Knowledge shared by our community

Formalizing Your Review Process

As organizations grow, it is important to put a process in place for fair and substantial performance reviews. This includes setting guidelines and expectations, giving feedback more often, and using a spreadsheet or performance management tool. It is important to keep the process lightweight, funnel up performance information, and be transparent about expectations.

Defining Roles as a Company Transitions out of the Startup Environment

Huli started as a flat organization without roles or competencies, but as it grew, it became necessary to create structure and responsibilities. To do this, Huli adopted a strategy from Spotify to define steps, disciplines, roles, and competencies. They also used a 360 review exercise to get feedback from the team and create a career path for each position. This process taught them the importance of having roles and competencies for clarity and to help people grow in their roles.

Improving Technology Through Teamwide Feedback

This article outlines the process taken to create a formal technical strategy for a growing company. The process involved gathering feedback from the entire team, curating the feedback into segments, and setting scores for each initiative. The lessons learned from this process included the importance of involving the entire team in the feedback process, focusing solely on technology, and setting scores in a session. This process enabled the team to be on the same page and make incremental efforts to reach the technological vision.

How to generate more innovation every day

In order to innovate, people need to enter into healthy conflict and collaboration. Design thinking, vision and strategy development, and software can help reduce the amount of disagreement by creating shared context. To bring more collaboration and innovation into daily life and work, one should set the intention to bring more healthy conflict and collaboration and notice the moments of disagreement and what happens afterwards.

How to Reorganize your Team Based on the Product Development Journey

This article discusses the importance of scaling an organization effectively by considering the people, process, and tools involved. It suggests constantly evaluating the organization and making hard decisions to ensure the right employees are in the right roles. It also emphasizes the need to build for the future, as technology is constantly changing and can affect plans.

Soft Skills Offer a Smooth Transition from IC to Management

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager without proper mentorship, the author decided to work for a new company in order to learn the necessary skills to be a successful manager. Through this experience, the author learned that management is about people and enabling the team to work together to achieve greater results than any individual could. They also learned the importance of mentorship, getting the trust of their engineers, and discovering the strengths and weaknesses of each individual on the team.

Pivoting a Mature Startup

A midsize startup faced the "Innovator's Dilemma" - their growth model no longer scaled well, leading to a natural asymptote in growth. To address this, the organization leadership had to decide between incremental improvements in the existing product or investing in a riskier, but more ambitious product strategy. To create the new product strategy, the team experimented with new product experiences, used "lean hypothesis testing" to validate questions, and worked to align the different functions on the new strategy. The lessons learned from this experience were that developing a new product strategy takes time, building a new product strategy requires a period of organizational learning, customer-facing teams may have difficulty understanding the logic behind building a new product, and alignment of the CEO is necessary to overcome the negative inertia from the innovator's dilemma.

Implementing OKRs at your organization

A leader implemented a six-part plan to help the team re-set their OKR processes and improve their capacity to execute against a strategy in an aligned way. The plan requires a product strategy as an input and key results as an output, and it includes elements such as strategic alignment, opportunity, solution, risks/challenges, goals (KRs), and asks. The plan is reviewed whenever a new team is formed, pivots, and on a regular cadence after that. The leader also provided advice on not drowning in process, getting decision-making buy-in, and understanding who the decision-makers are.

The Benefits of Restructuring Teams for Customer Use Cases

The author's previous company had an engineering and product structure that was misaligned, leading to a lack of customer-facing products or features. To address this, the author suggested restructuring the engineering and scrum teams to focus on customer use cases, bringing together technical problems to deliver a single customer outcome. This restructuring had many advantages, such as improved engineering efficiency, better alignment between product and engineering teams, and increased morale and motivation of the team. The author's key lessons learned were that restructuring can be hard to implement, scrum teams don't have to reflect reporting structure, and having a roadmap based on customer problems rather than features leads to higher product development efficiency.

Techniques for Managing Upward and Outward

This article discusses the importance of managing outward in order to ensure effective communication and collaboration between teams. The author implemented a framework to discuss successes, failures, and support needs in weekly collaboration meetings. Through this process, the author learned that reflecting on successes, expressing vulnerability, and asking for help were key to building trust and creating a culture of collaboration.

Building a Career Ladder for Employees at an Early Stage Company

When the author's first employee asked for a promotion, the author created a career ladder with four pillars: UX/PM skills, productivity, communication, and leadership. This ladder was shared with all employees proactively and enabled them to have tangible career growth conversations. The author learned to be proactive and transparent with expectations and to articulate expectations around critical soft skills.

Designing a Successful App Using Lean and Agile Principles

A team successfully launched an app that went viral by using Lean/Agile principles. They validated their idea, knew their ideal user, built small, shipped imperfect products, tested actual users, iterated often, tied into human behavior, guided people, and measured the important stuff. They learned to create and launch a smart and simple product, know their target user, and open source their code.

Taking Ownership and Empowering Your Team

This article discusses the importance of taking responsibility as a leader and how to do so effectively. It outlines the steps to take ownership of failure, such as asking questions to determine if it was indeed the leader's fault, and how to move forward. It also discusses the importance of root cause analysis meetings, team over individual, and focused disagreement. It emphasizes the need for courage and humility to be an effective leader.

Steps to Take with an Underperforming Employee Before Implementing a PIP

Managers should have sufficient documentation when dealing with an underperforming employee, and should discuss the issue with the employee and provide feedback to correct it. Shared documentation, explicit articulation of consequences, and a coaching memo can help transition the employee out of the company. This process can take up to 6 months and has a 15-20% success rate. It is important to provide support to the employee and be aware of other employees' reactions.

‘Pretotyping’ - Prototyping Without the Hassle

Pretotyping is a process that allows you to test the demand for a product before investing time and money into building it. It involves developing a platform with criteria, creating a trial group, and measuring the number of people who are willing to pay for the service. It can save time, effort, and money, and it is a smart way to test demand before investing in a product.

