Knowledge shared by our community

How to Drive a Team Vision as a First-Time Manager

A first-time manager took over a team that lacked vision and a roadmap. To set up the team vision, the manager had to understand the business goals, identify how the team could contribute, and learn from customers. By prioritizing heavily and getting buy-in from stakeholders, the team was able to create a roadmap document and increase job satisfaction. The manager also established an informal feedback mechanism with customers and was able to reduce the bi-weekly planning time from 90 minutes to 30 minutes.

How to Be Acquired

After a company was acquired, the VP of Software Development was demoted and had their salary reduced. They initially reacted with anger, but eventually learned to take ownership of the acquisition and the success of the transition. They embraced the new company's values, built relationships, and shielded their team from the disruptions. The lesson learned is to accept the acquisition and be a servant leader, focusing on helping the team through the transition and implementing the acquiring company's must-have changes immediately.

In-House Mentorship Program: Creating Learning Opportunities for Engineers

The manager of a small office at a large company wanted to provide their engineers with new challenges and growth opportunities. To do this, they created an open-source based, in-house mentorship program run company-wide. This allowed engineers to connect with top tech experts and work on open source projects, expanding their knowledge and skills. Through this program, lasting mentorship relationships were established and the company as a whole benefited. The manager learned that building relationships across different offices is important and managers should look beyond local experience to find learning opportunities for their engineers.

Developing a Career Development Plan

This article discusses the need for a career development plan and the steps taken to create one. The author created a framework that combines different available resources and approaches, such as performance reviews, Insights Discovery, and the Intent Matrix. The framework consists of three parts: core values, strengths and areas for improvement, and a vision. The author also emphasizes the importance of having supporters to help with the journey. The article also highlights the importance of having a simple, comprehensive plan that connects different levels and provides clear benefits.

Being Explicit About a Work-Life Balance

In this case study, the author was working on a project with a tight deadline and put in extra time in the evenings and weekends to unblock things. However, the team saw this and felt they had to do the same, leading to burnout. After realizing the problem, the author had to apologize and reset expectations with the team, emphasizing that the schedule was not the most important thing. The author also had to be careful about when they did extra work and be explicit with the team if they needed to make an exception. In the end, the team was able to maintain a more sustainable level of effort and avoid burnout. The author learned that people tend to observe behavior closely and to be careful about how work-life balance is perceived.

When Being Helpful Backfires

A team needed to launch an experiment early and needed to be able to sell their product. The tech lead proposed forking the code into a sandbox, but the team had a lot of work to do and it would be disruptive. After realizing the tech lead had a misunderstanding of the schedule, the team convinced the tech lead that forking the code was a bad idea. The other team decided to fork the code anyway, and the tech lead learned lessons about being more aware of the broader dynamics before making a recommendation and making sure to know what they are talking about.

Delivering a New Beta Product on a Tight Deadline

The technical lead engineer had to decide between two design options for a new product with a tight deadline. They chose to build it on a new stack, even though it was not mature yet, as it would be better situated for the long run. After convincing other teams to support them, they released the demo by the deadline, but it was cut from the demo. However, they were able to develop it into a product for an open beta. The lesson learned was that it was worth the extra care and pain to build it the right way upfront so that they could get feedback and iterate on it.

Improving Peer Review Practice

This case study looks at how two teams with different approaches to building a training system for a piece of military equipment were able to successfully collaborate. The team with more product experience focused on building with high quality for the long run, while the other team was focused on rapid prototyping. To bridge the gap between the two cultures, the team with more experience embedded their engineers with the other team, publicly demonstrated good peer review practices, and emphasized the value of good reviews. Through this process, the team was able to successfully collaborate and deliver a high-quality product.

Leveraging Roadmap Planning for Engagement and Alignment

This article discusses how a product leader can drive productive cross-functional engagement to create a plan that is leveraged for accountability and learning. It suggests an iterative mindset, early interaction with the organization, finding an expression that is authentic to the organization, and creating artifacts that are tailored to the audience. It also suggests a process for keeping artifacts in sync and checking in on progress to plan along the way.

Building a Product Team: Identifying Desired Attributes and Activities

This article outlines a process for building a strong product team by first documenting the desired attributes and activities of the ideal candidate, then sharing it with the organization for feedback and revisions. This document is then used to define the interview activities and post-interview conversations to ensure the right fit for the organization's needs. Separating cultural aspirations from key responsibilities has helped the organization better understand what it needs in a product partner.

Creating Space on Your Roadmap for Innovation and Improvements

This article discusses how to ensure proper alignment on work projects by using three distinct work types (Discover, Build, Strengthen) and a 4-quarter rolling roadmap cadence. It also explains how investing time to review and ratify with cross-functional partners helps to feed learning into the plan, sharpen thinking, and reduce surprises.

Building a Platform Team

As a company grows, it is natural for teams to specialize and the first distinction is between product and platform engineering. It is important to identify the right time to do the split, which is usually when the value of spending engineering cycles to optimize what is being done becomes more apparent. Platform teams are built differently in different companies and should be structured according to the company's North Star and specific initiatives. Platform teams typically work on a longer time horizon than product engineering teams and should use DORA metrics to track progress. It is important to not split the team too soon or too late.

How to Drive Operational Excellence

Product technology leadership face various challenges such as balancing velocity and quality, product features and tune-ups, and staffing investment. The largest determinant of success is the ”speed of innovation”, which consists of two categories: innovation (product features) and tune-up items driving the speed of innovation. Prioritization should be based on customer impact, business impact, and operational efficiency. Alignment and prioritization with the Product and Engineering teams is crucial, and metrics should be captured to inform data-driven decision making. Lastly, transparency and clear communication on decisions and tradeoffs should be maintained, with follow-through on execution and delivery.

Leading an Organization Through a Colossal Change

As a tech leader, the author has taken a variety of actions to mature the team and processes to meet the next phase of the company's growth and needs. This includes restructuring the organization, assessing and putting the right people in the right roles, introducing performance assessment and a 9-box matrix, organizing show-and-tells, tech reviews, tech talks, and roundtable discussions, and introducing external trainers and post-mortems. The outcomes of these actions have been increased engagement, attendance, and frequency of forums/meetings, influencing outside of engineering, and improved engagement scores. The author has also learned the importance of having patience and giving time for the process to mature, holding cross-groups accountable, and training as early as possible.

Adapting Scrum to Continuous Deployment

A development organization was operating on a very inefficient one-month sprint cycle and manual deployment process. The existing leadership team was risk-averse and did not want change. The individual gathered data to support the changes and developed a roadmap to enable fully automated deploys at least once per day. This demonstrated value allowed them to elevate the automation project to an officially sponsored initiative. After achieving the goal of daily fully automated deployments, the heavy sprint cycle development process was the next bottleneck. The individual experimented with process tweaks on a single team, rolling out each successful change to all the other teams. This allowed teams to deliver a predictable flow of work while retaining the ability to quickly react to production incidents and changes in project scope.

