Knowledge shared by our community

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.

Blameless Incident Management

This article outlines the steps taken by the author to create a culture of incident management that encourages acknowledging mistakes without focusing on a person but on the conditions that caused an incident. The author introduced a structured on-call process, a weekly on-call hand-off process, and an incident review for the whole company. The author also emphasizes the importance of prevention, streamlining the focus on mitigation and actions, and running simulation sessions to prepare the team to handle stressful situations.

Building a Culture of Ownership and User Empathy

After taking over a marketplace engineering team of 45 people in Singapore, the author noticed a lack of ownership and user empathy, as well as an acrimonious tension between the engineering team and the data analytics and business operations team. To address this, the author conducted an immersion followed by a hackathon, pairing members of all non-tech cross-functional teams with members of the engineering team. Through this, the team developed empathy towards users and each other, and became more vocal and passionate about their ideas. The author also learned the importance of developing ownership around key marketplace challenges, having a clearly defined team charter, and empowering people on the team to make decisions.

Transitioning From a Fortune 20 Company to a Start-Up Just Finding Its Place

After fourteen years at a large company, the author decided to take a leap of faith and join a start-up. They found the transition to be refreshing, but it was a drastic change. The author encourages others to explore different opportunities and to follow their passions, as well as to build their network and to never regret any experiences.

Workshopping a Team and Clearing the Way for Success

This story is about a leader who was called to lead a remote team that was struggling with engagement and satisfaction. The leader used metrics to design a plan to improve engagement, connecting the team to the organization's goals and matching challenging projects with the team's skills. The leader also worked to build trust, bridge any existing friction, and create new opportunities. After a few months, the team reported more favorable conditions and many of the reports were promoted. The leader's lessons learned were to level the team up, make the project and personal interests compatible, and to always put people first.

Building Software in a Hardware Company

Working at a hardware company presents unique challenges, such as longer lead times and limited testing devices. To address these issues, it is important to bring hardware and software engineers together early to brainstorm and document risks and solutions, create a virtual testing platform, create resource calendars to book hardware devices, and document a common understanding of shared APIs. Communication and collaboration between hardware and software engineers is key to success.

Improving Diversity Initiatives

Companies should create an environment that supports and recognizes contributions with greater equity, diversify their hiring process, and support the community and promote a genuine commitment to mentorship in order to promote diversity in the workplace. These steps are necessary for a fair and welcoming workplace and should not be treated as a PR move or a box to check, but as a fundamental change to company culture and practices.

How NOT to Introduce a New Revenue Model

In the early days of his career, the author was tasked with creating a new revenue stream through existing products. He proposed a pay-as-you-use model, but failed to consider the impact it would have on customers and internal teams. He learned that introducing a new form of payment should be done iteratively and without binding contracts. He should have proposed a solution that was not binding for customers, and listened more closely to their needs.

Breaking Out of a Feature Factory

A startup team was struggling to acquire multiple customers due to a lack of strategic direction. To overcome this, they identified tangible hypotheses based on market and customer research to help them build features that would serve many customers. To get people on board, they had to create a compelling product story and convince internal stakeholders. They also had to manage emotions and point to solid facts and research to help customers overcome emotional attachment.

Managing a QA Team for the First Time

A manager had to switch from an offshore QA team to an in-house one, but had no knowledge of QA. To gain understanding, they deep-dived into the code and explored the existing automation. They then removed irrelevant tests, fixed meaningful ones, and hired three senior QA engineers. With their help, they were able to migrate from the old framework to a new, scalable, and reusable one. The manager learned that when switching from one domain to another, they should familiarize themselves as much as possible and that building a team from scratch is particularly taxing when unfamiliar with tools or technology.

Getting Machine Learning Projects Unstuck

This article discusses two examples of ML projects that got stuck and the lessons learned from them. The first example emphasizes the importance of discussing constraints upfront and understanding success metrics and acceptable errors. The second example highlights the importance of clarifying roles and responsibilities of the ML team. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the importance of learning from everyone involved in the ML project and discussing constraints to ensure success.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Putting Fear Aside While Growing Into a New Role

This article discusses the transition of a technical lead to an engineering manager, and the lessons learned from the experience. It highlights the importance of taking a business-minded approach to the role, and focusing on the needs of the organization as a whole. It also emphasizes the importance of taking a results-driven approach and setting specific metrics for success.

Emotional Intelligence‌ in Management

This engineer manager learned that before becoming successful in their role, they needed to gain a greater sense of self-awareness. They researched emotional intelligence and found a book that taught them strategies for managing their emotions in the workplace. They learned to recognize their own symptoms and address stress and frustration before it had a chance to take a toll on their team. They also learned to be open to feedback, avoid assigning blame, and be a positive role model for their team. They also practice healthful hobbies and pass their lessons on to their team.

Maintaining Productivity as a Quickly-Scaling Team

This article discusses the challenges faced by the author when scaling up a start-up from five to four hundred people over the course of ten years. The author led an effort called "Developer Experience" which consisted of two sub-teams and delegated tasks to manage many people at once. The author learned to act and not wait, to not shy away from unfamiliar processes, and to not fear failure.

Combining Styles of Leadership

This article discusses the importance of understanding different leadership styles and how they can be applied in different situations. The author discusses their own leadership style, which includes democratic, transformational, coaching, and servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of having personal values written down to refer to in challenging situations.

Motivating Development Through Employee Enrichment

When managing a junior engineer who was having difficulty understanding class diagrams in Unified Modeling Language, the manager identified the obstacle and directed the employee to an educational resource to gain a better understanding. Through knowledge-sharing sessions, the team was able to learn from each other and become more motivated and productive. The manager also learned the importance of sharing what they have learned with their team to inspire them to learn more.

How a Framework Can Kill Productivity

When interviewing for a PM role, it is important to assess skills and traits that often fall under the realm of subjectivity. During interviews, it is important to focus on fundamental skills such as listening, portraying, and contextualizing rather than assessing if a candidate is well-versed in a certain framework. It is also important to trust one's gut and not get stuck in endless theoretical considerations. Product management is often thought of as being objective, but when it comes to collecting user feedback, the subtlety of subjectivity is critical.

How to Scale User Feedback

This article discusses the challenges of collecting customer feedback for a company that serves small- to medium-sized companies. To address this, the company has implemented a system of interconnected tools that allow customer-facing employees to collect feedback and send it to the product team. Additionally, the company has created training material to help people from different departments collect feedback, and has hired virtual assistants to clean the data and classify insights. The article also emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with users and lowering technical barriers for people to send feedback.

How to Cultivate Customer Empathy

This article discusses the importance of customer empathy for product managers and how to cultivate it in a company-wide process. It suggests onboarding processes that include being a support agent, triaging product feedback, and conducting customer interviews. It also suggests setting expectations team-wide by recording and sharing customer interviews and feedback. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of connecting with customers and creating a personal connection in order to cultivate customer empathy.

Flexing Your Management Style

This article discusses the challenges of managing a team with a mix of junior and senior members. It suggests that first-time managers should assess the level of expertise and confidence of each team member and adjust their management style accordingly. They should also set expectations upfront and be clear about their expectations and actions. Finally, they should also reflect on their own needs and what level of support they require.