Transitioning from Marketing to Product: A Non-Tech in Tech

A marketer with no traditional tech skillset was given the opportunity to lead a customer migration project for a major replatform project. Through saying yes to the role and taking on tasks, they were able to learn the development lifecycle, build relationships with experts, and ask questions to gain knowledge. They learned that it's ok to not know everything, and to use their strengths to their advantage. They also learned to start conversations with what they do know, and to find advocates to soundboard with when stuck.

ICs Managing Upward to a VP

This article discusses how an individual contributor was able to build a successful relationship with a new vice president by taking initiative and showing interest in the VP's goals and vision. The individual contributor took action by paying attention in meetings, taking detailed notes, volunteering for extra assignments, and delivering strategic projects on-time and on-budget. The article also provides lessons learned, such as taking action, studying the person you are managing up to, and being true to yourself.

The Necessity of Reorganization of teams and processes in a Growing Company

As the business grew, the product and engineering teams faced three main problems: dependencies between teams, customer-focused culture, and team size. Leaders adjusted their perspective, created a source of truth Execution Roadmap, and implemented a semi-permanent team structure to address these problems. After four months, the company was able to release features efficiently while keeping the team motivated. At key stages of a company's scaling, leadership must reorganize both teams and processes to ensure success.

Why a Data Science Team is Advantageous

This article discusses how data science teams can use predictive modeling to provide insights into projects and decisions. It also explains how data science teams should be constantly learning and have project ownership, and encourages leadership teams to create avenues for the free exchange of ideas and knowledge throughout the company.

You acquired a new company -- now what?

This article outlines the steps to effectively manage an acquisition, such as getting an executive commitment on success, building trust with the founders, getting to know the acquired team, developing new leadership talent, visiting frequently, and encouraging cross team communication. These steps are important to ensure the acquired company feels part of the greater whole and to ensure a successful integration.

Formalizing Your Review Process

As organizations grow, it is important to put a process in place for fair and substantial performance reviews. This includes setting guidelines and expectations, giving feedback more often, and using a spreadsheet or performance management tool. It is important to keep the process lightweight, funnel up performance information, and be transparent about expectations.

Defining Roles as a Company Transitions out of the Startup Environment

Huli started as a flat organization without roles or competencies, but as it grew, it became necessary to create structure and responsibilities. To do this, Huli adopted a strategy from Spotify to define steps, disciplines, roles, and competencies. They also used a 360 review exercise to get feedback from the team and create a career path for each position. This process taught them the importance of having roles and competencies for clarity and to help people grow in their roles.

Improving Technology Through Teamwide Feedback

This article outlines the process taken to create a formal technical strategy for a growing company. The process involved gathering feedback from the entire team, curating the feedback into segments, and setting scores for each initiative. The lessons learned from this process included the importance of involving the entire team in the feedback process, focusing solely on technology, and setting scores in a session. This process enabled the team to be on the same page and make incremental efforts to reach the technological vision.

How to generate more innovation every day

In order to innovate, people need to enter into healthy conflict and collaboration. Design thinking, vision and strategy development, and software can help reduce the amount of disagreement by creating shared context. To bring more collaboration and innovation into daily life and work, one should set the intention to bring more healthy conflict and collaboration and notice the moments of disagreement and what happens afterwards.

How to Reorganize your Team Based on the Product Development Journey

This article discusses the importance of scaling an organization effectively by considering the people, process, and tools involved. It suggests constantly evaluating the organization and making hard decisions to ensure the right employees are in the right roles. It also emphasizes the need to build for the future, as technology is constantly changing and can affect plans.

Soft Skills Offer a Smooth Transition from IC to Management

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager without proper mentorship, the author decided to work for a new company in order to learn the necessary skills to be a successful manager. Through this experience, the author learned that management is about people and enabling the team to work together to achieve greater results than any individual could. They also learned the importance of mentorship, getting the trust of their engineers, and discovering the strengths and weaknesses of each individual on the team.

Pivoting a Mature Startup

A midsize startup faced the "Innovator's Dilemma" - their growth model no longer scaled well, leading to a natural asymptote in growth. To address this, the organization leadership had to decide between incremental improvements in the existing product or investing in a riskier, but more ambitious product strategy. To create the new product strategy, the team experimented with new product experiences, used "lean hypothesis testing" to validate questions, and worked to align the different functions on the new strategy. The lessons learned from this experience were that developing a new product strategy takes time, building a new product strategy requires a period of organizational learning, customer-facing teams may have difficulty understanding the logic behind building a new product, and alignment of the CEO is necessary to overcome the negative inertia from the innovator's dilemma.

Implementing OKRs at your organization

A leader implemented a six-part plan to help the team re-set their OKR processes and improve their capacity to execute against a strategy in an aligned way. The plan requires a product strategy as an input and key results as an output, and it includes elements such as strategic alignment, opportunity, solution, risks/challenges, goals (KRs), and asks. The plan is reviewed whenever a new team is formed, pivots, and on a regular cadence after that. The leader also provided advice on not drowning in process, getting decision-making buy-in, and understanding who the decision-makers are.

The Benefits of Restructuring Teams for Customer Use Cases

The author's previous company had an engineering and product structure that was misaligned, leading to a lack of customer-facing products or features. To address this, the author suggested restructuring the engineering and scrum teams to focus on customer use cases, bringing together technical problems to deliver a single customer outcome. This restructuring had many advantages, such as improved engineering efficiency, better alignment between product and engineering teams, and increased morale and motivation of the team. The author's key lessons learned were that restructuring can be hard to implement, scrum teams don't have to reflect reporting structure, and having a roadmap based on customer problems rather than features leads to higher product development efficiency.