Tech Debt Bankruptcy

After realizing that their fixed 20% tech debt budget was not working, a team took action to quantify the amount of time spent on unplanned work, created a three-level priority system for work, and established service ownership to ensure that critical issues were addressed. This resulted in unplanned work dropping in half, production incidents virtually disappearing, and developer happiness doubling. The team learned that service ownership works at small scales and that there is more to "production" than customer-facing components.

A Lack of Clear Vision and the Team Morale

A team had built an in-house product that was launched globally, but had insufficient global coverage and quality issues. An external company released a third-party solution that could replace the in-house product, and the team feared they would be downsized or disbanded. The manager had to balance between what was best for the team and the company, and ultimately decided on a hybrid solution that combined the best of both worlds. The team was encouraged to think from a customer perspective, and transparency and trust were key to motivating the team to work on improvements.

Restructuring a Team: How to Enhance Accountability and Ownership

When the author joined their current company, they found that the team was not structured to execute and scale well due to its size and project-based nature. To address this, the author and their team restructured the team into six smaller subteams with vertical ownership and tech leads to drive a charter and provide a long-term vision. This improved the team's engagement, on-call rotation, and overall reliability. The restructuring also allowed leadership to have more visibility into areas that needed more investment. However, the author also learned that forming a research team too early can be problematic if the underlying platform is not mature enough.

Learning to Sell

A product development lead was given the opportunity to become a product manager and had to learn how to sell the product without any prior experience or training. They read books, blog posts, and ebooks, followed sales influencers on social media, and worked with salespeople. Through tracking data, they improved their social media outreach success rate and started publishing engineering topics on social media. They learned that sales is still helping people and that their engineering background made them a more authentic helper.

Integrating a Junior Engineer Into a New Team

A junior engineer was integrated into a product development team, but the team was not welcoming and the engineer was unfamiliar with the culture and procedures. The engineer was passionate about a technology solution, but the team did not feel the presentation was well-researched enough. The engineer was mentored and the technical leader of the product development worked with them, but the engineer eventually left the company. Lessons learned included creating a better, welcoming culture and pairing the junior engineer with a mentor.

How to Drive a Team Vision as a First-Time Manager

A first-time manager took over a team that lacked vision and a roadmap. To set up the team vision, the manager had to understand the business goals, identify how the team could contribute, and learn from customers. By prioritizing heavily and getting buy-in from stakeholders, the team was able to create a roadmap document and increase job satisfaction. The manager also established an informal feedback mechanism with customers and was able to reduce the bi-weekly planning time from 90 minutes to 30 minutes.

How to Be Acquired

After a company was acquired, the VP of Software Development was demoted and had their salary reduced. They initially reacted with anger, but eventually learned to take ownership of the acquisition and the success of the transition. They embraced the new company's values, built relationships, and shielded their team from the disruptions. The lesson learned is to accept the acquisition and be a servant leader, focusing on helping the team through the transition and implementing the acquiring company's must-have changes immediately.

In-House Mentorship Program: Creating Learning Opportunities for Engineers

The manager of a small office at a large company wanted to provide their engineers with new challenges and growth opportunities. To do this, they created an open-source based, in-house mentorship program run company-wide. This allowed engineers to connect with top tech experts and work on open source projects, expanding their knowledge and skills. Through this program, lasting mentorship relationships were established and the company as a whole benefited. The manager learned that building relationships across different offices is important and managers should look beyond local experience to find learning opportunities for their engineers.

Developing a Career Development Plan

This article discusses the need for a career development plan and the steps taken to create one. The author created a framework that combines different available resources and approaches, such as performance reviews, Insights Discovery, and the Intent Matrix. The framework consists of three parts: core values, strengths and areas for improvement, and a vision. The author also emphasizes the importance of having supporters to help with the journey. The article also highlights the importance of having a simple, comprehensive plan that connects different levels and provides clear benefits.

Being Explicit About a Work-Life Balance

In this case study, the author was working on a project with a tight deadline and put in extra time in the evenings and weekends to unblock things. However, the team saw this and felt they had to do the same, leading to burnout. After realizing the problem, the author had to apologize and reset expectations with the team, emphasizing that the schedule was not the most important thing. The author also had to be careful about when they did extra work and be explicit with the team if they needed to make an exception. In the end, the team was able to maintain a more sustainable level of effort and avoid burnout. The author learned that people tend to observe behavior closely and to be careful about how work-life balance is perceived.

When Being Helpful Backfires

A team needed to launch an experiment early and needed to be able to sell their product. The tech lead proposed forking the code into a sandbox, but the team had a lot of work to do and it would be disruptive. After realizing the tech lead had a misunderstanding of the schedule, the team convinced the tech lead that forking the code was a bad idea. The other team decided to fork the code anyway, and the tech lead learned lessons about being more aware of the broader dynamics before making a recommendation and making sure to know what they are talking about.

Delivering a New Beta Product on a Tight Deadline

The technical lead engineer had to decide between two design options for a new product with a tight deadline. They chose to build it on a new stack, even though it was not mature yet, as it would be better situated for the long run. After convincing other teams to support them, they released the demo by the deadline, but it was cut from the demo. However, they were able to develop it into a product for an open beta. The lesson learned was that it was worth the extra care and pain to build it the right way upfront so that they could get feedback and iterate on it.

Improving Peer Review Practice

This case study looks at how two teams with different approaches to building a training system for a piece of military equipment were able to successfully collaborate. The team with more product experience focused on building with high quality for the long run, while the other team was focused on rapid prototyping. To bridge the gap between the two cultures, the team with more experience embedded their engineers with the other team, publicly demonstrated good peer review practices, and emphasized the value of good reviews. Through this process, the team was able to successfully collaborate and deliver a high-quality product.

Leveraging Roadmap Planning for Engagement and Alignment

This article discusses how a product leader can drive productive cross-functional engagement to create a plan that is leveraged for accountability and learning. It suggests an iterative mindset, early interaction with the organization, finding an expression that is authentic to the organization, and creating artifacts that are tailored to the audience. It also suggests a process for keeping artifacts in sync and checking in on progress to plan along the way.

Building a Product Team: Identifying Desired Attributes and Activities

This article outlines a process for building a strong product team by first documenting the desired attributes and activities of the ideal candidate, then sharing it with the organization for feedback and revisions. This document is then used to define the interview activities and post-interview conversations to ensure the right fit for the organization's needs. Separating cultural aspirations from key responsibilities has helped the organization better understand what it needs in a product partner.

