagnose the source of the stress and use the appropriate technique to resolve it. These techniques can range from situational leadership to the ladder of inference. It is important to note that some sources of stress are not fixable and the best approach is to be compassionate and supportive.

Building A Great Culture

When hiring, it is important to focus on the character attributes of potential employees rather than just their technical abilities. To build a great team culture, ask your team what makes them feel good and use that to inform your interview process. Open-ended projects are a great way to assess how well someone can manage, understand, and meet standards.

Using Rubrics For Diversity

Establishing fairness on a diverse team is key, and can be achieved by creating rubrics for job expectations, behavioral attributes, and compensation. These rubrics should be as specific as possible to avoid bias, and should be informed by company values and the attributes of the best people on the team. If consistently used, these rubrics will create a bias towards diversity, fairness, and inclusion.

Asked To Fire A Technically Competent Manager

A network engineering manager was asked to fire the manager of the DC office, but instead of doing so, he took the time to understand the situation and offered the other manager advice on how to improve his communication skills. After a year and a half, the other manager was promoted to the position and kept it for seven more years. The lesson learned was to question more before making a final decision and to not take HR direction from seniors at face value.

A Better Way To Onboard

This article discusses the problem of a lack of seniority on a team and how to properly onboard junior engineers. The solution was to introduce a buddy system, where junior engineers are put through a rotation of three different teams and then paired with a mentor. Additionally, specific projects were assigned to the junior engineers to help them adjust to working in a team and getting their code reviewed. This approach has improved onboarding and mentorship relationships, and is a good way to show junior engineers that they are valued.

A Different Approach To Estimation & Tech Debt Prioritization

This case study outlines the process of an engineering team that was struggling to manage a five-year program replacing an old legacy system. The team came up with the hypothesis that it would be easier to manage the prioritization and development of tasks if they broke everything down into similar size work units and put them into a backlog. They also identified the challenge of articulating the value of resolving tech debt to the business stakeholders and created a business case to present to the project stakeholders. The team found that they were much better at same-sizing tasks than estimating and that creating a business case to present to the project stakeholders was an effective way to prioritize tech debt.

Providing Constructive Feedback

This article discusses the importance of giving effective feedback as an engineering leader. It outlines the steps to take when giving feedback, such as starting with positive feedback, providing clear examples of areas of improvement, and employing a coaching approach. It also emphasizes the importance of being vulnerable as a leader and investing in the growth of the individual receiving the feedback.

Ensuring Teams Deliver Value

In order to address an issue of teams not knowing what they were doing, I identified how we could add value to the business, organized people and processes around that, and used Agile processes, stand-ups, duration planning, retros, and demos to encourage teams to think about their work and how they could get it done. This approach helped to increase morale and enabled teams to do work they were proud of. The lesson learned is that teams need to understand why they are doing the rituals and if they support the company's goals.

Sharing The Company’s Vision With Everyone

Neto faced a challenge in making the company's strategy relevant to individuals, so the CEO used Salesforce's V2MOM (Visions, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) to create a high-level strategy document. Each department head and team then built their own V2MOM that was relevant to them, but aligned with the CEO's vision. This gave purpose to individuals and teams, and helped them to become high-performing. Using V2MOM has been a productive mechanism for making the company's vision relevant at an individual level and helping teams understand how their work contributes to the business's success.

Gaining Team Insights During Restructuring

After Neto secured its third round of funding, the engineering team underwent a restructure to realign with business outcomes. To gauge how the team felt about the change, a temperature survey and word cloud were created. The results of the survey were higher than expected and the word cloud highlighted that while there was some frustration, people were enjoying new challenges and learning new things. This exercise showed that the problem was not as big as initially thought and that the team changes should be more consultative.

Growing With An Organization

This article discusses the difficulty of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager. It explains that as a company grows, roles and responsibilities need to change and be delegated in order for the company to be successful. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing why different roles are important and being willing to let go of certain roles and responsibilities as the company grows.

Decisive Firing

A reportee was an average performer, so a performance improvement plan was put in place to assess if he could sustain growth. However, the changes leveled off, so it was decided to let him go. The lesson learned was to find a balance between being hopeful and decisive when firing someone, and to have good evidence to support the decision.