Techniques for Managing Upward and Outward

This article discusses the importance of managing outward in order to ensure effective communication and collaboration between teams. The author implemented a framework to discuss successes, failures, and support needs in weekly collaboration meetings. Through this process, the author learned that reflecting on successes, expressing vulnerability, and asking for help were key to building trust and creating a culture of collaboration.

Building a Career Ladder for Employees at an Early Stage Company

When the author's first employee asked for a promotion, the author created a career ladder with four pillars: UX/PM skills, productivity, communication, and leadership. This ladder was shared with all employees proactively and enabled them to have tangible career growth conversations. The author learned to be proactive and transparent with expectations and to articulate expectations around critical soft skills.

Designing a Successful App Using Lean and Agile Principles

A team successfully launched an app that went viral by using Lean/Agile principles. They validated their idea, knew their ideal user, built small, shipped imperfect products, tested actual users, iterated often, tied into human behavior, guided people, and measured the important stuff. They learned to create and launch a smart and simple product, know their target user, and open source their code.

Taking Ownership and Empowering Your Team

This article discusses the importance of taking responsibility as a leader and how to do so effectively. It outlines the steps to take ownership of failure, such as asking questions to determine if it was indeed the leader's fault, and how to move forward. It also discusses the importance of root cause analysis meetings, team over individual, and focused disagreement. It emphasizes the need for courage and humility to be an effective leader.

Steps to Take with an Underperforming Employee Before Implementing a PIP

Managers should have sufficient documentation when dealing with an underperforming employee, and should discuss the issue with the employee and provide feedback to correct it. Shared documentation, explicit articulation of consequences, and a coaching memo can help transition the employee out of the company. This process can take up to 6 months and has a 15-20% success rate. It is important to provide support to the employee and be aware of other employees' reactions.

‘Pretotyping’ - Prototyping Without the Hassle

Pretotyping is a process that allows you to test the demand for a product before investing time and money into building it. It involves developing a platform with criteria, creating a trial group, and measuring the number of people who are willing to pay for the service. It can save time, effort, and money, and it is a smart way to test demand before investing in a product.

Transitioning from Marketing to Product: A Non-Tech in Tech

A marketer with no traditional tech skillset was given the opportunity to lead a customer migration project for a major replatform project. Through saying yes to the role and taking on tasks, they were able to learn the development lifecycle, build relationships with experts, and ask questions to gain knowledge. They learned that it's ok to not know everything, and to use their strengths to their advantage. They also learned to start conversations with what they do know, and to find advocates to soundboard with when stuck.

ICs Managing Upward to a VP

This article discusses how an individual contributor was able to build a successful relationship with a new vice president by taking initiative and showing interest in the VP's goals and vision. The individual contributor took action by paying attention in meetings, taking detailed notes, volunteering for extra assignments, and delivering strategic projects on-time and on-budget. The article also provides lessons learned, such as taking action, studying the person you are managing up to, and being true to yourself.

The Necessity of Reorganization of teams and processes in a Growing Company

As the business grew, the product and engineering teams faced three main problems: dependencies between teams, customer-focused culture, and team size. Leaders adjusted their perspective, created a source of truth Execution Roadmap, and implemented a semi-permanent team structure to address these problems. After four months, the company was able to release features efficiently while keeping the team motivated. At key stages of a company's scaling, leadership must reorganize both teams and processes to ensure success.

Why a Data Science Team is Advantageous

This article discusses how data science teams can use predictive modeling to provide insights into projects and decisions. It also explains how data science teams should be constantly learning and have project ownership, and encourages leadership teams to create avenues for the free exchange of ideas and knowledge throughout the company.

You acquired a new company -- now what?

This article outlines the steps to effectively manage an acquisition, such as getting an executive commitment on success, building trust with the founders, getting to know the acquired team, developing new leadership talent, visiting frequently, and encouraging cross team communication. These steps are important to ensure the acquired company feels part of the greater whole and to ensure a successful integration.

Formalizing Your Review Process

As organizations grow, it is important to put a process in place for fair and substantial performance reviews. This includes setting guidelines and expectations, giving feedback more often, and using a spreadsheet or performance management tool. It is important to keep the process lightweight, funnel up performance information, and be transparent about expectations.

Defining Roles as a Company Transitions out of the Startup Environment

Huli started as a flat organization without roles or competencies, but as it grew, it became necessary to create structure and responsibilities. To do this, Huli adopted a strategy from Spotify to define steps, disciplines, roles, and competencies. They also used a 360 review exercise to get feedback from the team and create a career path for each position. This process taught them the importance of having roles and competencies for clarity and to help people grow in their roles.

Improving Technology Through Teamwide Feedback

This article outlines the process taken to create a formal technical strategy for a growing company. The process involved gathering feedback from the entire team, curating the feedback into segments, and setting scores for each initiative. The lessons learned from this process included the importance of involving the entire team in the feedback process, focusing solely on technology, and setting scores in a session. This process enabled the team to be on the same page and make incremental efforts to reach the technological vision.

How to generate more innovation every day

In order to innovate, people need to enter into healthy conflict and collaboration. Design thinking, vision and strategy development, and software can help reduce the amount of disagreement by creating shared context. To bring more collaboration and innovation into daily life and work, one should set the intention to bring more healthy conflict and collaboration and notice the moments of disagreement and what happens afterwards.

How to Reorganize your Team Based on the Product Development Journey

This article discusses the importance of scaling an organization effectively by considering the people, process, and tools involved. It suggests constantly evaluating the organization and making hard decisions to ensure the right employees are in the right roles. It also emphasizes the need to build for the future, as technology is constantly changing and can affect plans.

Soft Skills Offer a Smooth Transition from IC to Management

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager without proper mentorship, the author decided to work for a new company in order to learn the necessary skills to be a successful manager. Through this experience, the author learned that management is about people and enabling the team to work together to achieve greater results than any individual could. They also learned the importance of mentorship, getting the trust of their engineers, and discovering the strengths and weaknesses of each individual on the team.