Creating Space on Your Roadmap for Innovation and Improvements

This article discusses how to ensure proper alignment on work projects by using three distinct work types (Discover, Build, Strengthen) and a 4-quarter rolling roadmap cadence. It also explains how investing time to review and ratify with cross-functional partners helps to feed learning into the plan, sharpen thinking, and reduce surprises.

Building a Platform Team

As a company grows, it is natural for teams to specialize and the first distinction is between product and platform engineering. It is important to identify the right time to do the split, which is usually when the value of spending engineering cycles to optimize what is being done becomes more apparent. Platform teams are built differently in different companies and should be structured according to the company's North Star and specific initiatives. Platform teams typically work on a longer time horizon than product engineering teams and should use DORA metrics to track progress. It is important to not split the team too soon or too late.

How to Drive Operational Excellence

Product technology leadership face various challenges such as balancing velocity and quality, product features and tune-ups, and staffing investment. The largest determinant of success is the ”speed of innovation”, which consists of two categories: innovation (product features) and tune-up items driving the speed of innovation. Prioritization should be based on customer impact, business impact, and operational efficiency. Alignment and prioritization with the Product and Engineering teams is crucial, and metrics should be captured to inform data-driven decision making. Lastly, transparency and clear communication on decisions and tradeoffs should be maintained, with follow-through on execution and delivery.

Leading an Organization Through a Colossal Change

As a tech leader, the author has taken a variety of actions to mature the team and processes to meet the next phase of the company's growth and needs. This includes restructuring the organization, assessing and putting the right people in the right roles, introducing performance assessment and a 9-box matrix, organizing show-and-tells, tech reviews, tech talks, and roundtable discussions, and introducing external trainers and post-mortems. The outcomes of these actions have been increased engagement, attendance, and frequency of forums/meetings, influencing outside of engineering, and improved engagement scores. The author has also learned the importance of having patience and giving time for the process to mature, holding cross-groups accountable, and training as early as possible.

Adapting Scrum to Continuous Deployment

A development organization was operating on a very inefficient one-month sprint cycle and manual deployment process. The existing leadership team was risk-averse and did not want change. The individual gathered data to support the changes and developed a roadmap to enable fully automated deploys at least once per day. This demonstrated value allowed them to elevate the automation project to an officially sponsored initiative. After achieving the goal of daily fully automated deployments, the heavy sprint cycle development process was the next bottleneck. The individual experimented with process tweaks on a single team, rolling out each successful change to all the other teams. This allowed teams to deliver a predictable flow of work while retaining the ability to quickly react to production incidents and changes in project scope.

Tech Debt Bankruptcy

After realizing that their fixed 20% tech debt budget was not working, a team took action to quantify the amount of time spent on unplanned work, created a three-level priority system for work, and established service ownership to ensure that critical issues were addressed. This resulted in unplanned work dropping in half, production incidents virtually disappearing, and developer happiness doubling. The team learned that service ownership works at small scales and that there is more to "production" than customer-facing components.

A Lack of Clear Vision and the Team Morale

A team had built an in-house product that was launched globally, but had insufficient global coverage and quality issues. An external company released a third-party solution that could replace the in-house product, and the team feared they would be downsized or disbanded. The manager had to balance between what was best for the team and the company, and ultimately decided on a hybrid solution that combined the best of both worlds. The team was encouraged to think from a customer perspective, and transparency and trust were key to motivating the team to work on improvements.

Restructuring a Team: How to Enhance Accountability and Ownership

When the author joined their current company, they found that the team was not structured to execute and scale well due to its size and project-based nature. To address this, the author and their team restructured the team into six smaller subteams with vertical ownership and tech leads to drive a charter and provide a long-term vision. This improved the team's engagement, on-call rotation, and overall reliability. The restructuring also allowed leadership to have more visibility into areas that needed more investment. However, the author also learned that forming a research team too early can be problematic if the underlying platform is not mature enough.

Learning to Sell

A product development lead was given the opportunity to become a product manager and had to learn how to sell the product without any prior experience or training. They read books, blog posts, and ebooks, followed sales influencers on social media, and worked with salespeople. Through tracking data, they improved their social media outreach success rate and started publishing engineering topics on social media. They learned that sales is still helping people and that their engineering background made them a more authentic helper.

Integrating a Junior Engineer Into a New Team

A junior engineer was integrated into a product development team, but the team was not welcoming and the engineer was unfamiliar with the culture and procedures. The engineer was passionate about a technology solution, but the team did not feel the presentation was well-researched enough. The engineer was mentored and the technical leader of the product development worked with them, but the engineer eventually left the company. Lessons learned included creating a better, welcoming culture and pairing the junior engineer with a mentor.

How to Drive a Team Vision as a First-Time Manager

A first-time manager took over a team that lacked vision and a roadmap. To set up the team vision, the manager had to understand the business goals, identify how the team could contribute, and learn from customers. By prioritizing heavily and getting buy-in from stakeholders, the team was able to create a roadmap document and increase job satisfaction. The manager also established an informal feedback mechanism with customers and was able to reduce the bi-weekly planning time from 90 minutes to 30 minutes.

How to Be Acquired

After a company was acquired, the VP of Software Development was demoted and had their salary reduced. They initially reacted with anger, but eventually learned to take ownership of the acquisition and the success of the transition. They embraced the new company's values, built relationships, and shielded their team from the disruptions. The lesson learned is to accept the acquisition and be a servant leader, focusing on helping the team through the transition and implementing the acquiring company's must-have changes immediately.

In-House Mentorship Program: Creating Learning Opportunities for Engineers

The manager of a small office at a large company wanted to provide their engineers with new challenges and growth opportunities. To do this, they created an open-source based, in-house mentorship program run company-wide. This allowed engineers to connect with top tech experts and work on open source projects, expanding their knowledge and skills. Through this program, lasting mentorship relationships were established and the company as a whole benefited. The manager learned that building relationships across different offices is important and managers should look beyond local experience to find learning opportunities for their engineers.

Developing a Career Development Plan

This article discusses the need for a career development plan and the steps taken to create one. The author created a framework that combines different available resources and approaches, such as performance reviews, Insights Discovery, and the Intent Matrix. The framework consists of three parts: core values, strengths and areas for improvement, and a vision. The author also emphasizes the importance of having supporters to help with the journey. The article also highlights the importance of having a simple, comprehensive plan that connects different levels and provides clear benefits.

Being Explicit About a Work-Life Balance

In this case study, the author was working on a project with a tight deadline and put in extra time in the evenings and weekends to unblock things. However, the team saw this and felt they had to do the same, leading to burnout. After realizing the problem, the author had to apologize and reset expectations with the team, emphasizing that the schedule was not the most important thing. The author also had to be careful about when they did extra work and be explicit with the team if they needed to make an exception. In the end, the team was able to maintain a more sustainable level of effort and avoid burnout. The author learned that people tend to observe behavior closely and to be careful about how work-life balance is perceived.

