Knowledge shared by our community

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Changing Responsibilities In an Organization Undergoing Change

When the author's company began to grow, they had to shift their focus from hands-on coding to VP work. After consulting with other leaders, they realized that their primary job was to focus on architecture and team building, rather than coding. They kept notes and reflected on the changes, but eventually left the company because their role had become too distant from the engineering work. They learned that the primary job of an engineering leader changes a lot as a company grows.

Hiring En Masse

When hiring a large number of people, it is beneficial to look for existing teams that are looking for a new opportunity, such as those from companies that are going out of business or pivoting to a different sector. Keeping an eye on these opportunities, acting fast, and having an informal meeting with the whole group can help to build relationships and create a unified team. Communication and honest feedback are key to success, and it is important to remember that hiring a group of technically gifted people does not automatically make a good team.

Don’t Let Yourself Be Held Hostage by Estimates

Stakeholders and PMs often blame engineering teams for not meeting deadlines, but the problem is usually not inaccurate estimates. To fix this, PMs and tech leads should have a clear insight into the type of work a team is completing, and product and engineering should have an opportunity to design things together. Additionally, engineers should update stakeholders promptly if work is under-estimated. The focus should be on prioritization, not estimates.

Outcomes Before Outputs: Measuring Engineering Performance

The text discusses the problem faced by engineering managers (EMs) in effectively monitoring the performance of their teams. The author suggests that instead of measuring activities such as closed tickets or lines of code, EMs should focus on measuring outcomes, specifically the number of epics and features delivered. The author also proposes the creation of a system that allows engineers to track their performance and provides a solid argument against complaints about poor team performance. The author implemented a system that measures five key team performance indicators based on real-time data, including the number of epics completed, the number of epics in progress, the lead time of features, and the roadmap contribution ratio. The author faced initial pushback from engineers but explained that the system serves as guardrails to streamline focus and stay on track. The system also improved transparency and allowed others in the company to have insight into the engineering team's work.

How Early Engagement Can Help Improve Cross-Team Communication

This article discusses a situation where a development team and customer success team had to go back and forth multiple times to implement a feature. To prevent this from happening in the future, the author suggests establishing a Product Council to ensure early engagement of all stakeholders and to prioritize activities. The author also outlines six key principles to ensure smooth communication and alignment between different teams. These include being clear on why, exercising empathy and understanding, owning responsibility, acknowledging frustration, establishing a common ground, and moving into a solution.

How to Motivate Distracted or Disengaged Team Members

As a leader, I have taken various actions to help my engineers with their demotivation and disengagement, such as encouraging time-management techniques, blocking calendars for professional development, handing over areas of work, switching work context, and journaling. I have also been inspired by Lara Hogan's book, Resilient Management, to better understand my employees' needs. I have learned that different people need different things to stay motivated and that it is important to nurture and encourage motivation and engagement.

Merging a Web and Mobile Team: A Tale of Two Cultures

When tasked with merging the mobile and web teams at Zynga Poker, the engineering leader had to solve the challenge of resolving both the technical and cultural divides. To do this, they co-located the teams, made the mobile team first-class citizens, encouraged social interaction, and mixed them around spatially and functionally. However, they did not address the architectural differences in the platform, which caused issues later. Ultimately, the teams were successfully merged.

Drive Accountability and Ownership by Embracing Mistakes

This article discusses how introducing "failure forums" and a peer-nominated contest to highlight excellence helped to create a safe culture and boost morale in a dysfunctional team. It also helped to drive ownership for improvements, increase engagement, and build loyalty. It taught people how to interact with leadership and accept mistakes, which was especially beneficial for younger people.

Get More Done by Working Less

When faced with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, it is necessary to carefully decide where to reduce involvement. To succeed, managers must find a balance between distancing themselves too much from the details and staying stuck firmly in them. This is a challenge that every manager will have to face. One manager, faced with managing three teams, decided to prioritize his time and develop levers inside his organization, quickly setting up leaders for all his teams, and reflecting on his work at the end of the week.

4 Key Tips for First-Time Managers Growing into Their Role

Aspiring ICs who want to become managers face many challenges, such as maintaining technical competency, developing people skills, understanding project management, and improving prioritization skills. To stay technical, ICs should do code reviews, QA, and side projects. People skills include empathy, candor, and being comfortable giving directions and taking feedback. Project management involves organizing, planning, and seeing the big picture. Prioritization skills involve understanding the difference between important and urgent tasks and assigning value to each. Finally, aspiring managers should be honest with themselves and patient with the transition.