Pivoting a Mature Startup

A midsize startup faced the "Innovator's Dilemma" - their growth model no longer scaled well, leading to a natural asymptote in growth. To address this, the organization leadership had to decide between incremental improvements in the existing product or investing in a riskier, but more ambitious product strategy. To create the new product strategy, the team experimented with new product experiences, used "lean hypothesis testing" to validate questions, and worked to align the different functions on the new strategy. The lessons learned from this experience were that developing a new product strategy takes time, building a new product strategy requires a period of organizational learning, customer-facing teams may have difficulty understanding the logic behind building a new product, and alignment of the CEO is necessary to overcome the negative inertia from the innovator's dilemma.

Implementing OKRs at your organization

A leader implemented a six-part plan to help the team re-set their OKR processes and improve their capacity to execute against a strategy in an aligned way. The plan requires a product strategy as an input and key results as an output, and it includes elements such as strategic alignment, opportunity, solution, risks/challenges, goals (KRs), and asks. The plan is reviewed whenever a new team is formed, pivots, and on a regular cadence after that. The leader also provided advice on not drowning in process, getting decision-making buy-in, and understanding who the decision-makers are.

The Benefits of Restructuring Teams for Customer Use Cases

The author's previous company had an engineering and product structure that was misaligned, leading to a lack of customer-facing products or features. To address this, the author suggested restructuring the engineering and scrum teams to focus on customer use cases, bringing together technical problems to deliver a single customer outcome. This restructuring had many advantages, such as improved engineering efficiency, better alignment between product and engineering teams, and increased morale and motivation of the team. The author's key lessons learned were that restructuring can be hard to implement, scrum teams don't have to reflect reporting structure, and having a roadmap based on customer problems rather than features leads to higher product development efficiency.

Techniques for Managing Upward and Outward

This article discusses the importance of managing outward in order to ensure effective communication and collaboration between teams. The author implemented a framework to discuss successes, failures, and support needs in weekly collaboration meetings. Through this process, the author learned that reflecting on successes, expressing vulnerability, and asking for help were key to building trust and creating a culture of collaboration.

Building a Career Ladder for Employees at an Early Stage Company

When the author's first employee asked for a promotion, the author created a career ladder with four pillars: UX/PM skills, productivity, communication, and leadership. This ladder was shared with all employees proactively and enabled them to have tangible career growth conversations. The author learned to be proactive and transparent with expectations and to articulate expectations around critical soft skills.

Designing a Successful App Using Lean and Agile Principles

A team successfully launched an app that went viral by using Lean/Agile principles. They validated their idea, knew their ideal user, built small, shipped imperfect products, tested actual users, iterated often, tied into human behavior, guided people, and measured the important stuff. They learned to create and launch a smart and simple product, know their target user, and open source their code.

Taking Ownership and Empowering Your Team

This article discusses the importance of taking responsibility as a leader and how to do so effectively. It outlines the steps to take ownership of failure, such as asking questions to determine if it was indeed the leader's fault, and how to move forward. It also discusses the importance of root cause analysis meetings, team over individual, and focused disagreement. It emphasizes the need for courage and humility to be an effective leader.

Steps to Take with an Underperforming Employee Before Implementing a PIP

Managers should have sufficient documentation when dealing with an underperforming employee, and should discuss the issue with the employee and provide feedback to correct it. Shared documentation, explicit articulation of consequences, and a coaching memo can help transition the employee out of the company. This process can take up to 6 months and has a 15-20% success rate. It is important to provide support to the employee and be aware of other employees' reactions.

‘Pretotyping’ - Prototyping Without the Hassle

Pretotyping is a process that allows you to test the demand for a product before investing time and money into building it. It involves developing a platform with criteria, creating a trial group, and measuring the number of people who are willing to pay for the service. It can save time, effort, and money, and it is a smart way to test demand before investing in a product.

Transitioning from Marketing to Product: A Non-Tech in Tech

A marketer with no traditional tech skillset was given the opportunity to lead a customer migration project for a major replatform project. Through saying yes to the role and taking on tasks, they were able to learn the development lifecycle, build relationships with experts, and ask questions to gain knowledge. They learned that it's ok to not know everything, and to use their strengths to their advantage. They also learned to start conversations with what they do know, and to find advocates to soundboard with when stuck.

ICs Managing Upward to a VP

This article discusses how an individual contributor was able to build a successful relationship with a new vice president by taking initiative and showing interest in the VP's goals and vision. The individual contributor took action by paying attention in meetings, taking detailed notes, volunteering for extra assignments, and delivering strategic projects on-time and on-budget. The article also provides lessons learned, such as taking action, studying the person you are managing up to, and being true to yourself.

The Necessity of Reorganization of teams and processes in a Growing Company

As the business grew, the product and engineering teams faced three main problems: dependencies between teams, customer-focused culture, and team size. Leaders adjusted their perspective, created a source of truth Execution Roadmap, and implemented a semi-permanent team structure to address these problems. After four months, the company was able to release features efficiently while keeping the team motivated. At key stages of a company's scaling, leadership must reorganize both teams and processes to ensure success.

Why a Data Science Team is Advantageous

This article discusses how data science teams can use predictive modeling to provide insights into projects and decisions. It also explains how data science teams should be constantly learning and have project ownership, and encourages leadership teams to create avenues for the free exchange of ideas and knowledge throughout the company.

You acquired a new company -- now what?

This article outlines the steps to effectively manage an acquisition, such as getting an executive commitment on success, building trust with the founders, getting to know the acquired team, developing new leadership talent, visiting frequently, and encouraging cross team communication. These steps are important to ensure the acquired company feels part of the greater whole and to ensure a successful integration.

