Knowledge shared by our community

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.

Managing Customer Releases with Feature Flags instead of Branches

Blend faced the challenge of different customers needing different functionality and accepting change at different rates. To solve this, they considered two approaches: deploying an instance of their core service for each customer, or using feature flags to deploy a single version of code for all customers. They chose the latter, which has proven to be the right decision. It has scaled past 100 customers and allowed them to upgrade their core service frequently and in a highly automated fashion. They have also experienced three unanticipated classes of "dead feature flags" and encourage pods to clean up after themselves in common codebases.

Backfilling an executive as a Founder

When the company's Heads of Engineering, Product, and Design resigned, the CEO and the author stepped into the roles and promoted a senior designer to Head of Design. Through this experience, the author learned that life goes on when an executive leaves, to be humble about one's abilities, to use candidate interviews as a learning opportunity, to spend some time learning the role but not undervalue speed of replacement, and to not be dogmatic about promoting from within.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

How to Motivate a Geographically Distributed Team

This article discusses the challenges of managing a distributed team, such as communication problems and lack of motivation. It provides various strategies to help manage these issues, such as creating sub-teams, encouraging video calls, organizing offsites, and creating rules for asynchronous communication. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the cultural background of each remote employee. Ultimately, the article stresses the importance of communication and creating a strong company culture to ensure low employee turnover.

Debugging process with newer people

This article outlines several methods to improve the quality of software systems for debugging problems. These include setting clear guidelines for prioritizing errors, rotating on-call individuals, investing in better tools, using tracing frameworks, and collecting logs in a centralized area. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of allocating time and resources to establish metrics for bug recovery and creating a culture where shipping features and fixing bugs are of equal value.

Building Up Technical Skills During an Engineering to Product Transition

Switching from engineering to product can be difficult, especially when it comes to understanding the technical aspects of data collection and analysis. This article provides tips on how to prioritize data, recognize success metrics, and ask the right questions to ensure success. It also emphasizes the importance of data-driven success metrics and the need to monitor and access data at any point.

Getting Your Foot in the Door - Product Management

Product managers come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, and there is no one correct path to becoming one. To gain the necessary skills and experience, one should work on a side project, ask to be more involved with the product at their current job, look for a hole that needs to be filled, and if possible, become the product manager at their current company. Product management is less about authority and more about influence, and requires a wide perspective of how things work in the company.

OKRs in a 2x2 Grid

This article provides advice on how to implement OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in a company. It suggests establishing a clear objective, creating a 2x2 grid with sections for implementation steps, improvements, objective, and measures, and tracking steps and experiments. It also recommends using smaller time frames, not clinging to a goal if it's not valuable, picking metrics that are reflective of success, and observing conversations around the topic to diagnose whether the process is going well. This method is not only about teaching how OKRs work, but also about modeling the kind of behavior and thought process that you want from your engineering organization.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Principles of Successful Software Engineering Teams

Establishing tenets to guide software engineering teams is essential for their success. Tenets include shared code ownership, open discussion forums, work/life balance, writing reusable tools and reusing them, documenting, distinguishing between prototypes and MVPs, leaving things better than you found them, learning new tools but choosing wisely when to use them, teaching what you learn, and learning from mistakes and adapting.

Cultivating the Positive Effects of Agile Retrospectives

Agile retrospectives are meetings held at the end of an iteration or at a scheduled interval, where team members can voice their opinions on what worked well and what needs improvement. Doximity has implemented team-wide retrospectives every two months, as well as smaller retrospectives for sub-teams. The lessons learned from this process have been positive, with everyone happy with the outcome.

5 Tips for Self-Managing Your Team

This article outlines six key considerations for implementing a self-managed organization, based on the author's personal experience. These include hiring the right people, creating a culture of collaboration, developing a shared vision, and getting buy-in from team members. The article also highlights the importance of building a team that can manage itself, and the need to educate people on the advantages of self-management.

Sourcing Alignment Through Individualized Goal Setting

This article outlines how to guide individuals on a team to achieve company goals. It suggests being transparent about the corporate goals, having individuals write out their own goals, holding them accountable, and allowing them to add in a personal goal. It also suggests educating individuals in their thinking, understanding who team members are, and conducting reviews. Management should audit the written goals to ensure they align with the company's goals, and micromanaging should be avoided.

Scaling In Office and Outsourced Teams

This company faced the challenge of scaling teams to meet new product and customer requirements without sacrificing good management techniques, team communication, and open company culture. To address this, they balanced workloads, took advantage of strengths, and captured efficiencies as they realigned their in office and offshore teams. They also hired employees with strong communication skills and embraced their individual qualities. Finally, they invested in the right tools and processes to ensure seamless communication between both locations. As a result, they were able to onboard employees 30% faster and maintain their collaborative, family culture.

Five Reasons Why Your Data Platform Sucks

Companies often embark on building data products without proper business strategy, controls, and procedures in place. It is important to set realistic expectations and design solutions with business requirements in mind. Additionally, data platforms require parallel processing compute clusters, and data quality is critical to trust the results of data queries. It is important to invest time in collecting business requirements, data governance, security, and data quality metrics.

Managing During Hard Times

When a company is facing difficult times, it is important for managers to stay connected with their team and ensure they understand the company's strategies. It is also important to maintain a close relationship with the team and demonstrate empathy to build trust and confidence. Ultimately, purpose and alignment are key to helping the team navigate through hard times.

Defeating the Challenges of Staying Technical While Being a Manager

This article discusses how to stay technical while being a manager. It suggests learning on your own, reading documentation, taking classes, asking questions, and showing understanding of the technical architecture. It also emphasizes the importance of learning as much as possible in the first six months, having face to face conversations, being vulnerable, asking questions, and treating everyone as an equal learning opportunity.

Building Networks for the Transition from IC into Management

This article discusses the importance of building a network of people to support you as a manager. It outlines the steps taken to create an Excel spreadsheet of people to interact with, rank them based on how often they are talked to, and analyze time spent with them. It also emphasizes the need for ample resources, meeting with other managers, having a mentor, and polishing soft skills.

Engaging and Managing Engineers Who Lack Confidence

As a leader, it is important to create an environment where engineers feel comfortable being vulnerable and to provide coaching and guidance to help them develop. It is also important to understand the interpersonal relationships between team members and to provide opportunities for struggling engineers to own their own development. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the team is not calculated by the developmental velocity of individual engineers, but by the team's success as a whole.

Don’t Think ‘Competitor’, Think ‘Opportunity’

This case study examines the decision to acquire a financially troubled company with an audience, content, and IP. The company was running on 150 servers in a top-tier data center, but our company had a server technology that could run thousands of people on one server, reducing the cost. After due diligence, the deal was executed and the technologies matched up, allowing the platform to be run at a fraction of the cost. The case study highlights the importance of expressing interest, engaging in due diligence, and connecting with potential competitors.