When Being Helpful Backfires

A team needed to launch an experiment early and needed to be able to sell their product. The tech lead proposed forking the code into a sandbox, but the team had a lot of work to do and it would be disruptive. After realizing the tech lead had a misunderstanding of the schedule, the team convinced the tech lead that forking the code was a bad idea. The other team decided to fork the code anyway, and the tech lead learned lessons about being more aware of the broader dynamics before making a recommendation and making sure to know what they are talking about.

Delivering a New Beta Product on a Tight Deadline

The technical lead engineer had to decide between two design options for a new product with a tight deadline. They chose to build it on a new stack, even though it was not mature yet, as it would be better situated for the long run. After convincing other teams to support them, they released the demo by the deadline, but it was cut from the demo. However, they were able to develop it into a product for an open beta. The lesson learned was that it was worth the extra care and pain to build it the right way upfront so that they could get feedback and iterate on it.

Improving Peer Review Practice

This case study looks at how two teams with different approaches to building a training system for a piece of military equipment were able to successfully collaborate. The team with more product experience focused on building with high quality for the long run, while the other team was focused on rapid prototyping. To bridge the gap between the two cultures, the team with more experience embedded their engineers with the other team, publicly demonstrated good peer review practices, and emphasized the value of good reviews. Through this process, the team was able to successfully collaborate and deliver a high-quality product.

Leveraging Roadmap Planning for Engagement and Alignment

This article discusses how a product leader can drive productive cross-functional engagement to create a plan that is leveraged for accountability and learning. It suggests an iterative mindset, early interaction with the organization, finding an expression that is authentic to the organization, and creating artifacts that are tailored to the audience. It also suggests a process for keeping artifacts in sync and checking in on progress to plan along the way.

Building a Product Team: Identifying Desired Attributes and Activities

This article outlines a process for building a strong product team by first documenting the desired attributes and activities of the ideal candidate, then sharing it with the organization for feedback and revisions. This document is then used to define the interview activities and post-interview conversations to ensure the right fit for the organization's needs. Separating cultural aspirations from key responsibilities has helped the organization better understand what it needs in a product partner.

Creating Space on Your Roadmap for Innovation and Improvements

This article discusses how to ensure proper alignment on work projects by using three distinct work types (Discover, Build, Strengthen) and a 4-quarter rolling roadmap cadence. It also explains how investing time to review and ratify with cross-functional partners helps to feed learning into the plan, sharpen thinking, and reduce surprises.

Building a Platform Team

As a company grows, it is natural for teams to specialize and the first distinction is between product and platform engineering. It is important to identify the right time to do the split, which is usually when the value of spending engineering cycles to optimize what is being done becomes more apparent. Platform teams are built differently in different companies and should be structured according to the company's North Star and specific initiatives. Platform teams typically work on a longer time horizon than product engineering teams and should use DORA metrics to track progress. It is important to not split the team too soon or too late.

How to Drive Operational Excellence

Product technology leadership face various challenges such as balancing velocity and quality, product features and tune-ups, and staffing investment. The largest determinant of success is the ”speed of innovation”, which consists of two categories: innovation (product features) and tune-up items driving the speed of innovation. Prioritization should be based on customer impact, business impact, and operational efficiency. Alignment and prioritization with the Product and Engineering teams is crucial, and metrics should be captured to inform data-driven decision making. Lastly, transparency and clear communication on decisions and tradeoffs should be maintained, with follow-through on execution and delivery.

Leading an Organization Through a Colossal Change

As a tech leader, the author has taken a variety of actions to mature the team and processes to meet the next phase of the company's growth and needs. This includes restructuring the organization, assessing and putting the right people in the right roles, introducing performance assessment and a 9-box matrix, organizing show-and-tells, tech reviews, tech talks, and roundtable discussions, and introducing external trainers and post-mortems. The outcomes of these actions have been increased engagement, attendance, and frequency of forums/meetings, influencing outside of engineering, and improved engagement scores. The author has also learned the importance of having patience and giving time for the process to mature, holding cross-groups accountable, and training as early as possible.

Adapting Scrum to Continuous Deployment

A development organization was operating on a very inefficient one-month sprint cycle and manual deployment process. The existing leadership team was risk-averse and did not want change. The individual gathered data to support the changes and developed a roadmap to enable fully automated deploys at least once per day. This demonstrated value allowed them to elevate the automation project to an officially sponsored initiative. After achieving the goal of daily fully automated deployments, the heavy sprint cycle development process was the next bottleneck. The individual experimented with process tweaks on a single team, rolling out each successful change to all the other teams. This allowed teams to deliver a predictable flow of work while retaining the ability to quickly react to production incidents and changes in project scope.

Tech Debt Bankruptcy

After realizing that their fixed 20% tech debt budget was not working, a team took action to quantify the amount of time spent on unplanned work, created a three-level priority system for work, and established service ownership to ensure that critical issues were addressed. This resulted in unplanned work dropping in half, production incidents virtually disappearing, and developer happiness doubling. The team learned that service ownership works at small scales and that there is more to "production" than customer-facing components.

A Lack of Clear Vision and the Team Morale

A team had built an in-house product that was launched globally, but had insufficient global coverage and quality issues. An external company released a third-party solution that could replace the in-house product, and the team feared they would be downsized or disbanded. The manager had to balance between what was best for the team and the company, and ultimately decided on a hybrid solution that combined the best of both worlds. The team was encouraged to think from a customer perspective, and transparency and trust were key to motivating the team to work on improvements.

Restructuring a Team: How to Enhance Accountability and Ownership

When the author joined their current company, they found that the team was not structured to execute and scale well due to its size and project-based nature. To address this, the author and their team restructured the team into six smaller subteams with vertical ownership and tech leads to drive a charter and provide a long-term vision. This improved the team's engagement, on-call rotation, and overall reliability. The restructuring also allowed leadership to have more visibility into areas that needed more investment. However, the author also learned that forming a research team too early can be problematic if the underlying platform is not mature enough.

Learning to Sell

A product development lead was given the opportunity to become a product manager and had to learn how to sell the product without any prior experience or training. They read books, blog posts, and ebooks, followed sales influencers on social media, and worked with salespeople. Through tracking data, they improved their social media outreach success rate and started publishing engineering topics on social media. They learned that sales is still helping people and that their engineering background made them a more authentic helper.

Integrating a Junior Engineer Into a New Team

A junior engineer was integrated into a product development team, but the team was not welcoming and the engineer was unfamiliar with the culture and procedures. The engineer was passionate about a technology solution, but the team did not feel the presentation was well-researched enough. The engineer was mentored and the technical leader of the product development worked with them, but the engineer eventually left the company. Lessons learned included creating a better, welcoming culture and pairing the junior engineer with a mentor.