Formalizing Your Review Process

As organizations grow, it is important to put a process in place for fair and substantial performance reviews. This includes setting guidelines and expectations, giving feedback more often, and using a spreadsheet or performance management tool. It is important to keep the process lightweight, funnel up performance information, and be transparent about expectations.

Defining Roles as a Company Transitions out of the Startup Environment

Huli started as a flat organization without roles or competencies, but as it grew, it became necessary to create structure and responsibilities. To do this, Huli adopted a strategy from Spotify to define steps, disciplines, roles, and competencies. They also used a 360 review exercise to get feedback from the team and create a career path for each position. This process taught them the importance of having roles and competencies for clarity and to help people grow in their roles.

Improving Technology Through Teamwide Feedback

This article outlines the process taken to create a formal technical strategy for a growing company. The process involved gathering feedback from the entire team, curating the feedback into segments, and setting scores for each initiative. The lessons learned from this process included the importance of involving the entire team in the feedback process, focusing solely on technology, and setting scores in a session. This process enabled the team to be on the same page and make incremental efforts to reach the technological vision.

How to generate more innovation every day

In order to innovate, people need to enter into healthy conflict and collaboration. Design thinking, vision and strategy development, and software can help reduce the amount of disagreement by creating shared context. To bring more collaboration and innovation into daily life and work, one should set the intention to bring more healthy conflict and collaboration and notice the moments of disagreement and what happens afterwards.

How to Reorganize your Team Based on the Product Development Journey

This article discusses the importance of scaling an organization effectively by considering the people, process, and tools involved. It suggests constantly evaluating the organization and making hard decisions to ensure the right employees are in the right roles. It also emphasizes the need to build for the future, as technology is constantly changing and can affect plans.

Soft Skills Offer a Smooth Transition from IC to Management

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager without proper mentorship, the author decided to work for a new company in order to learn the necessary skills to be a successful manager. Through this experience, the author learned that management is about people and enabling the team to work together to achieve greater results than any individual could. They also learned the importance of mentorship, getting the trust of their engineers, and discovering the strengths and weaknesses of each individual on the team.

Pivoting a Mature Startup

A midsize startup faced the "Innovator's Dilemma" - their growth model no longer scaled well, leading to a natural asymptote in growth. To address this, the organization leadership had to decide between incremental improvements in the existing product or investing in a riskier, but more ambitious product strategy. To create the new product strategy, the team experimented with new product experiences, used "lean hypothesis testing" to validate questions, and worked to align the different functions on the new strategy. The lessons learned from this experience were that developing a new product strategy takes time, building a new product strategy requires a period of organizational learning, customer-facing teams may have difficulty understanding the logic behind building a new product, and alignment of the CEO is necessary to overcome the negative inertia from the innovator's dilemma.

Implementing OKRs at your organization

A leader implemented a six-part plan to help the team re-set their OKR processes and improve their capacity to execute against a strategy in an aligned way. The plan requires a product strategy as an input and key results as an output, and it includes elements such as strategic alignment, opportunity, solution, risks/challenges, goals (KRs), and asks. The plan is reviewed whenever a new team is formed, pivots, and on a regular cadence after that. The leader also provided advice on not drowning in process, getting decision-making buy-in, and understanding who the decision-makers are.

The Benefits of Restructuring Teams for Customer Use Cases

The author's previous company had an engineering and product structure that was misaligned, leading to a lack of customer-facing products or features. To address this, the author suggested restructuring the engineering and scrum teams to focus on customer use cases, bringing together technical problems to deliver a single customer outcome. This restructuring had many advantages, such as improved engineering efficiency, better alignment between product and engineering teams, and increased morale and motivation of the team. The author's key lessons learned were that restructuring can be hard to implement, scrum teams don't have to reflect reporting structure, and having a roadmap based on customer problems rather than features leads to higher product development efficiency.

Techniques for Managing Upward and Outward

This article discusses the importance of managing outward in order to ensure effective communication and collaboration between teams. The author implemented a framework to discuss successes, failures, and support needs in weekly collaboration meetings. Through this process, the author learned that reflecting on successes, expressing vulnerability, and asking for help were key to building trust and creating a culture of collaboration.

Building a Career Ladder for Employees at an Early Stage Company

When the author's first employee asked for a promotion, the author created a career ladder with four pillars: UX/PM skills, productivity, communication, and leadership. This ladder was shared with all employees proactively and enabled them to have tangible career growth conversations. The author learned to be proactive and transparent with expectations and to articulate expectations around critical soft skills.

Designing a Successful App Using Lean and Agile Principles

A team successfully launched an app that went viral by using Lean/Agile principles. They validated their idea, knew their ideal user, built small, shipped imperfect products, tested actual users, iterated often, tied into human behavior, guided people, and measured the important stuff. They learned to create and launch a smart and simple product, know their target user, and open source their code.

Taking Ownership and Empowering Your Team

This article discusses the importance of taking responsibility as a leader and how to do so effectively. It outlines the steps to take ownership of failure, such as asking questions to determine if it was indeed the leader's fault, and how to move forward. It also discusses the importance of root cause analysis meetings, team over individual, and focused disagreement. It emphasizes the need for courage and humility to be an effective leader.

Steps to Take with an Underperforming Employee Before Implementing a PIP

Managers should have sufficient documentation when dealing with an underperforming employee, and should discuss the issue with the employee and provide feedback to correct it. Shared documentation, explicit articulation of consequences, and a coaching memo can help transition the employee out of the company. This process can take up to 6 months and has a 15-20% success rate. It is important to provide support to the employee and be aware of other employees' reactions.

‘Pretotyping’ - Prototyping Without the Hassle

Pretotyping is a process that allows you to test the demand for a product before investing time and money into building it. It involves developing a platform with criteria, creating a trial group, and measuring the number of people who are willing to pay for the service. It can save time, effort, and money, and it is a smart way to test demand before investing in a product.