An Amicable Firing

A manager gave an engineer feedback, discussed issues in one-on-one's, and gave her specific tasks to work on, but she still didn't meet the expected standard. A formal performance improvement plan was put in place, with goals and measurements, and the manager met with her for 3-4 hours a week to coach her. Despite improvements, sustained improvements were not seen, so the manager increased the urgency of feedback. It was realized the role was not a good fit for her, so the manager communicated that she should be let go and she was understanding.

Holding Out Too Long To Fire

In this situation, the engineer was not performing to the standard expected of them and was given feedback and incentives to try and change their behavior. However, after two years, the engineer's output started to affect other people on their team and team morale, so the manager ended up firing them. This situation taught the manager that two years is far too long to put up with bad performance and that there is a difference between barely meeting expectations and underperformance.

Rising Through The Ranks

The author started as the first engineer at Betterment and was responsible for shipping the next thing. As the engineering team grew, the author had to shift into a lead role and take on more responsibility for the output of the team and the growth of individuals. The author learned that they had to focus on helping their team be better and making sure people were making the best use of their skill set.

From Waterfall To Agile

This article discusses the process of transitioning from a Waterfall to an Agile software development life cycle. It explains the actions taken by two different companies, Inuit and LexisNexis, to make the transition successful. The article also highlights the lessons learned from the process, such as starting with both the product and engineering teams, and not relying on external consultants.

The Difficulties Of Providing Constructive Feedback

A manager had to give constructive feedback to an employee who was also a personal friend. The manager tried different approaches such as putting the employee on an individual project and having weekly checkpoints, but the employee still struggled to deliver on time. Ultimately, the manager had to put the employee on a Performance Improvement Plan, which resulted in the employee resigning. The lesson learned is that managers should be transparent about expectations and have consistent checkpoints to ensure quality and that the employee is invested in improving.

Engaging Training Sessions

This article outlines how the author improved their team's training program by identifying the real pain points and making the content more relevant and interactive. As a result, the team's velocity and cycle-time increased and the code-review process was more streamlined. The author's key lesson is to identify the real pain points and make sure the team understands why it's important to learn how to deal with them.

Shipping Enterprise Software

My company produces Enterprise Software and has implemented a continuous integration and delivery system to ensure quality and testing at all levels. We ship our code every two weeks and cut up larger builds into smaller pieces to deliver to customers earlier. This model has improved quality and customer feedback, as customers are now getting continuous value and upgrades faster.

Why You Should Measure Productivity

Engineering leaders often view measuring productivity as a bad thing, but it is necessary to help teams be as productive as possible. Volume metrics and milestones are useful indicators of productivity, and can help detect anomalies. However, metrics should not be used to penalize teams, and should be used to raise conversations about how to improve productivity.

Scaling your teams and yourself

This article discusses how to manage stress in engineering teams. It suggests that the best way to prevent stress is to hire and value the right people. When someone is dealing with stress, it is important to diagnose the source of the stress and use the appropriate technique to resolve it. These techniques can range from situational leadership to the ladder of inference. It is important to note that some sources of stress are not fixable and the best approach is to be compassionate and supportive.

Building A Great Culture

When hiring, it is important to focus on the character attributes of potential employees rather than just their technical abilities. To build a great team culture, ask your team what makes them feel good and use that to inform your interview process. Open-ended projects are a great way to assess how well someone can manage, understand, and meet standards.

Using Rubrics For Diversity

Establishing fairness on a diverse team is key, and can be achieved by creating rubrics for job expectations, behavioral attributes, and compensation. These rubrics should be as specific as possible to avoid bias, and should be informed by company values and the attributes of the best people on the team. If consistently used, these rubrics will create a bias towards diversity, fairness, and inclusion.

Asked To Fire A Technically Competent Manager

A network engineering manager was asked to fire the manager of the DC office, but instead of doing so, he took the time to understand the situation and offered the other manager advice on how to improve his communication skills. After a year and a half, the other manager was promoted to the position and kept it for seven more years. The lesson learned was to question more before making a final decision and to not take HR direction from seniors at face value.

A Better Way To Onboard

This article discusses the problem of a lack of seniority on a team and how to properly onboard junior engineers. The solution was to introduce a buddy system, where junior engineers are put through a rotation of three different teams and then paired with a mentor. Additionally, specific projects were assigned to the junior engineers to help them adjust to working in a team and getting their code reviewed. This approach has improved onboarding and mentorship relationships, and is a good way to show junior engineers that they are valued.