Managing Managers: A Lesson in a Mindset Shift

When a first-line manager is promoted to a senior manager or director, they must learn to adjust their mindset and focus on new responsibilities while giving their team room to grow. The author took an inventory of tasks a manager must do, identified what they were personally accountable for, and figured out how to do status checks and which ceremonies they had to attend. They also learned the importance of managing up, articulating why tasks are important, and the difference between managing ICs and managers.

How To Create a Successful Onboarding Plan for New Hires

When the author joined their company, they saw the onboarding process as an opportunity to make new hires effective contributors to the engineering organization. They developed a structured onboarding plan, which included sections on business strategy, competition, financial analysis, marketecture, technical architecture, project management, software management, and support. The plan was iterative and the author collected feedback from peers, HR, and their boss. The plan was eventually adopted as a standard and a new role was created to upkeep the document. The author learned to be iterative, take on tasks independently, and not take feedback personally.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Changing Responsibilities In an Organization Undergoing Change

When the author's company began to grow, they had to shift their focus from hands-on coding to VP work. After consulting with other leaders, they realized that their primary job was to focus on architecture and team building, rather than coding. They kept notes and reflected on the changes, but eventually left the company because their role had become too distant from the engineering work. They learned that the primary job of an engineering leader changes a lot as a company grows.

Hiring En Masse

When hiring a large number of people, it is beneficial to look for existing teams that are looking for a new opportunity, such as those from companies that are going out of business or pivoting to a different sector. Keeping an eye on these opportunities, acting fast, and having an informal meeting with the whole group can help to build relationships and create a unified team. Communication and honest feedback are key to success, and it is important to remember that hiring a group of technically gifted people does not automatically make a good team.

Don’t Let Yourself Be Held Hostage by Estimates

Stakeholders and PMs often blame engineering teams for not meeting deadlines, but the problem is usually not inaccurate estimates. To fix this, PMs and tech leads should have a clear insight into the type of work a team is completing, and product and engineering should have an opportunity to design things together. Additionally, engineers should update stakeholders promptly if work is under-estimated. The focus should be on prioritization, not estimates.

Outcomes Before Outputs: Measuring Engineering Performance

The text discusses the problem faced by engineering managers (EMs) in effectively monitoring the performance of their teams. The author suggests that instead of measuring activities such as closed tickets or lines of code, EMs should focus on measuring outcomes, specifically the number of epics and features delivered. The author also proposes the creation of a system that allows engineers to track their performance and provides a solid argument against complaints about poor team performance. The author implemented a system that measures five key team performance indicators based on real-time data, including the number of epics completed, the number of epics in progress, the lead time of features, and the roadmap contribution ratio. The author faced initial pushback from engineers but explained that the system serves as guardrails to streamline focus and stay on track. The system also improved transparency and allowed others in the company to have insight into the engineering team's work.

How Early Engagement Can Help Improve Cross-Team Communication

This article discusses a situation where a development team and customer success team had to go back and forth multiple times to implement a feature. To prevent this from happening in the future, the author suggests establishing a Product Council to ensure early engagement of all stakeholders and to prioritize activities. The author also outlines six key principles to ensure smooth communication and alignment between different teams. These include being clear on why, exercising empathy and understanding, owning responsibility, acknowledging frustration, establishing a common ground, and moving into a solution.

How to Motivate Distracted or Disengaged Team Members

As a leader, I have taken various actions to help my engineers with their demotivation and disengagement, such as encouraging time-management techniques, blocking calendars for professional development, handing over areas of work, switching work context, and journaling. I have also been inspired by Lara Hogan's book, Resilient Management, to better understand my employees' needs. I have learned that different people need different things to stay motivated and that it is important to nurture and encourage motivation and engagement.

Merging a Web and Mobile Team: A Tale of Two Cultures

When tasked with merging the mobile and web teams at Zynga Poker, the engineering leader had to solve the challenge of resolving both the technical and cultural divides. To do this, they co-located the teams, made the mobile team first-class citizens, encouraged social interaction, and mixed them around spatially and functionally. However, they did not address the architectural differences in the platform, which caused issues later. Ultimately, the teams were successfully merged.

Drive Accountability and Ownership by Embracing Mistakes

This article discusses how introducing "failure forums" and a peer-nominated contest to highlight excellence helped to create a safe culture and boost morale in a dysfunctional team. It also helped to drive ownership for improvements, increase engagement, and build loyalty. It taught people how to interact with leadership and accept mistakes, which was especially beneficial for younger people.