Transitioning from Marketing to Product: A Non-Tech in Tech

A marketer with no traditional tech skillset was given the opportunity to lead a customer migration project for a major replatform project. Through saying yes to the role and taking on tasks, they were able to learn the development lifecycle, build relationships with experts, and ask questions to gain knowledge. They learned that it's ok to not know everything, and to use their strengths to their advantage. They also learned to start conversations with what they do know, and to find advocates to soundboard with when stuck.

ICs Managing Upward to a VP

This article discusses how an individual contributor was able to build a successful relationship with a new vice president by taking initiative and showing interest in the VP's goals and vision. The individual contributor took action by paying attention in meetings, taking detailed notes, volunteering for extra assignments, and delivering strategic projects on-time and on-budget. The article also provides lessons learned, such as taking action, studying the person you are managing up to, and being true to yourself.

The Necessity of Reorganization of teams and processes in a Growing Company

As the business grew, the product and engineering teams faced three main problems: dependencies between teams, customer-focused culture, and team size. Leaders adjusted their perspective, created a source of truth Execution Roadmap, and implemented a semi-permanent team structure to address these problems. After four months, the company was able to release features efficiently while keeping the team motivated. At key stages of a company's scaling, leadership must reorganize both teams and processes to ensure success.

Why a Data Science Team is Advantageous

This article discusses how data science teams can use predictive modeling to provide insights into projects and decisions. It also explains how data science teams should be constantly learning and have project ownership, and encourages leadership teams to create avenues for the free exchange of ideas and knowledge throughout the company.

You acquired a new company -- now what?

This article outlines the steps to effectively manage an acquisition, such as getting an executive commitment on success, building trust with the founders, getting to know the acquired team, developing new leadership talent, visiting frequently, and encouraging cross team communication. These steps are important to ensure the acquired company feels part of the greater whole and to ensure a successful integration.

Formalizing Your Review Process

As organizations grow, it is important to put a process in place for fair and substantial performance reviews. This includes setting guidelines and expectations, giving feedback more often, and using a spreadsheet or performance management tool. It is important to keep the process lightweight, funnel up performance information, and be transparent about expectations.

Defining Roles as a Company Transitions out of the Startup Environment

Huli started as a flat organization without roles or competencies, but as it grew, it became necessary to create structure and responsibilities. To do this, Huli adopted a strategy from Spotify to define steps, disciplines, roles, and competencies. They also used a 360 review exercise to get feedback from the team and create a career path for each position. This process taught them the importance of having roles and competencies for clarity and to help people grow in their roles.

Improving Technology Through Teamwide Feedback

This article outlines the process taken to create a formal technical strategy for a growing company. The process involved gathering feedback from the entire team, curating the feedback into segments, and setting scores for each initiative. The lessons learned from this process included the importance of involving the entire team in the feedback process, focusing solely on technology, and setting scores in a session. This process enabled the team to be on the same page and make incremental efforts to reach the technological vision.

How to generate more innovation every day

In order to innovate, people need to enter into healthy conflict and collaboration. Design thinking, vision and strategy development, and software can help reduce the amount of disagreement by creating shared context. To bring more collaboration and innovation into daily life and work, one should set the intention to bring more healthy conflict and collaboration and notice the moments of disagreement and what happens afterwards.

How to Reorganize your Team Based on the Product Development Journey

This article discusses the importance of scaling an organization effectively by considering the people, process, and tools involved. It suggests constantly evaluating the organization and making hard decisions to ensure the right employees are in the right roles. It also emphasizes the need to build for the future, as technology is constantly changing and can affect plans.

Soft Skills Offer a Smooth Transition from IC to Management

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager without proper mentorship, the author decided to work for a new company in order to learn the necessary skills to be a successful manager. Through this experience, the author learned that management is about people and enabling the team to work together to achieve greater results than any individual could. They also learned the importance of mentorship, getting the trust of their engineers, and discovering the strengths and weaknesses of each individual on the team.

Pivoting a Mature Startup

A midsize startup faced the "Innovator's Dilemma" - their growth model no longer scaled well, leading to a natural asymptote in growth. To address this, the organization leadership had to decide between incremental improvements in the existing product or investing in a riskier, but more ambitious product strategy. To create the new product strategy, the team experimented with new product experiences, used "lean hypothesis testing" to validate questions, and worked to align the different functions on the new strategy. The lessons learned from this experience were that developing a new product strategy takes time, building a new product strategy requires a period of organizational learning, customer-facing teams may have difficulty understanding the logic behind building a new product, and alignment of the CEO is necessary to overcome the negative inertia from the innovator's dilemma.

Implementing OKRs at your organization

A leader implemented a six-part plan to help the team re-set their OKR processes and improve their capacity to execute against a strategy in an aligned way. The plan requires a product strategy as an input and key results as an output, and it includes elements such as strategic alignment, opportunity, solution, risks/challenges, goals (KRs), and asks. The plan is reviewed whenever a new team is formed, pivots, and on a regular cadence after that. The leader also provided advice on not drowning in process, getting decision-making buy-in, and understanding who the decision-makers are.

The Benefits of Restructuring Teams for Customer Use Cases

The author's previous company had an engineering and product structure that was misaligned, leading to a lack of customer-facing products or features. To address this, the author suggested restructuring the engineering and scrum teams to focus on customer use cases, bringing together technical problems to deliver a single customer outcome. This restructuring had many advantages, such as improved engineering efficiency, better alignment between product and engineering teams, and increased morale and motivation of the team. The author's key lessons learned were that restructuring can be hard to implement, scrum teams don't have to reflect reporting structure, and having a roadmap based on customer problems rather than features leads to higher product development efficiency.