A Different Approach To Estimation & Tech Debt Prioritization

This case study outlines the process of an engineering team that was struggling to manage a five-year program replacing an old legacy system. The team came up with the hypothesis that it would be easier to manage the prioritization and development of tasks if they broke everything down into similar size work units and put them into a backlog. They also identified the challenge of articulating the value of resolving tech debt to the business stakeholders and created a business case to present to the project stakeholders. The team found that they were much better at same-sizing tasks than estimating and that creating a business case to present to the project stakeholders was an effective way to prioritize tech debt.

Providing Constructive Feedback

This article discusses the importance of giving effective feedback as an engineering leader. It outlines the steps to take when giving feedback, such as starting with positive feedback, providing clear examples of areas of improvement, and employing a coaching approach. It also emphasizes the importance of being vulnerable as a leader and investing in the growth of the individual receiving the feedback.

Ensuring Teams Deliver Value

In order to address an issue of teams not knowing what they were doing, I identified how we could add value to the business, organized people and processes around that, and used Agile processes, stand-ups, duration planning, retros, and demos to encourage teams to think about their work and how they could get it done. This approach helped to increase morale and enabled teams to do work they were proud of. The lesson learned is that teams need to understand why they are doing the rituals and if they support the company's goals.

Sharing The Company’s Vision With Everyone

Neto faced a challenge in making the company's strategy relevant to individuals, so the CEO used Salesforce's V2MOM (Visions, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) to create a high-level strategy document. Each department head and team then built their own V2MOM that was relevant to them, but aligned with the CEO's vision. This gave purpose to individuals and teams, and helped them to become high-performing. Using V2MOM has been a productive mechanism for making the company's vision relevant at an individual level and helping teams understand how their work contributes to the business's success.

Gaining Team Insights During Restructuring

After Neto secured its third round of funding, the engineering team underwent a restructure to realign with business outcomes. To gauge how the team felt about the change, a temperature survey and word cloud were created. The results of the survey were higher than expected and the word cloud highlighted that while there was some frustration, people were enjoying new challenges and learning new things. This exercise showed that the problem was not as big as initially thought and that the team changes should be more consultative.

Growing With An Organization

This article discusses the difficulty of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager. It explains that as a company grows, roles and responsibilities need to change and be delegated in order for the company to be successful. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing why different roles are important and being willing to let go of certain roles and responsibilities as the company grows.

Decisive Firing

A reportee was an average performer, so a performance improvement plan was put in place to assess if he could sustain growth. However, the changes leveled off, so it was decided to let him go. The lesson learned was to find a balance between being hopeful and decisive when firing someone, and to have good evidence to support the decision.

An Amicable Firing

A manager gave an engineer feedback, discussed issues in one-on-one's, and gave her specific tasks to work on, but she still didn't meet the expected standard. A formal performance improvement plan was put in place, with goals and measurements, and the manager met with her for 3-4 hours a week to coach her. Despite improvements, sustained improvements were not seen, so the manager increased the urgency of feedback. It was realized the role was not a good fit for her, so the manager communicated that she should be let go and she was understanding.

Holding Out Too Long To Fire

In this situation, the engineer was not performing to the standard expected of them and was given feedback and incentives to try and change their behavior. However, after two years, the engineer's output started to affect other people on their team and team morale, so the manager ended up firing them. This situation taught the manager that two years is far too long to put up with bad performance and that there is a difference between barely meeting expectations and underperformance.

Rising Through The Ranks

The author started as the first engineer at Betterment and was responsible for shipping the next thing. As the engineering team grew, the author had to shift into a lead role and take on more responsibility for the output of the team and the growth of individuals. The author learned that they had to focus on helping their team be better and making sure people were making the best use of their skill set.

From Waterfall To Agile

This article discusses the process of transitioning from a Waterfall to an Agile software development life cycle. It explains the actions taken by two different companies, Inuit and LexisNexis, to make the transition successful. The article also highlights the lessons learned from the process, such as starting with both the product and engineering teams, and not relying on external consultants.

The Difficulties Of Providing Constructive Feedback

A manager had to give constructive feedback to an employee who was also a personal friend. The manager tried different approaches such as putting the employee on an individual project and having weekly checkpoints, but the employee still struggled to deliver on time. Ultimately, the manager had to put the employee on a Performance Improvement Plan, which resulted in the employee resigning. The lesson learned is that managers should be transparent about expectations and have consistent checkpoints to ensure quality and that the employee is invested in improving.