Get More Done by Working Less

When faced with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, it is necessary to carefully decide where to reduce involvement. To succeed, managers must find a balance between distancing themselves too much from the details and staying stuck firmly in them. This is a challenge that every manager will have to face. One manager, faced with managing three teams, decided to prioritize his time and develop levers inside his organization, quickly setting up leaders for all his teams, and reflecting on his work at the end of the week.

4 Key Tips for First-Time Managers Growing into Their Role

Aspiring ICs who want to become managers face many challenges, such as maintaining technical competency, developing people skills, understanding project management, and improving prioritization skills. To stay technical, ICs should do code reviews, QA, and side projects. People skills include empathy, candor, and being comfortable giving directions and taking feedback. Project management involves organizing, planning, and seeing the big picture. Prioritization skills involve understanding the difference between important and urgent tasks and assigning value to each. Finally, aspiring managers should be honest with themselves and patient with the transition.

Managing Managers: A Lesson in a Mindset Shift

When a first-line manager is promoted to a senior manager or director, they must learn to adjust their mindset and focus on new responsibilities while giving their team room to grow. The author took an inventory of tasks a manager must do, identified what they were personally accountable for, and figured out how to do status checks and which ceremonies they had to attend. They also learned the importance of managing up, articulating why tasks are important, and the difference between managing ICs and managers.

How To Create a Successful Onboarding Plan for New Hires

When the author joined their company, they saw the onboarding process as an opportunity to make new hires effective contributors to the engineering organization. They developed a structured onboarding plan, which included sections on business strategy, competition, financial analysis, marketecture, technical architecture, project management, software management, and support. The plan was iterative and the author collected feedback from peers, HR, and their boss. The plan was eventually adopted as a standard and a new role was created to upkeep the document. The author learned to be iterative, take on tasks independently, and not take feedback personally.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Changing Responsibilities In an Organization Undergoing Change

When the author's company began to grow, they had to shift their focus from hands-on coding to VP work. After consulting with other leaders, they realized that their primary job was to focus on architecture and team building, rather than coding. They kept notes and reflected on the changes, but eventually left the company because their role had become too distant from the engineering work. They learned that the primary job of an engineering leader changes a lot as a company grows.

Hiring En Masse

When hiring a large number of people, it is beneficial to look for existing teams that are looking for a new opportunity, such as those from companies that are going out of business or pivoting to a different sector. Keeping an eye on these opportunities, acting fast, and having an informal meeting with the whole group can help to build relationships and create a unified team. Communication and honest feedback are key to success, and it is important to remember that hiring a group of technically gifted people does not automatically make a good team.

Don’t Let Yourself Be Held Hostage by Estimates

Stakeholders and PMs often blame engineering teams for not meeting deadlines, but the problem is usually not inaccurate estimates. To fix this, PMs and tech leads should have a clear insight into the type of work a team is completing, and product and engineering should have an opportunity to design things together. Additionally, engineers should update stakeholders promptly if work is under-estimated. The focus should be on prioritization, not estimates.

Outcomes Before Outputs: Measuring Engineering Performance

The text discusses the problem faced by engineering managers (EMs) in effectively monitoring the performance of their teams. The author suggests that instead of measuring activities such as closed tickets or lines of code, EMs should focus on measuring outcomes, specifically the number of epics and features delivered. The author also proposes the creation of a system that allows engineers to track their performance and provides a solid argument against complaints about poor team performance. The author implemented a system that measures five key team performance indicators based on real-time data, including the number of epics completed, the number of epics in progress, the lead time of features, and the roadmap contribution ratio. The author faced initial pushback from engineers but explained that the system serves as guardrails to streamline focus and stay on track. The system also improved transparency and allowed others in the company to have insight into the engineering team's work.

How Early Engagement Can Help Improve Cross-Team Communication

This article discusses a situation where a development team and customer success team had to go back and forth multiple times to implement a feature. To prevent this from happening in the future, the author suggests establishing a Product Council to ensure early engagement of all stakeholders and to prioritize activities. The author also outlines six key principles to ensure smooth communication and alignment between different teams. These include being clear on why, exercising empathy and understanding, owning responsibility, acknowledging frustration, establishing a common ground, and moving into a solution.

