Engineering projects that are either directly technology migrations or shaped like them are exceedingly common, so learning to do them well is an important skill as an engineering leader. These projects tend to generate a lot of detail-oriented work and often lack the glamour of shipping product features. Connecting the…

The inspiration for this post was a Tweet I’ve bookmarked that goes “Never YOLO the communications plan”, from Julia Grace. Like her other advice it is worth emulating. Why is it important? The what and why of the changes are obviously the most critical aspects. However, as Julia’s Tweet indicates, the how of the…

The team I support has traditionally done offsites twice a year. We are very distributed and find it useful to spend time together in the same location as a team at a planned cadence. This is important to get to know each other socially, plan work, and have some planning…

Recently, I led a discussion group and an interesting thread emerged on, the question of identifying interesting problems to work on. My answer was one I’ve internalized for a while though I don’t practice as much as I should. …

All good engineering organization organizations eventually form career ladders or paths around 2 basic principles. Ladders separated by function i.e. at a minimum separate ladders for individual contributors and managers. As organizations mature you typically start seeing more parallel ladders being added into the mix e.g. Product Management, Program Management…

Thoughts for this post, started like most things with a common problem. Scheduling appointments on weekends to accomodate a regular weekday job schedule. It’s always a struggle, requiring booking far in advance to get desirable Saturday appointments for everything from a dentist to a haircut. On the rare times, I’ve…

This is an unordered list of things I learned or mulled over in 2017 [1]. It is incredibly hard to interview and hire engineering managers, particularly first line managers. 2017 was the year I decided to look for a new job. I spent some time interviewing at various companies, of various sizes for an engineering manager position. Technical interviews for engineers have received a…