Engaging Training Sessions

This article outlines how the author improved their team's training program by identifying the real pain points and making the content more relevant and interactive. As a result, the team's velocity and cycle-time increased and the code-review process was more streamlined. The author's key lesson is to identify the real pain points and make sure the team understands why it's important to learn how to deal with them.

Shipping Enterprise Software

My company produces Enterprise Software and has implemented a continuous integration and delivery system to ensure quality and testing at all levels. We ship our code every two weeks and cut up larger builds into smaller pieces to deliver to customers earlier. This model has improved quality and customer feedback, as customers are now getting continuous value and upgrades faster.

Why You Should Measure Productivity

Engineering leaders often view measuring productivity as a bad thing, but it is necessary to help teams be as productive as possible. Volume metrics and milestones are useful indicators of productivity, and can help detect anomalies. However, metrics should not be used to penalize teams, and should be used to raise conversations about how to improve productivity.

Scaling your teams and yourself

This article discusses how to manage stress in engineering teams. It suggests that the best way to prevent stress is to hire and value the right people. When someone is dealing with stress, it is important to diagnose the source of the stress and use the appropriate technique to resolve it. These techniques can range from situational leadership to the ladder of inference. It is important to note that some sources of stress are not fixable and the best approach is to be compassionate and supportive.

Building A Great Culture

When hiring, it is important to focus on the character attributes of potential employees rather than just their technical abilities. To build a great team culture, ask your team what makes them feel good and use that to inform your interview process. Open-ended projects are a great way to assess how well someone can manage, understand, and meet standards.

Using Rubrics For Diversity

Establishing fairness on a diverse team is key, and can be achieved by creating rubrics for job expectations, behavioral attributes, and compensation. These rubrics should be as specific as possible to avoid bias, and should be informed by company values and the attributes of the best people on the team. If consistently used, these rubrics will create a bias towards diversity, fairness, and inclusion.

Asked To Fire A Technically Competent Manager

A network engineering manager was asked to fire the manager of the DC office, but instead of doing so, he took the time to understand the situation and offered the other manager advice on how to improve his communication skills. After a year and a half, the other manager was promoted to the position and kept it for seven more years. The lesson learned was to question more before making a final decision and to not take HR direction from seniors at face value.

A Better Way To Onboard

This article discusses the problem of a lack of seniority on a team and how to properly onboard junior engineers. The solution was to introduce a buddy system, where junior engineers are put through a rotation of three different teams and then paired with a mentor. Additionally, specific projects were assigned to the junior engineers to help them adjust to working in a team and getting their code reviewed. This approach has improved onboarding and mentorship relationships, and is a good way to show junior engineers that they are valued.

A Different Approach To Estimation & Tech Debt Prioritization

This case study outlines the process of an engineering team that was struggling to manage a five-year program replacing an old legacy system. The team came up with the hypothesis that it would be easier to manage the prioritization and development of tasks if they broke everything down into similar size work units and put them into a backlog. They also identified the challenge of articulating the value of resolving tech debt to the business stakeholders and created a business case to present to the project stakeholders. The team found that they were much better at same-sizing tasks than estimating and that creating a business case to present to the project stakeholders was an effective way to prioritize tech debt.

Providing Constructive Feedback

This article discusses the importance of giving effective feedback as an engineering leader. It outlines the steps to take when giving feedback, such as starting with positive feedback, providing clear examples of areas of improvement, and employing a coaching approach. It also emphasizes the importance of being vulnerable as a leader and investing in the growth of the individual receiving the feedback.

Ensuring Teams Deliver Value

In order to address an issue of teams not knowing what they were doing, I identified how we could add value to the business, organized people and processes around that, and used Agile processes, stand-ups, duration planning, retros, and demos to encourage teams to think about their work and how they could get it done. This approach helped to increase morale and enabled teams to do work they were proud of. The lesson learned is that teams need to understand why they are doing the rituals and if they support the company's goals.

Sharing The Company’s Vision With Everyone

Neto faced a challenge in making the company's strategy relevant to individuals, so the CEO used Salesforce's V2MOM (Visions, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) to create a high-level strategy document. Each department head and team then built their own V2MOM that was relevant to them, but aligned with the CEO's vision. This gave purpose to individuals and teams, and helped them to become high-performing. Using V2MOM has been a productive mechanism for making the company's vision relevant at an individual level and helping teams understand how their work contributes to the business's success.

