A few times, I’ve come across companies where managers were reluctant to engage in discussions about their employees’ growth. Leadership tried to avoid it, and the managers never initiated those sorts of conversations. Digging further, the underlying issue is often that they know a significant portion of their employees will want to discuss different promotional […]
Frequently, leaders are disappointed with their team’s behavior, the developing culture, and collective habits. They don’t get why people come to meetings unprepared, or think that talking aggressively is acceptable. As someone who often sits as a fly in the room (or Zoom) to watch firsthand how companies operate, I often see a common source: […]
The higher up the organizational ladder that you go, the farther removed you get from the code being your focus: the team is your precious project now. Refactorings give way for re-organizations. New frameworks and tools are out, new processes are in. Architecture diagrams step aside, you now deal with the org chart. There are […]
Over the past month or so, I’ve consulted several CEOs who have had trouble with their tech executives. Some are now with or searching for their third or fourth CTO/VP of Engineering. More often than not, these mismatches are not the fault of just one of the parties: both sides need to be better vetting […]
As R&D groups grow, it becomes harder to maintain a high-quality bar and a fast pace of delivery. We tend to blame pure growth (too many people have to coordinate) or the inability to keep hiring strong people at the required rate. While those factors are true, having worked with companies globally, I see that […]
I’ve mentioned in the past that I have my clients go through a self-assessment of eight different traits. As it seems to be of interest, I will share a bit about another of those traits: communication. What’s Communication? My definition of communication in this context is: the effectiveness and clarity with which you are able […]
Human nature is amazing when it comes to adjusting. We get used quite rapidly to changes and forget how we initially felt about things. Now, six months into the pandemic mode for most of the western world, I’m already talking to clients who had forgotten how they were thinking and acting when this thing started. […]
When you learn a language, you think of words in it differently than how you think about words in your native tongue. I like the word “deflect.” I don’t know why, but it just has a nice ring to it. I like it so much that I worked on a (shuttered) developer-tool SaaS by that […]
I was recently asked whether the common distinction in startups between a CTO and a VP of Engineering is justified or not. My thinking is that for most organizations with less than 200 engineers, this separation isn’t a rule of nature and that you might be better off without it. It’s not needed unless it’s […]
Given that it’s my mission to help companies create world-class engineering teams, I often get questions along the lines of, “how does a world-class team behave?” In my mind, that’s a trivial question. The fascinating question, though, is to think about how you would tell that your team is on track to become remarkable. Teams […]