Knowledge shared by our community

Aligning an Ineffective Team to Realize Product Potential

When inheriting a technology product with an ineffective team, the author implemented processes to ensure business continuity and hold the team accountable to their Development Plans. This process involved creating a “Contributions” document to capture the knowledge held by developers, and a “Development Plan” to encourage proactivity and self-evaluation. The author learned that it is essential to establish processes to differentiate effective team members, and that accountability and communication are key to achieving personal and company goals.

Resolving Remote Communication Issues

The Chief Architect of a fully remote team of 20 developers faced communication issues both internally and with customers. To resolve these issues, the Chief Architect created a Google doc to track time zones, split the team into smaller groups, and created Slack channels and dashboards for each project. Additionally, they began recording conversations with customers and created War-Room channels in Slack for urgent issues. These solutions improved communication and response time, and the Chief Architect learned the importance of recording conversations and splitting up large teams.

Infrastructure: On-Site, Colocation, or the Cloud

The CTO of a company was faced with the challenge of transitioning their system into production. Initially, they chose to use bare-metal servers, but soon realized that this was not the best solution for their needs. After moving to colocation servers, the CTO realized that the cloud was the best solution for their needs. The cloud provided better security, cost savings, and storage options. The CTO's leadership and the business both benefited from the switch to the cloud, as they were able to focus on their business logic and the future of the company.

How To Identify the Right Product To Build

Startups need to focus on finding the right product to build before building it. This involves reducing risk by testing assumptions and being customer-driven. A collaborative approach with the product manager, product designer, engineering manager, and other stakeholders should be taken to identify risks, dig into why the project exists, and evaluate the solution. A go-to-market strategy should be created to focus on delivery and OKRs should be set to align people. A lean approach and continuous discovery and delivery is the best way to guarantee business impact and reduce the risk of failure.

Leveling Up Without Direct Support From Your Manager

This article is about a software engineer who was stuck in a career plateau and wanted to expand their skillset. In order to do this, they took three steps: leveling up by learning new languages and frameworks, leading a new project, and teaching. Through these steps, the engineer was able to level up their career and gain new opportunities. The article also emphasizes the importance of having a self-determined game plan and seeking mentors outside of the organization.

Building Customer Driven Backlog Across Several Component Teams

In software development, it can be difficult to enforce a product team to operate in a full-stack way. To solve this problem, a team restructured their engineering teams to have product managers responsible for value streams across different areas and tech leads responsible for components. This setup requires a lot of buy-in from teams in terms of communication and alignment, but it allows everyone to understand the user needs and values and how the product they build will change the user's life.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

Aligning an Ineffective Team to Realize Product Potential

When inheriting a technology product with an ineffective team, the author implemented processes to ensure business continuity and hold the team accountable to their Development Plans. This process involved creating a “Contributions” document to capture the knowledge held by developers, and a “Development Plan” to encourage proactivity and self-evaluation. The author learned that it is essential to establish processes to differentiate effective team members, and that accountability and communication are key to achieving personal and company goals.

Resolving Remote Communication Issues

The Chief Architect of a fully remote team of 20 developers faced communication issues both internally and with customers. To resolve these issues, the Chief Architect created a Google doc to track time zones, split the team into smaller groups, and created Slack channels and dashboards for each project. Additionally, they began recording conversations with customers and created War-Room channels in Slack for urgent issues. These solutions improved communication and response time, and the Chief Architect learned the importance of recording conversations and splitting up large teams.

Infrastructure: On-Site, Colocation, or the Cloud

The CTO of a company was faced with the challenge of transitioning their system into production. Initially, they chose to use bare-metal servers, but soon realized that this was not the best solution for their needs. After moving to colocation servers, the CTO realized that the cloud was the best solution for their needs. The cloud provided better security, cost savings, and storage options. The CTO's leadership and the business both benefited from the switch to the cloud, as they were able to focus on their business logic and the future of the company.

How To Identify the Right Product To Build

Startups need to focus on finding the right product to build before building it. This involves reducing risk by testing assumptions and being customer-driven. A collaborative approach with the product manager, product designer, engineering manager, and other stakeholders should be taken to identify risks, dig into why the project exists, and evaluate the solution. A go-to-market strategy should be created to focus on delivery and OKRs should be set to align people. A lean approach and continuous discovery and delivery is the best way to guarantee business impact and reduce the risk of failure.