Gaining Team Insights During Restructuring

After Neto secured its third round of funding, the engineering team underwent a restructure to realign with business outcomes. To gauge how the team felt about the change, a temperature survey and word cloud were created. The results of the survey were higher than expected and the word cloud highlighted that while there was some frustration, people were enjoying new challenges and learning new things. This exercise showed that the problem was not as big as initially thought and that the team changes should be more consultative.

Growing With An Organization

This article discusses the difficulty of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager. It explains that as a company grows, roles and responsibilities need to change and be delegated in order for the company to be successful. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing why different roles are important and being willing to let go of certain roles and responsibilities as the company grows.

Decisive Firing

A reportee was an average performer, so a performance improvement plan was put in place to assess if he could sustain growth. However, the changes leveled off, so it was decided to let him go. The lesson learned was to find a balance between being hopeful and decisive when firing someone, and to have good evidence to support the decision.

An Amicable Firing

A manager gave an engineer feedback, discussed issues in one-on-one's, and gave her specific tasks to work on, but she still didn't meet the expected standard. A formal performance improvement plan was put in place, with goals and measurements, and the manager met with her for 3-4 hours a week to coach her. Despite improvements, sustained improvements were not seen, so the manager increased the urgency of feedback. It was realized the role was not a good fit for her, so the manager communicated that she should be let go and she was understanding.

Holding Out Too Long To Fire

In this situation, the engineer was not performing to the standard expected of them and was given feedback and incentives to try and change their behavior. However, after two years, the engineer's output started to affect other people on their team and team morale, so the manager ended up firing them. This situation taught the manager that two years is far too long to put up with bad performance and that there is a difference between barely meeting expectations and underperformance.

Rising Through The Ranks

The author started as the first engineer at Betterment and was responsible for shipping the next thing. As the engineering team grew, the author had to shift into a lead role and take on more responsibility for the output of the team and the growth of individuals. The author learned that they had to focus on helping their team be better and making sure people were making the best use of their skill set.

From Waterfall To Agile

This article discusses the process of transitioning from a Waterfall to an Agile software development life cycle. It explains the actions taken by two different companies, Inuit and LexisNexis, to make the transition successful. The article also highlights the lessons learned from the process, such as starting with both the product and engineering teams, and not relying on external consultants.

The Difficulties Of Providing Constructive Feedback

A manager had to give constructive feedback to an employee who was also a personal friend. The manager tried different approaches such as putting the employee on an individual project and having weekly checkpoints, but the employee still struggled to deliver on time. Ultimately, the manager had to put the employee on a Performance Improvement Plan, which resulted in the employee resigning. The lesson learned is that managers should be transparent about expectations and have consistent checkpoints to ensure quality and that the employee is invested in improving.

Engaging Training Sessions

This article outlines how the author improved their team's training program by identifying the real pain points and making the content more relevant and interactive. As a result, the team's velocity and cycle-time increased and the code-review process was more streamlined. The author's key lesson is to identify the real pain points and make sure the team understands why it's important to learn how to deal with them.

Shipping Enterprise Software

My company produces Enterprise Software and has implemented a continuous integration and delivery system to ensure quality and testing at all levels. We ship our code every two weeks and cut up larger builds into smaller pieces to deliver to customers earlier. This model has improved quality and customer feedback, as customers are now getting continuous value and upgrades faster.

Why You Should Measure Productivity

Engineering leaders often view measuring productivity as a bad thing, but it is necessary to help teams be as productive as possible. Volume metrics and milestones are useful indicators of productivity, and can help detect anomalies. However, metrics should not be used to penalize teams, and should be used to raise conversations about how to improve productivity.

Scaling your teams and yourself

This article discusses how to manage stress in engineering teams. It suggests that the best way to prevent stress is to hire and value the right people. When someone is dealing with stress, it is important to diagnose the source of the stress and use the appropriate technique to resolve it. These techniques can range from situational leadership to the ladder of inference. It is important to note that some sources of stress are not fixable and the best approach is to be compassionate and supportive.

Building A Great Culture

When hiring, it is important to focus on the character attributes of potential employees rather than just their technical abilities. To build a great team culture, ask your team what makes them feel good and use that to inform your interview process. Open-ended projects are a great way to assess how well someone can manage, understand, and meet standards.

Using Rubrics For Diversity

Establishing fairness on a diverse team is key, and can be achieved by creating rubrics for job expectations, behavioral attributes, and compensation. These rubrics should be as specific as possible to avoid bias, and should be informed by company values and the attributes of the best people on the team. If consistently used, these rubrics will create a bias towards diversity, fairness, and inclusion.