How to Motivate Distracted or Disengaged Team Members

As a leader, I have taken various actions to help my engineers with their demotivation and disengagement, such as encouraging time-management techniques, blocking calendars for professional development, handing over areas of work, switching work context, and journaling. I have also been inspired by Lara Hogan's book, Resilient Management, to better understand my employees' needs. I have learned that different people need different things to stay motivated and that it is important to nurture and encourage motivation and engagement.

Merging a Web and Mobile Team: A Tale of Two Cultures

When tasked with merging the mobile and web teams at Zynga Poker, the engineering leader had to solve the challenge of resolving both the technical and cultural divides. To do this, they co-located the teams, made the mobile team first-class citizens, encouraged social interaction, and mixed them around spatially and functionally. However, they did not address the architectural differences in the platform, which caused issues later. Ultimately, the teams were successfully merged.

Drive Accountability and Ownership by Embracing Mistakes

This article discusses how introducing "failure forums" and a peer-nominated contest to highlight excellence helped to create a safe culture and boost morale in a dysfunctional team. It also helped to drive ownership for improvements, increase engagement, and build loyalty. It taught people how to interact with leadership and accept mistakes, which was especially beneficial for younger people.

Get More Done by Working Less

When faced with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, it is necessary to carefully decide where to reduce involvement. To succeed, managers must find a balance between distancing themselves too much from the details and staying stuck firmly in them. This is a challenge that every manager will have to face. One manager, faced with managing three teams, decided to prioritize his time and develop levers inside his organization, quickly setting up leaders for all his teams, and reflecting on his work at the end of the week.

4 Key Tips for First-Time Managers Growing into Their Role

Aspiring ICs who want to become managers face many challenges, such as maintaining technical competency, developing people skills, understanding project management, and improving prioritization skills. To stay technical, ICs should do code reviews, QA, and side projects. People skills include empathy, candor, and being comfortable giving directions and taking feedback. Project management involves organizing, planning, and seeing the big picture. Prioritization skills involve understanding the difference between important and urgent tasks and assigning value to each. Finally, aspiring managers should be honest with themselves and patient with the transition.

Managing Managers: A Lesson in a Mindset Shift

When a first-line manager is promoted to a senior manager or director, they must learn to adjust their mindset and focus on new responsibilities while giving their team room to grow. The author took an inventory of tasks a manager must do, identified what they were personally accountable for, and figured out how to do status checks and which ceremonies they had to attend. They also learned the importance of managing up, articulating why tasks are important, and the difference between managing ICs and managers.

How To Create a Successful Onboarding Plan for New Hires

When the author joined their company, they saw the onboarding process as an opportunity to make new hires effective contributors to the engineering organization. They developed a structured onboarding plan, which included sections on business strategy, competition, financial analysis, marketecture, technical architecture, project management, software management, and support. The plan was iterative and the author collected feedback from peers, HR, and their boss. The plan was eventually adopted as a standard and a new role was created to upkeep the document. The author learned to be iterative, take on tasks independently, and not take feedback personally.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Changing Responsibilities In an Organization Undergoing Change

When the author's company began to grow, they had to shift their focus from hands-on coding to VP work. After consulting with other leaders, they realized that their primary job was to focus on architecture and team building, rather than coding. They kept notes and reflected on the changes, but eventually left the company because their role had become too distant from the engineering work. They learned that the primary job of an engineering leader changes a lot as a company grows.

Hiring En Masse

When hiring a large number of people, it is beneficial to look for existing teams that are looking for a new opportunity, such as those from companies that are going out of business or pivoting to a different sector. Keeping an eye on these opportunities, acting fast, and having an informal meeting with the whole group can help to build relationships and create a unified team. Communication and honest feedback are key to success, and it is important to remember that hiring a group of technically gifted people does not automatically make a good team.

Don’t Let Yourself Be Held Hostage by Estimates

Stakeholders and PMs often blame engineering teams for not meeting deadlines, but the problem is usually not inaccurate estimates. To fix this, PMs and tech leads should have a clear insight into the type of work a team is completing, and product and engineering should have an opportunity to design things together. Additionally, engineers should update stakeholders promptly if work is under-estimated. The focus should be on prioritization, not estimates.

Outcomes Before Outputs: Measuring Engineering Performance

The text discusses the problem faced by engineering managers (EMs) in effectively monitoring the performance of their teams. The author suggests that instead of measuring activities such as closed tickets or lines of code, EMs should focus on measuring outcomes, specifically the number of epics and features delivered. The author also proposes the creation of a system that allows engineers to track their performance and provides a solid argument against complaints about poor team performance. The author implemented a system that measures five key team performance indicators based on real-time data, including the number of epics completed, the number of epics in progress, the lead time of features, and the roadmap contribution ratio. The author faced initial pushback from engineers but explained that the system serves as guardrails to streamline focus and stay on track. The system also improved transparency and allowed others in the company to have insight into the engineering team's work.

