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Management

Explore articles about management on Life Beyond Fife

Aligning Product and Engineering
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Aligning Product and Engineering

How do you align product and engineering when communication has broken down? A product peer friend of mine is mentoring someone who has this problem, and they asked me to reach out to them to see if my engineering perspective might help. Ahead of time I thought my advice was going to lead straight to, "You need DORA metrics in place, and to ask engineering to break work their work into smaller deliverables, then repeat." To be honest, that solves 90% of most team's delivery problems. But the issue isn't that they aren't shipping, but that they aren't delivering what...

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I have a book for that
management•

I have a book for that

I realised I had gained a reputation for recommending books when it became a joke on Slack. I'm not even particularly well read, but there are some foundational concepts in teamwork, management, leadership, and tech, that come up time and time again. Sometimes the key lesson only takes a sentence to explain, but a book will reinforce the idea much more strongly. Here are the most impactful books I invariably keep coming back to. First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham — This is the book every new manager must read. Based on over 80,000 interviews with real managers,...

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Why 5 Whys isn't enough
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Why 5 Whys isn't enough

5 Whys is a prevalent engineering process in a modern tech company. When your company has operational incidents (and even the biggest and best ones do), 5 Whys is there to find the root cause, which in turn yields the next steps to make sure those incidents don’t happen again. I could tell the engineering culture of the company needed work when an internal team had an outage related to an expired SSL cert. It wasn’t the outage that made me concerned; it was the attitude of the team who had the outage. “What steps have you taken to make...

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Convincing or Instructing

To convince someone, tell them why, then how, then what, in that order. To give an instruction, tell someone what, and time permitting, consider sharing the how, and why, in a reverse of the previous sequence. Simon Sinek’s insightful Start With Why TED Talk took about 15 minutes to change how I would give all presentations forever after. Intrisically it’s known that you have to share the motivation of why anyone should care about what you have to say. But based on the evidence of so many terrible talks you’ve both attended, and presented yourself, you know how easy it...

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Managing Expectations

“This team isn’t delivering enough.” You’ve had a fully funded team of engineers working on a product for years. It has fundamental issues with quality and completeness, and still isn’t integrated with the core platform seamlessly. As time has gone on, you’re getting further behind, not closer. There is either a problem with execution against the strategy, or with the strategy itself. You reflect. You’re sure that the quality of the engineers is not the issue. The drive and work ethic is there, and they collaborate effectively. Everyone understands the plan, and everytime you question the decision making of the...

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What are your engineering culture values?

Perform an activity frequently enough, and you will start to see patterns. After being involved in the process of creating software for two decades, I’ve decided to curate a living document of the high level patterns which are most applicable for how to build and maintain software well. These are my engineering culture values, what are yours? 01. Tradeoff Everything is a tradeoff. When you make a decision, you’re choosing where you sit between two extremes. It’s a useful thought exercise to consider what those two extremes are first to calibrate your options. Many times there is no correct answer,...

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