Asked To Fire A Technically Competent Manager

A network engineering manager was asked to fire the manager of the DC office, but instead of doing so, he took the time to understand the situation and offered the other manager advice on how to improve his communication skills. After a year and a half, the other manager was promoted to the position and kept it for seven more years. The lesson learned was to question more before making a final decision and to not take HR direction from seniors at face value.

A Better Way To Onboard

This article discusses the problem of a lack of seniority on a team and how to properly onboard junior engineers. The solution was to introduce a buddy system, where junior engineers are put through a rotation of three different teams and then paired with a mentor. Additionally, specific projects were assigned to the junior engineers to help them adjust to working in a team and getting their code reviewed. This approach has improved onboarding and mentorship relationships, and is a good way to show junior engineers that they are valued.

A Different Approach To Estimation & Tech Debt Prioritization

This case study outlines the process of an engineering team that was struggling to manage a five-year program replacing an old legacy system. The team came up with the hypothesis that it would be easier to manage the prioritization and development of tasks if they broke everything down into similar size work units and put them into a backlog. They also identified the challenge of articulating the value of resolving tech debt to the business stakeholders and created a business case to present to the project stakeholders. The team found that they were much better at same-sizing tasks than estimating and that creating a business case to present to the project stakeholders was an effective way to prioritize tech debt.

Providing Constructive Feedback

This article discusses the importance of giving effective feedback as an engineering leader. It outlines the steps to take when giving feedback, such as starting with positive feedback, providing clear examples of areas of improvement, and employing a coaching approach. It also emphasizes the importance of being vulnerable as a leader and investing in the growth of the individual receiving the feedback.

Ensuring Teams Deliver Value

In order to address an issue of teams not knowing what they were doing, I identified how we could add value to the business, organized people and processes around that, and used Agile processes, stand-ups, duration planning, retros, and demos to encourage teams to think about their work and how they could get it done. This approach helped to increase morale and enabled teams to do work they were proud of. The lesson learned is that teams need to understand why they are doing the rituals and if they support the company's goals.

Sharing The Company’s Vision With Everyone

Neto faced a challenge in making the company's strategy relevant to individuals, so the CEO used Salesforce's V2MOM (Visions, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures) to create a high-level strategy document. Each department head and team then built their own V2MOM that was relevant to them, but aligned with the CEO's vision. This gave purpose to individuals and teams, and helped them to become high-performing. Using V2MOM has been a productive mechanism for making the company's vision relevant at an individual level and helping teams understand how their work contributes to the business's success.

Gaining Team Insights During Restructuring

After Neto secured its third round of funding, the engineering team underwent a restructure to realign with business outcomes. To gauge how the team felt about the change, a temperature survey and word cloud were created. The results of the survey were higher than expected and the word cloud highlighted that while there was some frustration, people were enjoying new challenges and learning new things. This exercise showed that the problem was not as big as initially thought and that the team changes should be more consultative.

Growing With An Organization

This article discusses the difficulty of transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager. It explains that as a company grows, roles and responsibilities need to change and be delegated in order for the company to be successful. The article emphasizes the importance of recognizing why different roles are important and being willing to let go of certain roles and responsibilities as the company grows.

Decisive Firing

A reportee was an average performer, so a performance improvement plan was put in place to assess if he could sustain growth. However, the changes leveled off, so it was decided to let him go. The lesson learned was to find a balance between being hopeful and decisive when firing someone, and to have good evidence to support the decision.

An Amicable Firing

A manager gave an engineer feedback, discussed issues in one-on-one's, and gave her specific tasks to work on, but she still didn't meet the expected standard. A formal performance improvement plan was put in place, with goals and measurements, and the manager met with her for 3-4 hours a week to coach her. Despite improvements, sustained improvements were not seen, so the manager increased the urgency of feedback. It was realized the role was not a good fit for her, so the manager communicated that she should be let go and she was understanding.

Holding Out Too Long To Fire

In this situation, the engineer was not performing to the standard expected of them and was given feedback and incentives to try and change their behavior. However, after two years, the engineer's output started to affect other people on their team and team morale, so the manager ended up firing them. This situation taught the manager that two years is far too long to put up with bad performance and that there is a difference between barely meeting expectations and underperformance.