How to Drive a Team Vision as a First-Time Manager

A first-time manager took over a team that lacked vision and a roadmap. To set up the team vision, the manager had to understand the business goals, identify how the team could contribute, and learn from customers. By prioritizing heavily and getting buy-in from stakeholders, the team was able to create a roadmap document and increase job satisfaction. The manager also established an informal feedback mechanism with customers and was able to reduce the bi-weekly planning time from 90 minutes to 30 minutes.

How to Be Acquired

After a company was acquired, the VP of Software Development was demoted and had their salary reduced. They initially reacted with anger, but eventually learned to take ownership of the acquisition and the success of the transition. They embraced the new company's values, built relationships, and shielded their team from the disruptions. The lesson learned is to accept the acquisition and be a servant leader, focusing on helping the team through the transition and implementing the acquiring company's must-have changes immediately.

In-House Mentorship Program: Creating Learning Opportunities for Engineers

The manager of a small office at a large company wanted to provide their engineers with new challenges and growth opportunities. To do this, they created an open-source based, in-house mentorship program run company-wide. This allowed engineers to connect with top tech experts and work on open source projects, expanding their knowledge and skills. Through this program, lasting mentorship relationships were established and the company as a whole benefited. The manager learned that building relationships across different offices is important and managers should look beyond local experience to find learning opportunities for their engineers.

Developing a Career Development Plan

This article discusses the need for a career development plan and the steps taken to create one. The author created a framework that combines different available resources and approaches, such as performance reviews, Insights Discovery, and the Intent Matrix. The framework consists of three parts: core values, strengths and areas for improvement, and a vision. The author also emphasizes the importance of having supporters to help with the journey. The article also highlights the importance of having a simple, comprehensive plan that connects different levels and provides clear benefits.

Being Explicit About a Work-Life Balance

In this case study, the author was working on a project with a tight deadline and put in extra time in the evenings and weekends to unblock things. However, the team saw this and felt they had to do the same, leading to burnout. After realizing the problem, the author had to apologize and reset expectations with the team, emphasizing that the schedule was not the most important thing. The author also had to be careful about when they did extra work and be explicit with the team if they needed to make an exception. In the end, the team was able to maintain a more sustainable level of effort and avoid burnout. The author learned that people tend to observe behavior closely and to be careful about how work-life balance is perceived.

When Being Helpful Backfires

A team needed to launch an experiment early and needed to be able to sell their product. The tech lead proposed forking the code into a sandbox, but the team had a lot of work to do and it would be disruptive. After realizing the tech lead had a misunderstanding of the schedule, the team convinced the tech lead that forking the code was a bad idea. The other team decided to fork the code anyway, and the tech lead learned lessons about being more aware of the broader dynamics before making a recommendation and making sure to know what they are talking about.

Delivering a New Beta Product on a Tight Deadline

The technical lead engineer had to decide between two design options for a new product with a tight deadline. They chose to build it on a new stack, even though it was not mature yet, as it would be better situated for the long run. After convincing other teams to support them, they released the demo by the deadline, but it was cut from the demo. However, they were able to develop it into a product for an open beta. The lesson learned was that it was worth the extra care and pain to build it the right way upfront so that they could get feedback and iterate on it.

Improving Peer Review Practice

This case study looks at how two teams with different approaches to building a training system for a piece of military equipment were able to successfully collaborate. The team with more product experience focused on building with high quality for the long run, while the other team was focused on rapid prototyping. To bridge the gap between the two cultures, the team with more experience embedded their engineers with the other team, publicly demonstrated good peer review practices, and emphasized the value of good reviews. Through this process, the team was able to successfully collaborate and deliver a high-quality product.

Leveraging Roadmap Planning for Engagement and Alignment

This article discusses how a product leader can drive productive cross-functional engagement to create a plan that is leveraged for accountability and learning. It suggests an iterative mindset, early interaction with the organization, finding an expression that is authentic to the organization, and creating artifacts that are tailored to the audience. It also suggests a process for keeping artifacts in sync and checking in on progress to plan along the way.

Building a Product Team: Identifying Desired Attributes and Activities

This article outlines a process for building a strong product team by first documenting the desired attributes and activities of the ideal candidate, then sharing it with the organization for feedback and revisions. This document is then used to define the interview activities and post-interview conversations to ensure the right fit for the organization's needs. Separating cultural aspirations from key responsibilities has helped the organization better understand what it needs in a product partner.

Creating Space on Your Roadmap for Innovation and Improvements

This article discusses how to ensure proper alignment on work projects by using three distinct work types (Discover, Build, Strengthen) and a 4-quarter rolling roadmap cadence. It also explains how investing time to review and ratify with cross-functional partners helps to feed learning into the plan, sharpen thinking, and reduce surprises.

Building a Platform Team

As a company grows, it is natural for teams to specialize and the first distinction is between product and platform engineering. It is important to identify the right time to do the split, which is usually when the value of spending engineering cycles to optimize what is being done becomes more apparent. Platform teams are built differently in different companies and should be structured according to the company's North Star and specific initiatives. Platform teams typically work on a longer time horizon than product engineering teams and should use DORA metrics to track progress. It is important to not split the team too soon or too late.

How to Drive Operational Excellence

Product technology leadership face various challenges such as balancing velocity and quality, product features and tune-ups, and staffing investment. The largest determinant of success is the ”speed of innovation”, which consists of two categories: innovation (product features) and tune-up items driving the speed of innovation. Prioritization should be based on customer impact, business impact, and operational efficiency. Alignment and prioritization with the Product and Engineering teams is crucial, and metrics should be captured to inform data-driven decision making. Lastly, transparency and clear communication on decisions and tradeoffs should be maintained, with follow-through on execution and delivery.

Leading an Organization Through a Colossal Change

As a tech leader, the author has taken a variety of actions to mature the team and processes to meet the next phase of the company's growth and needs. This includes restructuring the organization, assessing and putting the right people in the right roles, introducing performance assessment and a 9-box matrix, organizing show-and-tells, tech reviews, tech talks, and roundtable discussions, and introducing external trainers and post-mortems. The outcomes of these actions have been increased engagement, attendance, and frequency of forums/meetings, influencing outside of engineering, and improved engagement scores. The author has also learned the importance of having patience and giving time for the process to mature, holding cross-groups accountable, and training as early as possible.

Adapting Scrum to Continuous Deployment

A development organization was operating on a very inefficient one-month sprint cycle and manual deployment process. The existing leadership team was risk-averse and did not want change. The individual gathered data to support the changes and developed a roadmap to enable fully automated deploys at least once per day. This demonstrated value allowed them to elevate the automation project to an officially sponsored initiative. After achieving the goal of daily fully automated deployments, the heavy sprint cycle development process was the next bottleneck. The individual experimented with process tweaks on a single team, rolling out each successful change to all the other teams. This allowed teams to deliver a predictable flow of work while retaining the ability to quickly react to production incidents and changes in project scope.