How Early Engagement Can Help Improve Cross-Team Communication

This article discusses a situation where a development team and customer success team had to go back and forth multiple times to implement a feature. To prevent this from happening in the future, the author suggests establishing a Product Council to ensure early engagement of all stakeholders and to prioritize activities. The author also outlines six key principles to ensure smooth communication and alignment between different teams. These include being clear on why, exercising empathy and understanding, owning responsibility, acknowledging frustration, establishing a common ground, and moving into a solution.

How to Motivate Distracted or Disengaged Team Members

As a leader, I have taken various actions to help my engineers with their demotivation and disengagement, such as encouraging time-management techniques, blocking calendars for professional development, handing over areas of work, switching work context, and journaling. I have also been inspired by Lara Hogan's book, Resilient Management, to better understand my employees' needs. I have learned that different people need different things to stay motivated and that it is important to nurture and encourage motivation and engagement.

Merging a Web and Mobile Team: A Tale of Two Cultures

When tasked with merging the mobile and web teams at Zynga Poker, the engineering leader had to solve the challenge of resolving both the technical and cultural divides. To do this, they co-located the teams, made the mobile team first-class citizens, encouraged social interaction, and mixed them around spatially and functionally. However, they did not address the architectural differences in the platform, which caused issues later. Ultimately, the teams were successfully merged.

Drive Accountability and Ownership by Embracing Mistakes

This article discusses how introducing "failure forums" and a peer-nominated contest to highlight excellence helped to create a safe culture and boost morale in a dysfunctional team. It also helped to drive ownership for improvements, increase engagement, and build loyalty. It taught people how to interact with leadership and accept mistakes, which was especially beneficial for younger people.

Get More Done by Working Less

When faced with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, it is necessary to carefully decide where to reduce involvement. To succeed, managers must find a balance between distancing themselves too much from the details and staying stuck firmly in them. This is a challenge that every manager will have to face. One manager, faced with managing three teams, decided to prioritize his time and develop levers inside his organization, quickly setting up leaders for all his teams, and reflecting on his work at the end of the week.

4 Key Tips for First-Time Managers Growing into Their Role

Aspiring ICs who want to become managers face many challenges, such as maintaining technical competency, developing people skills, understanding project management, and improving prioritization skills. To stay technical, ICs should do code reviews, QA, and side projects. People skills include empathy, candor, and being comfortable giving directions and taking feedback. Project management involves organizing, planning, and seeing the big picture. Prioritization skills involve understanding the difference between important and urgent tasks and assigning value to each. Finally, aspiring managers should be honest with themselves and patient with the transition.

Managing Managers: A Lesson in a Mindset Shift

When a first-line manager is promoted to a senior manager or director, they must learn to adjust their mindset and focus on new responsibilities while giving their team room to grow. The author took an inventory of tasks a manager must do, identified what they were personally accountable for, and figured out how to do status checks and which ceremonies they had to attend. They also learned the importance of managing up, articulating why tasks are important, and the difference between managing ICs and managers.

How To Create a Successful Onboarding Plan for New Hires

When the author joined their company, they saw the onboarding process as an opportunity to make new hires effective contributors to the engineering organization. They developed a structured onboarding plan, which included sections on business strategy, competition, financial analysis, marketecture, technical architecture, project management, software management, and support. The plan was iterative and the author collected feedback from peers, HR, and their boss. The plan was eventually adopted as a standard and a new role was created to upkeep the document. The author learned to be iterative, take on tasks independently, and not take feedback personally.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Changing Responsibilities In an Organization Undergoing Change

When the author's company began to grow, they had to shift their focus from hands-on coding to VP work. After consulting with other leaders, they realized that their primary job was to focus on architecture and team building, rather than coding. They kept notes and reflected on the changes, but eventually left the company because their role had become too distant from the engineering work. They learned that the primary job of an engineering leader changes a lot as a company grows.

Hiring En Masse

When hiring a large number of people, it is beneficial to look for existing teams that are looking for a new opportunity, such as those from companies that are going out of business or pivoting to a different sector. Keeping an eye on these opportunities, acting fast, and having an informal meeting with the whole group can help to build relationships and create a unified team. Communication and honest feedback are key to success, and it is important to remember that hiring a group of technically gifted people does not automatically make a good team.