Leveling Up Without Direct Support From Your Manager

This article is about a software engineer who was stuck in a career plateau and wanted to expand their skillset. In order to do this, they took three steps: leveling up by learning new languages and frameworks, leading a new project, and teaching. Through these steps, the engineer was able to level up their career and gain new opportunities. The article also emphasizes the importance of having a self-determined game plan and seeking mentors outside of the organization.

Building Customer Driven Backlog Across Several Component Teams

In software development, it can be difficult to enforce a product team to operate in a full-stack way. To solve this problem, a team restructured their engineering teams to have product managers responsible for value streams across different areas and tech leads responsible for components. This setup requires a lot of buy-in from teams in terms of communication and alignment, but it allows everyone to understand the user needs and values and how the product they build will change the user's life.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

Aligning an Ineffective Team to Realize Product Potential

When inheriting a technology product with an ineffective team, the author implemented processes to ensure business continuity and hold the team accountable to their Development Plans. This process involved creating a “Contributions” document to capture the knowledge held by developers, and a “Development Plan” to encourage proactivity and self-evaluation. The author learned that it is essential to establish processes to differentiate effective team members, and that accountability and communication are key to achieving personal and company goals.

Resolving Remote Communication Issues

The Chief Architect of a fully remote team of 20 developers faced communication issues both internally and with customers. To resolve these issues, the Chief Architect created a Google doc to track time zones, split the team into smaller groups, and created Slack channels and dashboards for each project. Additionally, they began recording conversations with customers and created War-Room channels in Slack for urgent issues. These solutions improved communication and response time, and the Chief Architect learned the importance of recording conversations and splitting up large teams.

Infrastructure: On-Site, Colocation, or the Cloud

The CTO of a company was faced with the challenge of transitioning their system into production. Initially, they chose to use bare-metal servers, but soon realized that this was not the best solution for their needs. After moving to colocation servers, the CTO realized that the cloud was the best solution for their needs. The cloud provided better security, cost savings, and storage options. The CTO's leadership and the business both benefited from the switch to the cloud, as they were able to focus on their business logic and the future of the company.

How To Identify the Right Product To Build

Startups need to focus on finding the right product to build before building it. This involves reducing risk by testing assumptions and being customer-driven. A collaborative approach with the product manager, product designer, engineering manager, and other stakeholders should be taken to identify risks, dig into why the project exists, and evaluate the solution. A go-to-market strategy should be created to focus on delivery and OKRs should be set to align people. A lean approach and continuous discovery and delivery is the best way to guarantee business impact and reduce the risk of failure.

Leveling Up Without Direct Support From Your Manager

This article is about a software engineer who was stuck in a career plateau and wanted to expand their skillset. In order to do this, they took three steps: leveling up by learning new languages and frameworks, leading a new project, and teaching. Through these steps, the engineer was able to level up their career and gain new opportunities. The article also emphasizes the importance of having a self-determined game plan and seeking mentors outside of the organization.

Building Customer Driven Backlog Across Several Component Teams

In software development, it can be difficult to enforce a product team to operate in a full-stack way. To solve this problem, a team restructured their engineering teams to have product managers responsible for value streams across different areas and tech leads responsible for components. This setup requires a lot of buy-in from teams in terms of communication and alignment, but it allows everyone to understand the user needs and values and how the product they build will change the user's life.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

Aligning an Ineffective Team to Realize Product Potential

When inheriting a technology product with an ineffective team, the author implemented processes to ensure business continuity and hold the team accountable to their Development Plans. This process involved creating a “Contributions” document to capture the knowledge held by developers, and a “Development Plan” to encourage proactivity and self-evaluation. The author learned that it is essential to establish processes to differentiate effective team members, and that accountability and communication are key to achieving personal and company goals.

Resolving Remote Communication Issues

The Chief Architect of a fully remote team of 20 developers faced communication issues both internally and with customers. To resolve these issues, the Chief Architect created a Google doc to track time zones, split the team into smaller groups, and created Slack channels and dashboards for each project. Additionally, they began recording conversations with customers and created War-Room channels in Slack for urgent issues. These solutions improved communication and response time, and the Chief Architect learned the importance of recording conversations and splitting up large teams.