Tech Debt Bankruptcy

After realizing that their fixed 20% tech debt budget was not working, a team took action to quantify the amount of time spent on unplanned work, created a three-level priority system for work, and established service ownership to ensure that critical issues were addressed. This resulted in unplanned work dropping in half, production incidents virtually disappearing, and developer happiness doubling. The team learned that service ownership works at small scales and that there is more to "production" than customer-facing components.

A Lack of Clear Vision and the Team Morale

A team had built an in-house product that was launched globally, but had insufficient global coverage and quality issues. An external company released a third-party solution that could replace the in-house product, and the team feared they would be downsized or disbanded. The manager had to balance between what was best for the team and the company, and ultimately decided on a hybrid solution that combined the best of both worlds. The team was encouraged to think from a customer perspective, and transparency and trust were key to motivating the team to work on improvements.

Restructuring a Team: How to Enhance Accountability and Ownership

When the author joined their current company, they found that the team was not structured to execute and scale well due to its size and project-based nature. To address this, the author and their team restructured the team into six smaller subteams with vertical ownership and tech leads to drive a charter and provide a long-term vision. This improved the team's engagement, on-call rotation, and overall reliability. The restructuring also allowed leadership to have more visibility into areas that needed more investment. However, the author also learned that forming a research team too early can be problematic if the underlying platform is not mature enough.

Learning to Sell

A product development lead was given the opportunity to become a product manager and had to learn how to sell the product without any prior experience or training. They read books, blog posts, and ebooks, followed sales influencers on social media, and worked with salespeople. Through tracking data, they improved their social media outreach success rate and started publishing engineering topics on social media. They learned that sales is still helping people and that their engineering background made them a more authentic helper.

Integrating a Junior Engineer Into a New Team

A junior engineer was integrated into a product development team, but the team was not welcoming and the engineer was unfamiliar with the culture and procedures. The engineer was passionate about a technology solution, but the team did not feel the presentation was well-researched enough. The engineer was mentored and the technical leader of the product development worked with them, but the engineer eventually left the company. Lessons learned included creating a better, welcoming culture and pairing the junior engineer with a mentor.

How to Drive a Team Vision as a First-Time Manager

A first-time manager took over a team that lacked vision and a roadmap. To set up the team vision, the manager had to understand the business goals, identify how the team could contribute, and learn from customers. By prioritizing heavily and getting buy-in from stakeholders, the team was able to create a roadmap document and increase job satisfaction. The manager also established an informal feedback mechanism with customers and was able to reduce the bi-weekly planning time from 90 minutes to 30 minutes.

How to Be Acquired

After a company was acquired, the VP of Software Development was demoted and had their salary reduced. They initially reacted with anger, but eventually learned to take ownership of the acquisition and the success of the transition. They embraced the new company's values, built relationships, and shielded their team from the disruptions. The lesson learned is to accept the acquisition and be a servant leader, focusing on helping the team through the transition and implementing the acquiring company's must-have changes immediately.

In-House Mentorship Program: Creating Learning Opportunities for Engineers

The manager of a small office at a large company wanted to provide their engineers with new challenges and growth opportunities. To do this, they created an open-source based, in-house mentorship program run company-wide. This allowed engineers to connect with top tech experts and work on open source projects, expanding their knowledge and skills. Through this program, lasting mentorship relationships were established and the company as a whole benefited. The manager learned that building relationships across different offices is important and managers should look beyond local experience to find learning opportunities for their engineers.

Developing a Career Development Plan

This article discusses the need for a career development plan and the steps taken to create one. The author created a framework that combines different available resources and approaches, such as performance reviews, Insights Discovery, and the Intent Matrix. The framework consists of three parts: core values, strengths and areas for improvement, and a vision. The author also emphasizes the importance of having supporters to help with the journey. The article also highlights the importance of having a simple, comprehensive plan that connects different levels and provides clear benefits.

Being Explicit About a Work-Life Balance

In this case study, the author was working on a project with a tight deadline and put in extra time in the evenings and weekends to unblock things. However, the team saw this and felt they had to do the same, leading to burnout. After realizing the problem, the author had to apologize and reset expectations with the team, emphasizing that the schedule was not the most important thing. The author also had to be careful about when they did extra work and be explicit with the team if they needed to make an exception. In the end, the team was able to maintain a more sustainable level of effort and avoid burnout. The author learned that people tend to observe behavior closely and to be careful about how work-life balance is perceived.

When Being Helpful Backfires

A team needed to launch an experiment early and needed to be able to sell their product. The tech lead proposed forking the code into a sandbox, but the team had a lot of work to do and it would be disruptive. After realizing the tech lead had a misunderstanding of the schedule, the team convinced the tech lead that forking the code was a bad idea. The other team decided to fork the code anyway, and the tech lead learned lessons about being more aware of the broader dynamics before making a recommendation and making sure to know what they are talking about.

Delivering a New Beta Product on a Tight Deadline

The technical lead engineer had to decide between two design options for a new product with a tight deadline. They chose to build it on a new stack, even though it was not mature yet, as it would be better situated for the long run. After convincing other teams to support them, they released the demo by the deadline, but it was cut from the demo. However, they were able to develop it into a product for an open beta. The lesson learned was that it was worth the extra care and pain to build it the right way upfront so that they could get feedback and iterate on it.

Improving Peer Review Practice

This case study looks at how two teams with different approaches to building a training system for a piece of military equipment were able to successfully collaborate. The team with more product experience focused on building with high quality for the long run, while the other team was focused on rapid prototyping. To bridge the gap between the two cultures, the team with more experience embedded their engineers with the other team, publicly demonstrated good peer review practices, and emphasized the value of good reviews. Through this process, the team was able to successfully collaborate and deliver a high-quality product.

Leveraging Roadmap Planning for Engagement and Alignment

This article discusses how a product leader can drive productive cross-functional engagement to create a plan that is leveraged for accountability and learning. It suggests an iterative mindset, early interaction with the organization, finding an expression that is authentic to the organization, and creating artifacts that are tailored to the audience. It also suggests a process for keeping artifacts in sync and checking in on progress to plan along the way.

Building a Product Team: Identifying Desired Attributes and Activities

This article outlines a process for building a strong product team by first documenting the desired attributes and activities of the ideal candidate, then sharing it with the organization for feedback and revisions. This document is then used to define the interview activities and post-interview conversations to ensure the right fit for the organization's needs. Separating cultural aspirations from key responsibilities has helped the organization better understand what it needs in a product partner.