Don’t Let Yourself Be Held Hostage by Estimates

Stakeholders and PMs often blame engineering teams for not meeting deadlines, but the problem is usually not inaccurate estimates. To fix this, PMs and tech leads should have a clear insight into the type of work a team is completing, and product and engineering should have an opportunity to design things together. Additionally, engineers should update stakeholders promptly if work is under-estimated. The focus should be on prioritization, not estimates.

Outcomes Before Outputs: Measuring Engineering Performance

The text discusses the problem faced by engineering managers (EMs) in effectively monitoring the performance of their teams. The author suggests that instead of measuring activities such as closed tickets or lines of code, EMs should focus on measuring outcomes, specifically the number of epics and features delivered. The author also proposes the creation of a system that allows engineers to track their performance and provides a solid argument against complaints about poor team performance. The author implemented a system that measures five key team performance indicators based on real-time data, including the number of epics completed, the number of epics in progress, the lead time of features, and the roadmap contribution ratio. The author faced initial pushback from engineers but explained that the system serves as guardrails to streamline focus and stay on track. The system also improved transparency and allowed others in the company to have insight into the engineering team's work.

How Early Engagement Can Help Improve Cross-Team Communication

This article discusses a situation where a development team and customer success team had to go back and forth multiple times to implement a feature. To prevent this from happening in the future, the author suggests establishing a Product Council to ensure early engagement of all stakeholders and to prioritize activities. The author also outlines six key principles to ensure smooth communication and alignment between different teams. These include being clear on why, exercising empathy and understanding, owning responsibility, acknowledging frustration, establishing a common ground, and moving into a solution.

How to Motivate Distracted or Disengaged Team Members

As a leader, I have taken various actions to help my engineers with their demotivation and disengagement, such as encouraging time-management techniques, blocking calendars for professional development, handing over areas of work, switching work context, and journaling. I have also been inspired by Lara Hogan's book, Resilient Management, to better understand my employees' needs. I have learned that different people need different things to stay motivated and that it is important to nurture and encourage motivation and engagement.

Merging a Web and Mobile Team: A Tale of Two Cultures

When tasked with merging the mobile and web teams at Zynga Poker, the engineering leader had to solve the challenge of resolving both the technical and cultural divides. To do this, they co-located the teams, made the mobile team first-class citizens, encouraged social interaction, and mixed them around spatially and functionally. However, they did not address the architectural differences in the platform, which caused issues later. Ultimately, the teams were successfully merged.

Drive Accountability and Ownership by Embracing Mistakes

This article discusses how introducing "failure forums" and a peer-nominated contest to highlight excellence helped to create a safe culture and boost morale in a dysfunctional team. It also helped to drive ownership for improvements, increase engagement, and build loyalty. It taught people how to interact with leadership and accept mistakes, which was especially beneficial for younger people.

Get More Done by Working Less

When faced with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, it is necessary to carefully decide where to reduce involvement. To succeed, managers must find a balance between distancing themselves too much from the details and staying stuck firmly in them. This is a challenge that every manager will have to face. One manager, faced with managing three teams, decided to prioritize his time and develop levers inside his organization, quickly setting up leaders for all his teams, and reflecting on his work at the end of the week.

4 Key Tips for First-Time Managers Growing into Their Role

Aspiring ICs who want to become managers face many challenges, such as maintaining technical competency, developing people skills, understanding project management, and improving prioritization skills. To stay technical, ICs should do code reviews, QA, and side projects. People skills include empathy, candor, and being comfortable giving directions and taking feedback. Project management involves organizing, planning, and seeing the big picture. Prioritization skills involve understanding the difference between important and urgent tasks and assigning value to each. Finally, aspiring managers should be honest with themselves and patient with the transition.

Managing Managers: A Lesson in a Mindset Shift

When a first-line manager is promoted to a senior manager or director, they must learn to adjust their mindset and focus on new responsibilities while giving their team room to grow. The author took an inventory of tasks a manager must do, identified what they were personally accountable for, and figured out how to do status checks and which ceremonies they had to attend. They also learned the importance of managing up, articulating why tasks are important, and the difference between managing ICs and managers.