Infrastructure: On-Site, Colocation, or the Cloud

The CTO of a company was faced with the challenge of transitioning their system into production. Initially, they chose to use bare-metal servers, but soon realized that this was not the best solution for their needs. After moving to colocation servers, the CTO realized that the cloud was the best solution for their needs. The cloud provided better security, cost savings, and storage options. The CTO's leadership and the business both benefited from the switch to the cloud, as they were able to focus on their business logic and the future of the company.

How To Identify the Right Product To Build

Startups need to focus on finding the right product to build before building it. This involves reducing risk by testing assumptions and being customer-driven. A collaborative approach with the product manager, product designer, engineering manager, and other stakeholders should be taken to identify risks, dig into why the project exists, and evaluate the solution. A go-to-market strategy should be created to focus on delivery and OKRs should be set to align people. A lean approach and continuous discovery and delivery is the best way to guarantee business impact and reduce the risk of failure.

Leveling Up Without Direct Support From Your Manager

This article is about a software engineer who was stuck in a career plateau and wanted to expand their skillset. In order to do this, they took three steps: leveling up by learning new languages and frameworks, leading a new project, and teaching. Through these steps, the engineer was able to level up their career and gain new opportunities. The article also emphasizes the importance of having a self-determined game plan and seeking mentors outside of the organization.

Building Customer Driven Backlog Across Several Component Teams

In software development, it can be difficult to enforce a product team to operate in a full-stack way. To solve this problem, a team restructured their engineering teams to have product managers responsible for value streams across different areas and tech leads responsible for components. This setup requires a lot of buy-in from teams in terms of communication and alignment, but it allows everyone to understand the user needs and values and how the product they build will change the user's life.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

Aligning an Ineffective Team to Realize Product Potential

When inheriting a technology product with an ineffective team, the author implemented processes to ensure business continuity and hold the team accountable to their Development Plans. This process involved creating a “Contributions” document to capture the knowledge held by developers, and a “Development Plan” to encourage proactivity and self-evaluation. The author learned that it is essential to establish processes to differentiate effective team members, and that accountability and communication are key to achieving personal and company goals.

Resolving Remote Communication Issues

The Chief Architect of a fully remote team of 20 developers faced communication issues both internally and with customers. To resolve these issues, the Chief Architect created a Google doc to track time zones, split the team into smaller groups, and created Slack channels and dashboards for each project. Additionally, they began recording conversations with customers and created War-Room channels in Slack for urgent issues. These solutions improved communication and response time, and the Chief Architect learned the importance of recording conversations and splitting up large teams.

Infrastructure: On-Site, Colocation, or the Cloud

The CTO of a company was faced with the challenge of transitioning their system into production. Initially, they chose to use bare-metal servers, but soon realized that this was not the best solution for their needs. After moving to colocation servers, the CTO realized that the cloud was the best solution for their needs. The cloud provided better security, cost savings, and storage options. The CTO's leadership and the business both benefited from the switch to the cloud, as they were able to focus on their business logic and the future of the company.

How To Identify the Right Product To Build

Startups need to focus on finding the right product to build before building it. This involves reducing risk by testing assumptions and being customer-driven. A collaborative approach with the product manager, product designer, engineering manager, and other stakeholders should be taken to identify risks, dig into why the project exists, and evaluate the solution. A go-to-market strategy should be created to focus on delivery and OKRs should be set to align people. A lean approach and continuous discovery and delivery is the best way to guarantee business impact and reduce the risk of failure.

Leveling Up Without Direct Support From Your Manager

This article is about a software engineer who was stuck in a career plateau and wanted to expand their skillset. In order to do this, they took three steps: leveling up by learning new languages and frameworks, leading a new project, and teaching. Through these steps, the engineer was able to level up their career and gain new opportunities. The article also emphasizes the importance of having a self-determined game plan and seeking mentors outside of the organization.

Building Customer Driven Backlog Across Several Component Teams

In software development, it can be difficult to enforce a product team to operate in a full-stack way. To solve this problem, a team restructured their engineering teams to have product managers responsible for value streams across different areas and tech leads responsible for components. This setup requires a lot of buy-in from teams in terms of communication and alignment, but it allows everyone to understand the user needs and values and how the product they build will change the user's life.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.

Aligning an Ineffective Team to Realize Product Potential

When inheriting a technology product with an ineffective team, the author implemented processes to ensure business continuity and hold the team accountable to their Development Plans. This process involved creating a “Contributions” document to capture the knowledge held by developers, and a “Development Plan” to encourage proactivity and self-evaluation. The author learned that it is essential to establish processes to differentiate effective team members, and that accountability and communication are key to achieving personal and company goals.