Creating Space on Your Roadmap for Innovation and Improvements

This article discusses how to ensure proper alignment on work projects by using three distinct work types (Discover, Build, Strengthen) and a 4-quarter rolling roadmap cadence. It also explains how investing time to review and ratify with cross-functional partners helps to feed learning into the plan, sharpen thinking, and reduce surprises.

Building a Platform Team

As a company grows, it is natural for teams to specialize and the first distinction is between product and platform engineering. It is important to identify the right time to do the split, which is usually when the value of spending engineering cycles to optimize what is being done becomes more apparent. Platform teams are built differently in different companies and should be structured according to the company's North Star and specific initiatives. Platform teams typically work on a longer time horizon than product engineering teams and should use DORA metrics to track progress. It is important to not split the team too soon or too late.

How to Drive Operational Excellence

Product technology leadership face various challenges such as balancing velocity and quality, product features and tune-ups, and staffing investment. The largest determinant of success is the ”speed of innovation”, which consists of two categories: innovation (product features) and tune-up items driving the speed of innovation. Prioritization should be based on customer impact, business impact, and operational efficiency. Alignment and prioritization with the Product and Engineering teams is crucial, and metrics should be captured to inform data-driven decision making. Lastly, transparency and clear communication on decisions and tradeoffs should be maintained, with follow-through on execution and delivery.

Leading an Organization Through a Colossal Change

As a tech leader, the author has taken a variety of actions to mature the team and processes to meet the next phase of the company's growth and needs. This includes restructuring the organization, assessing and putting the right people in the right roles, introducing performance assessment and a 9-box matrix, organizing show-and-tells, tech reviews, tech talks, and roundtable discussions, and introducing external trainers and post-mortems. The outcomes of these actions have been increased engagement, attendance, and frequency of forums/meetings, influencing outside of engineering, and improved engagement scores. The author has also learned the importance of having patience and giving time for the process to mature, holding cross-groups accountable, and training as early as possible.

Adapting Scrum to Continuous Deployment

A development organization was operating on a very inefficient one-month sprint cycle and manual deployment process. The existing leadership team was risk-averse and did not want change. The individual gathered data to support the changes and developed a roadmap to enable fully automated deploys at least once per day. This demonstrated value allowed them to elevate the automation project to an officially sponsored initiative. After achieving the goal of daily fully automated deployments, the heavy sprint cycle development process was the next bottleneck. The individual experimented with process tweaks on a single team, rolling out each successful change to all the other teams. This allowed teams to deliver a predictable flow of work while retaining the ability to quickly react to production incidents and changes in project scope.

Tech Debt Bankruptcy

After realizing that their fixed 20% tech debt budget was not working, a team took action to quantify the amount of time spent on unplanned work, created a three-level priority system for work, and established service ownership to ensure that critical issues were addressed. This resulted in unplanned work dropping in half, production incidents virtually disappearing, and developer happiness doubling. The team learned that service ownership works at small scales and that there is more to "production" than customer-facing components.

A Lack of Clear Vision and the Team Morale

A team had built an in-house product that was launched globally, but had insufficient global coverage and quality issues. An external company released a third-party solution that could replace the in-house product, and the team feared they would be downsized or disbanded. The manager had to balance between what was best for the team and the company, and ultimately decided on a hybrid solution that combined the best of both worlds. The team was encouraged to think from a customer perspective, and transparency and trust were key to motivating the team to work on improvements.

Restructuring a Team: How to Enhance Accountability and Ownership

When the author joined their current company, they found that the team was not structured to execute and scale well due to its size and project-based nature. To address this, the author and their team restructured the team into six smaller subteams with vertical ownership and tech leads to drive a charter and provide a long-term vision. This improved the team's engagement, on-call rotation, and overall reliability. The restructuring also allowed leadership to have more visibility into areas that needed more investment. However, the author also learned that forming a research team too early can be problematic if the underlying platform is not mature enough.

Learning to Sell

A product development lead was given the opportunity to become a product manager and had to learn how to sell the product without any prior experience or training. They read books, blog posts, and ebooks, followed sales influencers on social media, and worked with salespeople. Through tracking data, they improved their social media outreach success rate and started publishing engineering topics on social media. They learned that sales is still helping people and that their engineering background made them a more authentic helper.

Integrating a Junior Engineer Into a New Team

A junior engineer was integrated into a product development team, but the team was not welcoming and the engineer was unfamiliar with the culture and procedures. The engineer was passionate about a technology solution, but the team did not feel the presentation was well-researched enough. The engineer was mentored and the technical leader of the product development worked with them, but the engineer eventually left the company. Lessons learned included creating a better, welcoming culture and pairing the junior engineer with a mentor.

How to Drive a Team Vision as a First-Time Manager

A first-time manager took over a team that lacked vision and a roadmap. To set up the team vision, the manager had to understand the business goals, identify how the team could contribute, and learn from customers. By prioritizing heavily and getting buy-in from stakeholders, the team was able to create a roadmap document and increase job satisfaction. The manager also established an informal feedback mechanism with customers and was able to reduce the bi-weekly planning time from 90 minutes to 30 minutes.

How to Be Acquired

After a company was acquired, the VP of Software Development was demoted and had their salary reduced. They initially reacted with anger, but eventually learned to take ownership of the acquisition and the success of the transition. They embraced the new company's values, built relationships, and shielded their team from the disruptions. The lesson learned is to accept the acquisition and be a servant leader, focusing on helping the team through the transition and implementing the acquiring company's must-have changes immediately.

In-House Mentorship Program: Creating Learning Opportunities for Engineers

The manager of a small office at a large company wanted to provide their engineers with new challenges and growth opportunities. To do this, they created an open-source based, in-house mentorship program run company-wide. This allowed engineers to connect with top tech experts and work on open source projects, expanding their knowledge and skills. Through this program, lasting mentorship relationships were established and the company as a whole benefited. The manager learned that building relationships across different offices is important and managers should look beyond local experience to find learning opportunities for their engineers.

Developing a Career Development Plan

This article discusses the need for a career development plan and the steps taken to create one. The author created a framework that combines different available resources and approaches, such as performance reviews, Insights Discovery, and the Intent Matrix. The framework consists of three parts: core values, strengths and areas for improvement, and a vision. The author also emphasizes the importance of having supporters to help with the journey. The article also highlights the importance of having a simple, comprehensive plan that connects different levels and provides clear benefits.

Being Explicit About a Work-Life Balance

In this case study, the author was working on a project with a tight deadline and put in extra time in the evenings and weekends to unblock things. However, the team saw this and felt they had to do the same, leading to burnout. After realizing the problem, the author had to apologize and reset expectations with the team, emphasizing that the schedule was not the most important thing. The author also had to be careful about when they did extra work and be explicit with the team if they needed to make an exception. In the end, the team was able to maintain a more sustainable level of effort and avoid burnout. The author learned that people tend to observe behavior closely and to be careful about how work-life balance is perceived.