Techniques for Managing Upward and Outward

This article discusses the importance of managing outward in order to ensure effective communication and collaboration between teams. The author implemented a framework to discuss successes, failures, and support needs in weekly collaboration meetings. Through this process, the author learned that reflecting on successes, expressing vulnerability, and asking for help were key to building trust and creating a culture of collaboration.

Building a Career Ladder for Employees at an Early Stage Company

When the author's first employee asked for a promotion, the author created a career ladder with four pillars: UX/PM skills, productivity, communication, and leadership. This ladder was shared with all employees proactively and enabled them to have tangible career growth conversations. The author learned to be proactive and transparent with expectations and to articulate expectations around critical soft skills.

Designing a Successful App Using Lean and Agile Principles

A team successfully launched an app that went viral by using Lean/Agile principles. They validated their idea, knew their ideal user, built small, shipped imperfect products, tested actual users, iterated often, tied into human behavior, guided people, and measured the important stuff. They learned to create and launch a smart and simple product, know their target user, and open source their code.

Taking Ownership and Empowering Your Team

This article discusses the importance of taking responsibility as a leader and how to do so effectively. It outlines the steps to take ownership of failure, such as asking questions to determine if it was indeed the leader's fault, and how to move forward. It also discusses the importance of root cause analysis meetings, team over individual, and focused disagreement. It emphasizes the need for courage and humility to be an effective leader.

Steps to Take with an Underperforming Employee Before Implementing a PIP

Managers should have sufficient documentation when dealing with an underperforming employee, and should discuss the issue with the employee and provide feedback to correct it. Shared documentation, explicit articulation of consequences, and a coaching memo can help transition the employee out of the company. This process can take up to 6 months and has a 15-20% success rate. It is important to provide support to the employee and be aware of other employees' reactions.

‘Pretotyping’ - Prototyping Without the Hassle

Pretotyping is a process that allows you to test the demand for a product before investing time and money into building it. It involves developing a platform with criteria, creating a trial group, and measuring the number of people who are willing to pay for the service. It can save time, effort, and money, and it is a smart way to test demand before investing in a product.

Transitioning from Marketing to Product: A Non-Tech in Tech

A marketer with no traditional tech skillset was given the opportunity to lead a customer migration project for a major replatform project. Through saying yes to the role and taking on tasks, they were able to learn the development lifecycle, build relationships with experts, and ask questions to gain knowledge. They learned that it's ok to not know everything, and to use their strengths to their advantage. They also learned to start conversations with what they do know, and to find advocates to soundboard with when stuck.

ICs Managing Upward to a VP

This article discusses how an individual contributor was able to build a successful relationship with a new vice president by taking initiative and showing interest in the VP's goals and vision. The individual contributor took action by paying attention in meetings, taking detailed notes, volunteering for extra assignments, and delivering strategic projects on-time and on-budget. The article also provides lessons learned, such as taking action, studying the person you are managing up to, and being true to yourself.

The Necessity of Reorganization of teams and processes in a Growing Company

As the business grew, the product and engineering teams faced three main problems: dependencies between teams, customer-focused culture, and team size. Leaders adjusted their perspective, created a source of truth Execution Roadmap, and implemented a semi-permanent team structure to address these problems. After four months, the company was able to release features efficiently while keeping the team motivated. At key stages of a company's scaling, leadership must reorganize both teams and processes to ensure success.

Why a Data Science Team is Advantageous

This article discusses how data science teams can use predictive modeling to provide insights into projects and decisions. It also explains how data science teams should be constantly learning and have project ownership, and encourages leadership teams to create avenues for the free exchange of ideas and knowledge throughout the company.

You acquired a new company -- now what?

This article outlines the steps to effectively manage an acquisition, such as getting an executive commitment on success, building trust with the founders, getting to know the acquired team, developing new leadership talent, visiting frequently, and encouraging cross team communication. These steps are important to ensure the acquired company feels part of the greater whole and to ensure a successful integration.

Formalizing Your Review Process

As organizations grow, it is important to put a process in place for fair and substantial performance reviews. This includes setting guidelines and expectations, giving feedback more often, and using a spreadsheet or performance management tool. It is important to keep the process lightweight, funnel up performance information, and be transparent about expectations.

Defining Roles as a Company Transitions out of the Startup Environment

Huli started as a flat organization without roles or competencies, but as it grew, it became necessary to create structure and responsibilities. To do this, Huli adopted a strategy from Spotify to define steps, disciplines, roles, and competencies. They also used a 360 review exercise to get feedback from the team and create a career path for each position. This process taught them the importance of having roles and competencies for clarity and to help people grow in their roles.

Improving Technology Through Teamwide Feedback

This article outlines the process taken to create a formal technical strategy for a growing company. The process involved gathering feedback from the entire team, curating the feedback into segments, and setting scores for each initiative. The lessons learned from this process included the importance of involving the entire team in the feedback process, focusing solely on technology, and setting scores in a session. This process enabled the team to be on the same page and make incremental efforts to reach the technological vision.

How to generate more innovation every day

In order to innovate, people need to enter into healthy conflict and collaboration. Design thinking, vision and strategy development, and software can help reduce the amount of disagreement by creating shared context. To bring more collaboration and innovation into daily life and work, one should set the intention to bring more healthy conflict and collaboration and notice the moments of disagreement and what happens afterwards.

How to Reorganize your Team Based on the Product Development Journey

This article discusses the importance of scaling an organization effectively by considering the people, process, and tools involved. It suggests constantly evaluating the organization and making hard decisions to ensure the right employees are in the right roles. It also emphasizes the need to build for the future, as technology is constantly changing and can affect plans.

Soft Skills Offer a Smooth Transition from IC to Management

After transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager without proper mentorship, the author decided to work for a new company in order to learn the necessary skills to be a successful manager. Through this experience, the author learned that management is about people and enabling the team to work together to achieve greater results than any individual could. They also learned the importance of mentorship, getting the trust of their engineers, and discovering the strengths and weaknesses of each individual on the team.