Rising Through The Ranks

The author started as the first engineer at Betterment and was responsible for shipping the next thing. As the engineering team grew, the author had to shift into a lead role and take on more responsibility for the output of the team and the growth of individuals. The author learned that they had to focus on helping their team be better and making sure people were making the best use of their skill set.

From Waterfall To Agile

This article discusses the process of transitioning from a Waterfall to an Agile software development life cycle. It explains the actions taken by two different companies, Inuit and LexisNexis, to make the transition successful. The article also highlights the lessons learned from the process, such as starting with both the product and engineering teams, and not relying on external consultants.

The Difficulties Of Providing Constructive Feedback

A manager had to give constructive feedback to an employee who was also a personal friend. The manager tried different approaches such as putting the employee on an individual project and having weekly checkpoints, but the employee still struggled to deliver on time. Ultimately, the manager had to put the employee on a Performance Improvement Plan, which resulted in the employee resigning. The lesson learned is that managers should be transparent about expectations and have consistent checkpoints to ensure quality and that the employee is invested in improving.

Engaging Training Sessions

This article outlines how the author improved their team's training program by identifying the real pain points and making the content more relevant and interactive. As a result, the team's velocity and cycle-time increased and the code-review process was more streamlined. The author's key lesson is to identify the real pain points and make sure the team understands why it's important to learn how to deal with them.

Shipping Enterprise Software

My company produces Enterprise Software and has implemented a continuous integration and delivery system to ensure quality and testing at all levels. We ship our code every two weeks and cut up larger builds into smaller pieces to deliver to customers earlier. This model has improved quality and customer feedback, as customers are now getting continuous value and upgrades faster.

Why You Should Measure Productivity

Engineering leaders often view measuring productivity as a bad thing, but it is necessary to help teams be as productive as possible. Volume metrics and milestones are useful indicators of productivity, and can help detect anomalies. However, metrics should not be used to penalize teams, and should be used to raise conversations about how to improve productivity.

Scaling your teams and yourself

This article discusses how to manage stress in engineering teams. It suggests that the best way to prevent stress is to hire and value the right people. When someone is dealing with stress, it is important to diagnose the source of the stress and use the appropriate technique to resolve it. These techniques can range from situational leadership to the ladder of inference. It is important to note that some sources of stress are not fixable and the best approach is to be compassionate and supportive.

Building A Great Culture

When hiring, it is important to focus on the character attributes of potential employees rather than just their technical abilities. To build a great team culture, ask your team what makes them feel good and use that to inform your interview process. Open-ended projects are a great way to assess how well someone can manage, understand, and meet standards.

Using Rubrics For Diversity

Establishing fairness on a diverse team is key, and can be achieved by creating rubrics for job expectations, behavioral attributes, and compensation. These rubrics should be as specific as possible to avoid bias, and should be informed by company values and the attributes of the best people on the team. If consistently used, these rubrics will create a bias towards diversity, fairness, and inclusion.

Asked To Fire A Technically Competent Manager

A network engineering manager was asked to fire the manager of the DC office, but instead of doing so, he took the time to understand the situation and offered the other manager advice on how to improve his communication skills. After a year and a half, the other manager was promoted to the position and kept it for seven more years. The lesson learned was to question more before making a final decision and to not take HR direction from seniors at face value.

A Better Way To Onboard

This article discusses the problem of a lack of seniority on a team and how to properly onboard junior engineers. The solution was to introduce a buddy system, where junior engineers are put through a rotation of three different teams and then paired with a mentor. Additionally, specific projects were assigned to the junior engineers to help them adjust to working in a team and getting their code reviewed. This approach has improved onboarding and mentorship relationships, and is a good way to show junior engineers that they are valued.

A Different Approach To Estimation & Tech Debt Prioritization

This case study outlines the process of an engineering team that was struggling to manage a five-year program replacing an old legacy system. The team came up with the hypothesis that it would be easier to manage the prioritization and development of tasks if they broke everything down into similar size work units and put them into a backlog. They also identified the challenge of articulating the value of resolving tech debt to the business stakeholders and created a business case to present to the project stakeholders. The team found that they were much better at same-sizing tasks than estimating and that creating a business case to present to the project stakeholders was an effective way to prioritize tech debt.

Providing Constructive Feedback

This article discusses the importance of giving effective feedback as an engineering leader. It outlines the steps to take when giving feedback, such as starting with positive feedback, providing clear examples of areas of improvement, and employing a coaching approach. It also emphasizes the importance of being vulnerable as a leader and investing in the growth of the individual receiving the feedback.