I hope that the importance of having regular 1-on-1s with your direct subordinates is clear without going further into it here. Yet even when I see organizations that do these regularly, a minority has an ongoing practice of doing it with “skips,” meaning that you have these meetings with people in all levels in the […]
A frequent occurrence is promoting a team member to manage their team. When you promote these new managers you surely want to do all in your power to help them become successful in their new roles. You may reason that managing a team they know well is providing them with an advantage and setting them […]
I’ve been talking to my clients about the balance required in a successful and effective team, which lies on 3 factors: Slack, Autonomy and Execution. Recently I’ve seen several examples of Autonomy issues that could have caused a lot of failure work. Picture this: You as an executive or director delegate a new project to […]
A major part of leading a big tech organization is making sure that the team doesn’t get bogged down by constantly having to reinvent the wheel, especially internally. Greatness, and simply sticking to your deadlines, comes from standing on the shoulders of giants and those in your team that have already made the needed decisions. […]
A common issue I hear being raised by clients and peers, is the constant need to reinvent yourself as a tech executive in a growing company. There are different kinds of CTOs or tech VPs (more on that in a different time), but no matter which one you are, you cannot keep doing the same […]
It’s 2pm, you’re sitting in a conference room with 5 other people. The discussion is going along, jumping from one topic to the next. This has been going on for a few minutes now, yet you don’t feel like things are getting anywhere. When sitting in a meeting, if you’re unsure of what exactly is […]
In our industry it is common to come across companies or teams where working long hours and burning the midnight oil is standard. While it may show results in the short term and sometimes be the only option, you should be extremely wary of defaulting to using this option regularly. Working with clients I’ve seen […]
When you come to choose a tech stack for a main portion of your business, I always advise taking into account 3 different metrics. Note: this discussion is about long-term solutions, and doesn’t hold for quick, POC-like needs. Look for those in a different post. Core: Whether or not this is addressing something in your […]
As teams grow and become larger, it is common to see a few hero coders take position. They emerge from the darkness (usually, since most critical issues seem to happen after business hours), and sweep in with their magic to make everything go back to the way it was. When you’re being bombarded by monitoring […]
“There are so many things to do, I just can’t get to it all!” “Sorry, I know that needed attention but I’m just too busy!!” These are very common remarks from managers, especially junior team leads. If you hear these uttered rarely, at times of crunch, it’s ok. But, if those are being chanted over […]