When Being Helpful Backfires

A team needed to launch an experiment early and needed to be able to sell their product. The tech lead proposed forking the code into a sandbox, but the team had a lot of work to do and it would be disruptive. After realizing the tech lead had a misunderstanding of the schedule, the team convinced the tech lead that forking the code was a bad idea. The other team decided to fork the code anyway, and the tech lead learned lessons about being more aware of the broader dynamics before making a recommendation and making sure to know what they are talking about.

Delivering a New Beta Product on a Tight Deadline

The technical lead engineer had to decide between two design options for a new product with a tight deadline. They chose to build it on a new stack, even though it was not mature yet, as it would be better situated for the long run. After convincing other teams to support them, they released the demo by the deadline, but it was cut from the demo. However, they were able to develop it into a product for an open beta. The lesson learned was that it was worth the extra care and pain to build it the right way upfront so that they could get feedback and iterate on it.

Improving Peer Review Practice

This case study looks at how two teams with different approaches to building a training system for a piece of military equipment were able to successfully collaborate. The team with more product experience focused on building with high quality for the long run, while the other team was focused on rapid prototyping. To bridge the gap between the two cultures, the team with more experience embedded their engineers with the other team, publicly demonstrated good peer review practices, and emphasized the value of good reviews. Through this process, the team was able to successfully collaborate and deliver a high-quality product.

Leveraging Roadmap Planning for Engagement and Alignment

This article discusses how a product leader can drive productive cross-functional engagement to create a plan that is leveraged for accountability and learning. It suggests an iterative mindset, early interaction with the organization, finding an expression that is authentic to the organization, and creating artifacts that are tailored to the audience. It also suggests a process for keeping artifacts in sync and checking in on progress to plan along the way.

Building a Product Team: Identifying Desired Attributes and Activities

This article outlines a process for building a strong product team by first documenting the desired attributes and activities of the ideal candidate, then sharing it with the organization for feedback and revisions. This document is then used to define the interview activities and post-interview conversations to ensure the right fit for the organization's needs. Separating cultural aspirations from key responsibilities has helped the organization better understand what it needs in a product partner.

Creating Space on Your Roadmap for Innovation and Improvements

This article discusses how to ensure proper alignment on work projects by using three distinct work types (Discover, Build, Strengthen) and a 4-quarter rolling roadmap cadence. It also explains how investing time to review and ratify with cross-functional partners helps to feed learning into the plan, sharpen thinking, and reduce surprises.

Building a Platform Team

As a company grows, it is natural for teams to specialize and the first distinction is between product and platform engineering. It is important to identify the right time to do the split, which is usually when the value of spending engineering cycles to optimize what is being done becomes more apparent. Platform teams are built differently in different companies and should be structured according to the company's North Star and specific initiatives. Platform teams typically work on a longer time horizon than product engineering teams and should use DORA metrics to track progress. It is important to not split the team too soon or too late.

How to Drive Operational Excellence

Product technology leadership face various challenges such as balancing velocity and quality, product features and tune-ups, and staffing investment. The largest determinant of success is the ”speed of innovation”, which consists of two categories: innovation (product features) and tune-up items driving the speed of innovation. Prioritization should be based on customer impact, business impact, and operational efficiency. Alignment and prioritization with the Product and Engineering teams is crucial, and metrics should be captured to inform data-driven decision making. Lastly, transparency and clear communication on decisions and tradeoffs should be maintained, with follow-through on execution and delivery.

Leading an Organization Through a Colossal Change

As a tech leader, the author has taken a variety of actions to mature the team and processes to meet the next phase of the company's growth and needs. This includes restructuring the organization, assessing and putting the right people in the right roles, introducing performance assessment and a 9-box matrix, organizing show-and-tells, tech reviews, tech talks, and roundtable discussions, and introducing external trainers and post-mortems. The outcomes of these actions have been increased engagement, attendance, and frequency of forums/meetings, influencing outside of engineering, and improved engagement scores. The author has also learned the importance of having patience and giving time for the process to mature, holding cross-groups accountable, and training as early as possible.

Adapting Scrum to Continuous Deployment

A development organization was operating on a very inefficient one-month sprint cycle and manual deployment process. The existing leadership team was risk-averse and did not want change. The individual gathered data to support the changes and developed a roadmap to enable fully automated deploys at least once per day. This demonstrated value allowed them to elevate the automation project to an officially sponsored initiative. After achieving the goal of daily fully automated deployments, the heavy sprint cycle development process was the next bottleneck. The individual experimented with process tweaks on a single team, rolling out each successful change to all the other teams. This allowed teams to deliver a predictable flow of work while retaining the ability to quickly react to production incidents and changes in project scope.

Tech Debt Bankruptcy

After realizing that their fixed 20% tech debt budget was not working, a team took action to quantify the amount of time spent on unplanned work, created a three-level priority system for work, and established service ownership to ensure that critical issues were addressed. This resulted in unplanned work dropping in half, production incidents virtually disappearing, and developer happiness doubling. The team learned that service ownership works at small scales and that there is more to "production" than customer-facing components.

A Lack of Clear Vision and the Team Morale

A team had built an in-house product that was launched globally, but had insufficient global coverage and quality issues. An external company released a third-party solution that could replace the in-house product, and the team feared they would be downsized or disbanded. The manager had to balance between what was best for the team and the company, and ultimately decided on a hybrid solution that combined the best of both worlds. The team was encouraged to think from a customer perspective, and transparency and trust were key to motivating the team to work on improvements.

Restructuring a Team: How to Enhance Accountability and Ownership

When the author joined their current company, they found that the team was not structured to execute and scale well due to its size and project-based nature. To address this, the author and their team restructured the team into six smaller subteams with vertical ownership and tech leads to drive a charter and provide a long-term vision. This improved the team's engagement, on-call rotation, and overall reliability. The restructuring also allowed leadership to have more visibility into areas that needed more investment. However, the author also learned that forming a research team too early can be problematic if the underlying platform is not mature enough.

Learning to Sell

A product development lead was given the opportunity to become a product manager and had to learn how to sell the product without any prior experience or training. They read books, blog posts, and ebooks, followed sales influencers on social media, and worked with salespeople. Through tracking data, they improved their social media outreach success rate and started publishing engineering topics on social media. They learned that sales is still helping people and that their engineering background made them a more authentic helper.

Integrating a Junior Engineer Into a New Team

A junior engineer was integrated into a product development team, but the team was not welcoming and the engineer was unfamiliar with the culture and procedures. The engineer was passionate about a technology solution, but the team did not feel the presentation was well-researched enough. The engineer was mentored and the technical leader of the product development worked with them, but the engineer eventually left the company. Lessons learned included creating a better, welcoming culture and pairing the junior engineer with a mentor.