Resolving Remote Communication Issues

The Chief Architect of a fully remote team of 20 developers faced communication issues both internally and with customers. To resolve these issues, the Chief Architect created a Google doc to track time zones, split the team into smaller groups, and created Slack channels and dashboards for each project. Additionally, they began recording conversations with customers and created War-Room channels in Slack for urgent issues. These solutions improved communication and response time, and the Chief Architect learned the importance of recording conversations and splitting up large teams.

Infrastructure: On-Site, Colocation, or the Cloud

The CTO of a company was faced with the challenge of transitioning their system into production. Initially, they chose to use bare-metal servers, but soon realized that this was not the best solution for their needs. After moving to colocation servers, the CTO realized that the cloud was the best solution for their needs. The cloud provided better security, cost savings, and storage options. The CTO's leadership and the business both benefited from the switch to the cloud, as they were able to focus on their business logic and the future of the company.

How To Identify the Right Product To Build

Startups need to focus on finding the right product to build before building it. This involves reducing risk by testing assumptions and being customer-driven. A collaborative approach with the product manager, product designer, engineering manager, and other stakeholders should be taken to identify risks, dig into why the project exists, and evaluate the solution. A go-to-market strategy should be created to focus on delivery and OKRs should be set to align people. A lean approach and continuous discovery and delivery is the best way to guarantee business impact and reduce the risk of failure.

Leveling Up Without Direct Support From Your Manager

This article is about a software engineer who was stuck in a career plateau and wanted to expand their skillset. In order to do this, they took three steps: leveling up by learning new languages and frameworks, leading a new project, and teaching. Through these steps, the engineer was able to level up their career and gain new opportunities. The article also emphasizes the importance of having a self-determined game plan and seeking mentors outside of the organization.

Building Customer Driven Backlog Across Several Component Teams

In software development, it can be difficult to enforce a product team to operate in a full-stack way. To solve this problem, a team restructured their engineering teams to have product managers responsible for value streams across different areas and tech leads responsible for components. This setup requires a lot of buy-in from teams in terms of communication and alignment, but it allows everyone to understand the user needs and values and how the product they build will change the user's life.

How to Bring Business Context to the Development Team

This problem was solved by creating a dedicated KPI for the product team that connected strategic business goals and features. This KPI was used to measure the 'share of wallet' and a KPI tree was created to map out features that could help increase revenue. Additionally, it was important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators and to focus on measurements that can be easily affected and changed over time.

Organizing Stakeholder Requests

The team was having difficulty managing content personalization, on-site visibility, and traffic distribution for stakeholders creating content related to clothing and fashion. The developers were responding to requests with shortcuts and fixes, leading to a difficult-to-maintain solution and a complicated user experience. To address this, the product manager enforced bureaucracy and used user story maps to collect requirements and do requirement engineering. This process helped to create a database of user stories, lower the number of requests, and shift the focus from the solution to the problem. The lesson learned was the importance of understanding the current workflow and desired goals before brainstorming a solution.

The Power of Introspection in Career Growth

This story is about an engineer who was disappointed to not be promoted to a technical lead manager (TLM) position. The company had announced the names of the people who received the TLM positions and celebrated their accomplishments. The engineer expressed his belief that he was a better candidate for the position due to his previous technical lead position and longer tenure with the company. The leader listened to the engineer's concerns and helped him become more self-aware and focus on what he had control over. They discussed the expectations of a TLM and the engineer's strengths and weaknesses. The leader also provided guidance on choosing the right career path and set aside time each month to discuss career paths and goals. The leader learned the importance of listening to employees, providing honest feedback, and celebrating each other's successes.

Building an Effective Partnership Between Product & Engineering

As companies grow, silos between Product and Engineering can emerge, leading to unhealthy tensions. To facilitate alignment and collaboration, four levers should be used: organizational design, people, culture, and processes. Alignment should start at the top, with heads of product and engineering on the same page. Culture should be one of accountability and ownership, and objectivity and participation should be pursued. Processes should be put in place to bake collaboration into the tech org. Knowledge sharing should be done to create a common language. Finally, cultural norms should be established and over-communicated.