How To Create a Successful Onboarding Plan for New Hires

When the author joined their company, they saw the onboarding process as an opportunity to make new hires effective contributors to the engineering organization. They developed a structured onboarding plan, which included sections on business strategy, competition, financial analysis, marketecture, technical architecture, project management, software management, and support. The plan was iterative and the author collected feedback from peers, HR, and their boss. The plan was eventually adopted as a standard and a new role was created to upkeep the document. The author learned to be iterative, take on tasks independently, and not take feedback personally.

How to Deal With Employee Conflict

A manager had to intervene in a conflict between two employees from different departments who had to continue working together. After listening to the report, the manager witnessed the interaction between the two employees and asked them three questions to help them gain a broader perspective and take responsibility for their actions. The manager then proposed a solution and the conflict was resolved. This experience taught the manager that conflict resolution requires understanding the other person's perspective and taking responsibility for one's own actions.

Setting Guardrails and Containing an Increase in Cloud Costs

Companies are increasingly worried about their growing cloud costs, which can have a significant impact on their revenue. To address this, it is important to identify risks, create metrics to monitor usage and efficiency, allocate costs, and set guardrails. Additionally, it is important to frame metrics in a way that the business can understand and to have someone dedicated to executing on these strategies. Ultimately, the key lesson is that if guardrails are not put in place before scaling, the company will suffer financial loss.

How the Tension Between Technology and Business Units Can Enhance Cooperation

This article discusses how to create a structure to improve cooperation between Technology and business units. It outlines the actions taken, such as creating new squads, adding technical product managers, and setting priorities. It also emphasizes the importance of defining roles and ownership, adding PMs with domain knowledge, and creating squads with well-defined scope.

Launching a Product in a Large Organization

After being acquired by a large corporation, the author had to adjust to the new environment and launch a brand new product. To do this, they had to ensure alignment with stakeholders, spend more time on education, and enable integration with all facets of the large corporation. The author learned that they had to follow the processes to ensure the quality of the product, plan ahead and work backward from the plan, and put enough buffers in the schedule. In the end, the product was launched and became a $400 million product in two years.

Successful Launching of a Brand New Product

The author was tasked with quickly bringing a product offering to the market to justify the existence of a new business unit focused on mobile. To achieve this, they leveraged existing capabilities and developed a new analytics service based on their competitive advantage as one of the largest content distribution networks in the world. Within 12 months, they had over a dozen customers and an ARR of over $1M USD. Lessons learned included finding customers to partner with, validating the value of the product, and learning to walk away quickly.

Successful Engagement With Your Product Management Peer

Building a strong working relationship between Engineering and Product is a key challenge for every Engineering or Product leader. To build trust, product leaders must be respectful of their engineering counterparts and not question that they are trying to do the right thing. Respect and trust should be mutual, and product leaders should not take disagreements personally. Product leaders should also demonstrate trust by taking responsibility for mistakes and not blaming engineering. Finally, product leaders should stand their ground if they believe they are correct.

Developing a Product Mentality in Engineering-Centric Organizations

VMware's engineering services organization was lacking in product management and end-user focus, resulting in poor quality services. To address this, the organization implemented a governance process to ensure that all new services and products went through a life-cycle process to ensure quality, reliability, and responsiveness. This process was met with resistance, but with time and patience, it has been successful in improving the quality of the services.

Balancing Tech Debt and Feature Development

This situation describes a tech debt issue that had to be addressed in order to build something the right way. The team had to lobby hard against the business and legal departments to get the necessary buy-in to make changes and roll out in 20 states. The lessons learned are that when addressing tech debt, it should be packaged up with a new product and sold on the speed that can be achieved on the other side, and that tech debt can have a negative impact on morale and turnover rate.

Changing Responsibilities In an Organization Undergoing Change

When the author's company began to grow, they had to shift their focus from hands-on coding to VP work. After consulting with other leaders, they realized that their primary job was to focus on architecture and team building, rather than coding. They kept notes and reflected on the changes, but eventually left the company because their role had become too distant from the engineering work. They learned that the primary job of an engineering leader changes a lot as a company grows.

Hiring En Masse

When hiring a large number of people, it is beneficial to look for existing teams that are looking for a new opportunity, such as those from companies that are going out of business or pivoting to a different sector. Keeping an eye on these opportunities, acting fast, and having an informal meeting with the whole group can help to build relationships and create a unified team. Communication and honest feedback are key to success, and it is important to remember that hiring a group of technically gifted people does not automatically make a good team.