Pivoting a Mature Startup

A midsize startup faced the "Innovator's Dilemma" - their growth model no longer scaled well, leading to a natural asymptote in growth. To address this, the organization leadership had to decide between incremental improvements in the existing product or investing in a riskier, but more ambitious product strategy. To create the new product strategy, the team experimented with new product experiences, used "lean hypothesis testing" to validate questions, and worked to align the different functions on the new strategy. The lessons learned from this experience were that developing a new product strategy takes time, building a new product strategy requires a period of organizational learning, customer-facing teams may have difficulty understanding the logic behind building a new product, and alignment of the CEO is necessary to overcome the negative inertia from the innovator's dilemma.

Implementing OKRs at your organization

A leader implemented a six-part plan to help the team re-set their OKR processes and improve their capacity to execute against a strategy in an aligned way. The plan requires a product strategy as an input and key results as an output, and it includes elements such as strategic alignment, opportunity, solution, risks/challenges, goals (KRs), and asks. The plan is reviewed whenever a new team is formed, pivots, and on a regular cadence after that. The leader also provided advice on not drowning in process, getting decision-making buy-in, and understanding who the decision-makers are.

The Benefits of Restructuring Teams for Customer Use Cases

The author's previous company had an engineering and product structure that was misaligned, leading to a lack of customer-facing products or features. To address this, the author suggested restructuring the engineering and scrum teams to focus on customer use cases, bringing together technical problems to deliver a single customer outcome. This restructuring had many advantages, such as improved engineering efficiency, better alignment between product and engineering teams, and increased morale and motivation of the team. The author's key lessons learned were that restructuring can be hard to implement, scrum teams don't have to reflect reporting structure, and having a roadmap based on customer problems rather than features leads to higher product development efficiency.

Techniques for Managing Upward and Outward

This article discusses the importance of managing outward in order to ensure effective communication and collaboration between teams. The author implemented a framework to discuss successes, failures, and support needs in weekly collaboration meetings. Through this process, the author learned that reflecting on successes, expressing vulnerability, and asking for help were key to building trust and creating a culture of collaboration.

Building a Career Ladder for Employees at an Early Stage Company

When the author's first employee asked for a promotion, the author created a career ladder with four pillars: UX/PM skills, productivity, communication, and leadership. This ladder was shared with all employees proactively and enabled them to have tangible career growth conversations. The author learned to be proactive and transparent with expectations and to articulate expectations around critical soft skills.

Designing a Successful App Using Lean and Agile Principles

A team successfully launched an app that went viral by using Lean/Agile principles. They validated their idea, knew their ideal user, built small, shipped imperfect products, tested actual users, iterated often, tied into human behavior, guided people, and measured the important stuff. They learned to create and launch a smart and simple product, know their target user, and open source their code.

Taking Ownership and Empowering Your Team

This article discusses the importance of taking responsibility as a leader and how to do so effectively. It outlines the steps to take ownership of failure, such as asking questions to determine if it was indeed the leader's fault, and how to move forward. It also discusses the importance of root cause analysis meetings, team over individual, and focused disagreement. It emphasizes the need for courage and humility to be an effective leader.

Steps to Take with an Underperforming Employee Before Implementing a PIP

Managers should have sufficient documentation when dealing with an underperforming employee, and should discuss the issue with the employee and provide feedback to correct it. Shared documentation, explicit articulation of consequences, and a coaching memo can help transition the employee out of the company. This process can take up to 6 months and has a 15-20% success rate. It is important to provide support to the employee and be aware of other employees' reactions.

‘Pretotyping’ - Prototyping Without the Hassle

Pretotyping is a process that allows you to test the demand for a product before investing time and money into building it. It involves developing a platform with criteria, creating a trial group, and measuring the number of people who are willing to pay for the service. It can save time, effort, and money, and it is a smart way to test demand before investing in a product.

Transitioning from Marketing to Product: A Non-Tech in Tech

A marketer with no traditional tech skillset was given the opportunity to lead a customer migration project for a major replatform project. Through saying yes to the role and taking on tasks, they were able to learn the development lifecycle, build relationships with experts, and ask questions to gain knowledge. They learned that it's ok to not know everything, and to use their strengths to their advantage. They also learned to start conversations with what they do know, and to find advocates to soundboard with when stuck.

ICs Managing Upward to a VP

This article discusses how an individual contributor was able to build a successful relationship with a new vice president by taking initiative and showing interest in the VP's goals and vision. The individual contributor took action by paying attention in meetings, taking detailed notes, volunteering for extra assignments, and delivering strategic projects on-time and on-budget. The article also provides lessons learned, such as taking action, studying the person you are managing up to, and being true to yourself.

The Necessity of Reorganization of teams and processes in a Growing Company

As the business grew, the product and engineering teams faced three main problems: dependencies between teams, customer-focused culture, and team size. Leaders adjusted their perspective, created a source of truth Execution Roadmap, and implemented a semi-permanent team structure to address these problems. After four months, the company was able to release features efficiently while keeping the team motivated. At key stages of a company's scaling, leadership must reorganize both teams and processes to ensure success.

Why a Data Science Team is Advantageous

This article discusses how data science teams can use predictive modeling to provide insights into projects and decisions. It also explains how data science teams should be constantly learning and have project ownership, and encourages leadership teams to create avenues for the free exchange of ideas and knowledge throughout the company.

You acquired a new company -- now what?

This article outlines the steps to effectively manage an acquisition, such as getting an executive commitment on success, building trust with the founders, getting to know the acquired team, developing new leadership talent, visiting frequently, and encouraging cross team communication. These steps are important to ensure the acquired company feels part of the greater whole and to ensure a successful integration.