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 →
Tagged #management — Page 3
Why Great Engineers Sometimes Make Poor Managers
Over the years I have promoted more engineers into management than I can easily count, and I have watched a meaningful fraction of those promotions struggle....
11 min627Read →
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 →
Career Ladders That Actually Motivate
Every few years I rediscover the same uncomfortable truth: the career ladder I inherited was built to satisfy HR and finance, not to motivate engineers. It...
11 min358Read →
The Meeting Audit Every Team Needs
Every engineering organization I have worked in has a quiet, expensive problem hiding in plain sight: the calendar. Meetings accrete like sediment. A standup...
11 min610Read →
Handling a Production Incident Calmly
Every engineering leader remembers their first real production incident. Mine was a payment authorization gateway that started timing out at the worst possible...
11 min910Read →
Delegation Is a Skill, Not a Reflex
For years I treated delegation as something that happened automatically once I had enough people. Hire competent engineers, point them at problems, and the...
11 min878Read →
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 →
Why Software Estimates Are Hard
Every quarter, someone asks me the same question in a slightly different costume. Sometimes it is a board member who wants a date for the new ledger...
11 min804Read →
Managing Up Without Losing Yourself
Early in my career I thought managing up was a euphemism for office politics, the kind of thing people did instead of shipping. I was wrong, but not entirely....
12 min507Read →
Mentoring vs Coaching: Knowing the Difference
Somewhere around my third year leading engineering, I realised I was using two words interchangeably that I had no business confusing. I told a senior backend...
12 min433Read →
How to Onboard an Engineer in Their First 30 Days
I have onboarded enough engineers over the years to know that the first thirty days are not about ramping someone to full productivity. They are about...
11 min981Read →