Don’t Let Yourself Be Held Hostage by Estimates

Stakeholders and PMs often blame engineering teams for not meeting deadlines, but the problem is usually not inaccurate estimates. To fix this, PMs and tech leads should have a clear insight into the type of work a team is completing, and product and engineering should have an opportunity to design things together. Additionally, engineers should update stakeholders promptly if work is under-estimated. The focus should be on prioritization, not estimates.

Outcomes Before Outputs: Measuring Engineering Performance

The text discusses the problem faced by engineering managers (EMs) in effectively monitoring the performance of their teams. The author suggests that instead of measuring activities such as closed tickets or lines of code, EMs should focus on measuring outcomes, specifically the number of epics and features delivered. The author also proposes the creation of a system that allows engineers to track their performance and provides a solid argument against complaints about poor team performance. The author implemented a system that measures five key team performance indicators based on real-time data, including the number of epics completed, the number of epics in progress, the lead time of features, and the roadmap contribution ratio. The author faced initial pushback from engineers but explained that the system serves as guardrails to streamline focus and stay on track. The system also improved transparency and allowed others in the company to have insight into the engineering team's work.

How Early Engagement Can Help Improve Cross-Team Communication

This article discusses a situation where a development team and customer success team had to go back and forth multiple times to implement a feature. To prevent this from happening in the future, the author suggests establishing a Product Council to ensure early engagement of all stakeholders and to prioritize activities. The author also outlines six key principles to ensure smooth communication and alignment between different teams. These include being clear on why, exercising empathy and understanding, owning responsibility, acknowledging frustration, establishing a common ground, and moving into a solution.

How to Motivate Distracted or Disengaged Team Members

As a leader, I have taken various actions to help my engineers with their demotivation and disengagement, such as encouraging time-management techniques, blocking calendars for professional development, handing over areas of work, switching work context, and journaling. I have also been inspired by Lara Hogan's book, Resilient Management, to better understand my employees' needs. I have learned that different people need different things to stay motivated and that it is important to nurture and encourage motivation and engagement.

Merging a Web and Mobile Team: A Tale of Two Cultures

When tasked with merging the mobile and web teams at Zynga Poker, the engineering leader had to solve the challenge of resolving both the technical and cultural divides. To do this, they co-located the teams, made the mobile team first-class citizens, encouraged social interaction, and mixed them around spatially and functionally. However, they did not address the architectural differences in the platform, which caused issues later. Ultimately, the teams were successfully merged.

Drive Accountability and Ownership by Embracing Mistakes

This article discusses how introducing "failure forums" and a peer-nominated contest to highlight excellence helped to create a safe culture and boost morale in a dysfunctional team. It also helped to drive ownership for improvements, increase engagement, and build loyalty. It taught people how to interact with leadership and accept mistakes, which was especially beneficial for younger people.

Get More Done by Working Less

When faced with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities, it is necessary to carefully decide where to reduce involvement. To succeed, managers must find a balance between distancing themselves too much from the details and staying stuck firmly in them. This is a challenge that every manager will have to face. One manager, faced with managing three teams, decided to prioritize his time and develop levers inside his organization, quickly setting up leaders for all his teams, and reflecting on his work at the end of the week.

4 Key Tips for First-Time Managers Growing into Their Role

Aspiring ICs who want to become managers face many challenges, such as maintaining technical competency, developing people skills, understanding project management, and improving prioritization skills. To stay technical, ICs should do code reviews, QA, and side projects. People skills include empathy, candor, and being comfortable giving directions and taking feedback. Project management involves organizing, planning, and seeing the big picture. Prioritization skills involve understanding the difference between important and urgent tasks and assigning value to each. Finally, aspiring managers should be honest with themselves and patient with the transition.

Managing Managers: A Lesson in a Mindset Shift

When a first-line manager is promoted to a senior manager or director, they must learn to adjust their mindset and focus on new responsibilities while giving their team room to grow. The author took an inventory of tasks a manager must do, identified what they were personally accountable for, and figured out how to do status checks and which ceremonies they had to attend. They also learned the importance of managing up, articulating why tasks are important, and the difference between managing ICs and managers.

How To Create a Successful Onboarding Plan for New Hires

When the author joined their company, they saw the onboarding process as an opportunity to make new hires effective contributors to the engineering organization. They developed a structured onboarding plan, which included sections on business strategy, competition, financial analysis, marketecture, technical architecture, project management, software management, and support. The plan was iterative and the author collected feedback from peers, HR, and their boss. The plan was eventually adopted as a standard and a new role was created to upkeep the document. The author learned to be iterative, take on tasks independently, and not take feedback personally.