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 →
Tagged #culture
13 articles tagged #culture.
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...
12 min910Read →
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...
11 min735Read →
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,...
12 min621Read →
The Cost of Always Being Available
Somewhere along the way, availability stopped being a courtesy and became an expectation. I noticed it in myself first: the reflexive glance at a phone during...
11 min915Read →
Making Skip-Level 1-on-1s Useful
Skip-level 1-on-1s are one of those practices that sound obviously good and usually deliver almost nothing. You block thirty minutes with someone two layers...
12 min960Read →
Leading Through Uncertainty
Every leader claims to thrive under pressure, but uncertainty is a different beast than pressure. Pressure has a shape: a deadline, a launch, an audit you can...
11 min682Read →
The First Team Principle for Leaders
Most leaders, when asked to name their team, point downward. They describe the engineers, the product managers, the analysts who report to them. That answer...
11 min696Read →
Running Retrospectives People Do Not Dread
The retrospective is the one ceremony almost every team keeps and almost no team protects. When schedules tighten, the demo survives, standup survives, and the...
11 min736Read →
Building Psychological Safety on Your Team
Every engineering leader I know says they want psychological safety on their team. Far fewer can tell you what they actually changed to get it. The phrase has...
11 min321Read →