Implementing a Scalable Hiring Process

Growing a successful engineering team is a challenge, but it can be done by being clear on the skill sets you're looking for, shifting from job descriptions to impact descriptions, defining standard scorecards for test case reviews and interviews, using systems thinking to define clear funnel stages, leveraging your ATS to measure flow, and making sure you're not just growing for the sake of growing. It's important to make hiring activities part of the culture and optimize for candidate experience to generate good will and word-of-mouth.

The Importance of Task Delegation

A team leader recently transitioned to a Director position and was feeling overwhelmed and demotivated due to the workload. To help, a list of tasks was made and the ones that didn't require his personal involvement were delegated. Monitoring procedures were put in place to ensure the delegated tasks were completed. The lessons learned were to not wait until an employee is overwhelmed to check if they are comfortable with delegating tasks, and to monitor the execution of delegated tasks.

How To Deal With Conflict At the Workplace

This article discusses a situation where two employees were not getting along and how the author, as a manager, was able to mediate the conflict. The author learned that conflicts in the workplace should be addressed in a timely manner and that mediation should take place in a separate room with an impartial third party. The most valuable advice was to put oneself in the other person's shoes and try to understand their perspective.

Transitioning to One-Week Sprints

This article discusses the transition from two-week to one-week sprints and the importance of proper preparation. It emphasizes the need to plan in advance, anticipate potential problems, and get feedback from the team. It also highlights the benefits of shorter sprints, such as faster response time and more opportunities for continuous improvement.

Scaling the Company in Multiple Markets

This case study looks at the challenge of ensuring the right information flow from a company's headquarters to its multiple geographies, in the face of cultural and language barriers and different speeds of change. The solution was to place people who had already spent time at the headquarters in India in remote locations as coordination program managers, to bridge the gap and facilitate the information flow. Time zone differences and cultural and language barriers were also addressed. The key lesson learned is to anticipate and address information flow problems before launching and marketing a product.

Adopting DevOps: How To Make It Happen

A large bank hired a consultant to assess their DevOps strategy, which had been in progress for two years. After interviewing teams and creating a model of what was missing, the consultant became a trusted advisor to the executive team in charge of the transformation. The consultant set up metrics for measuring progress, created frameworks and architecture for the management of tools, and helped with the mindset change within the teams. As a result of the consultant's work, the bank was able to reduce their lead time for a change from 3 months to 2 weeks, and quickly respond to changes, such as pushing out a new loan processing platform for the COVID-19 pandemic. The consultant's lessons learned included building out high-performance teams, successful transformation requires the right people, and understanding how to deliver value.

Moving Legacy Applications Into the Cloud

An external consultant was tasked with helping an organization prepare for a regulatory deadline by setting up a disaster recovery backup on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The consultant identified the major stakeholders, overcame technical hurdles, and created alignment across teams with different standards. The consultant also had to build out the plan, create the vision and alignment for the program, and hit the timelines and deadlines. Lessons learned included ensuring a consistent group of people responsible for the project, identifying any missing skill gaps, and being flexible in approach to overcome barriers.

A Powerful Strategy for Implementing a New and Controversial Idea

This article discusses the story of a project that was initially rejected by numerous people due to security concerns. Despite the skepticism, the project was successfully implemented with the help of multiple teams across the organization. The project resulted in significant improvements to productivity and morale. The article also provides lessons learned, such as not taking no for an answer and being openly passionate and empathic about the project.

Launching a New Product

In order to turn a proof of concept used by a consulting team into a full product, the author had to form a team, hire new developers, and negotiate between the needs of the consultants and customers. To meet the deadline, they had to be careful about scope increases and selectively cut portions of features instead of cutting entire features. This allowed them to launch the product on time and with a high profile announcement, resulting in a big uptick of customers.

The Only Good Reason to Adopt Microservices

This article discusses the use of microservices to scale an engineering organization, and the challenges associated with debugging and running microservices. It references two pieces of research on the impact of organizational structure on software performance, which both suggest that communication overhead is the single largest factor. The article also references Conway's law and Brooks' law, which state that a system will end up a structural copy of the organization's communication structure, and that communication effort quickly dominates individual task time. To maximize productivity, smaller teams, more scoped work, and more time-boxing are recommended. Microservices can help reduce communication overhead and increase team efficiency. However, observability is key to overcoming the challenges associated with microservices. The upper limit on team size should be five.