Having helped many companies with their architectural decisions, both big and small, I have in my bags a few tricks to make things go smoother and more effectively for everyone. One of the major issues is that no one team is the same. I don’t have in my bag 3 solutions that I simply hand […]
Just because you never had proper mentoring when you became a leader, doesn’t mean your team can or should do it too. It doesn’t matter if you were a genius, all self-taught quickly and efficiently, or if you had to struggle to get where you are today. Simply because something was done that way doesn’t […]
If you never invest time in improving yourself, how will your team learn it’s OK to invest in improving themselves? Remember that you are a role model, whether you want to be one or not. When your team sees you invest time in your personal and professional improvement, they learn that it is welcomed and […]
In my work I’ve come across clients that seem to have decided not to make a decision when it comes to their organizational chart and defined roles. This comes in many forms, such as the Co-CTOs, two VPs with overlapping responsibilities, the flat team with no designated leader, etc. This might have been the easier […]
When working on improving a team’s efficacy and execution, it’s often clear that the norm nowadays has become total disregard of managing schedules and decreasing interruptions to a minimum. Where a couple of years ago you could see managers and engineers say they only check their email every X hours, Slack has completely stopped that […]
Working with new executives, either in new companies or newly appointed, you can always see how easily they forget the big picture. A second before starting they had all this grand ideas, plans for improvement, clear destinations. Fast forward a week and now they’re neck deep in trying to stabilize systems, meeting prior deadlines, looking […]
Almost any successful SaaS eventually has to offer some sort of developer tools as part of its growth and integration plans. It can be as simple as a javascript tag to be included in webpages, through REST APIs to SDKs and tools to be embedded and closely integrated by clients. The tendency, especially since most […]
Management is about the rigor and discipline of sticking to the important habits. One of the most important of those is always providing feedback through regular and routine 1-on-1s. It doesn’t matter how busy you think you are, how small your team is, how much you work together daily. What matters is that you schedule […]
When leading an organization, it is too easy to lose sight of what it is exactly that you yourself are supposed to be doing. While there’s no one single right answer, it is something that requires thought and determination. It is very easy to answer the generic purpose of the company, e.g. “we make widgets.” […]
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 […]