How to Let Someone Go With Dignity
The first person I ever let go, I did badly. It was 2011, I was a newly minted team lead, and I had rehearsed the meeting so many times in my head that when he...
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Leadership — Page 2
The Two-Pizza Team Rule, Revisited
The first time I heard the two-pizza rule quoted back to me in a planning meeting, it was being used to justify keeping a team at four people while they owned...
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Running Sprint Planning That People Respect
The worst sprint planning meeting I ever sat through ran for three hours and ended with nobody able to say what we were actually building that week. Fourteen...
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What a Decade in Fintech Taught Me
When I started in fintech, the word itself still carried a faint whiff of novelty. We were the upstarts, the people building software around the edges of banks...
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The Habits of Calm Engineering Teams
I have managed engineering teams through payment outages on the busiest shopping day of the year, through regulatory audits that arrived with two weeks notice,...
11 min761Read →
When to Build vs Buy
Every engineering leader I know has a build-versus-buy decision sitting in their backlog right now, and most of them are getting it wrong in one of two...
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Protecting Maker Time on an Engineering Team
Every engineering organization I have led has eventually run into the same quiet crisis. The team is busy. Calendars are full. Slack never stops. And yet the...
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The Leader's Job During a Reorg
Reorganizations have a bad reputation, and most of the time they have earned it. People hear the word and brace for the worst: a shuffle of boxes on an org...
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How to Disagree and Commit
Every engineering organization I have led eventually runs into the same wall. A decision needs to be made, the room is split, and the people in disagreement...
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The Right Way to Run a Postmortem
Every engineering organization eventually learns that incidents are not the exception. They are part of the operating model. Systems fail, dependencies...
11 min1001Read →
Why Burnout Is a System Problem
For most of my career I treated burnout the way I treated a flaky integration: as a symptom of someone, somewhere, not being careful enough. If an engineer was...
11 min953Read →
Building a Culture of Documentation
Every engineering organization I have led has reached the same uncomfortable moment. A senior engineer leaves, a critical incident hits at two in the morning,...
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