management Meetings: Status updates versus working sessions Most people say they hate meetings. For the most part this disdain is earned. Meetings are almost always synonymous with status updates. These are almost always a waste of time. Your people are presumably literate. They can read and respond to updates, as long as you build enough slack into
engineering-management Featured Building Aggressively Helpful Teams A simple two part trick to build teams that collaborate early, and often.
book-review Summary of The Effective Manager A summary of the key takeaways from the book the Effective Manager by Mark Horstman.
engineering-management Featured KPIs for Early Stage CTOs Metrics that you ought to be interested in as an early stage technology leader, for teams, individuals, and the organization as a whole.
management Trust, Care, and Word Choice If you're an organization leader like me, at some point you've uttered the phrase "I don't care", but what you really meant was I trust you.
management The Water Cooler Outside Time and Space People usually worry about recreating the serendipitous water cooler talk in a remote context. In fact Marissa Goldberg (@mar15sa on Twitter) has a great thread about this very topic. It's an important and worthwhile consideration as a leader. Today though, I'm going to turn the issue
engineering-management Nothing's on Fire... So Now What? So you've done it. No more fires. You're the dog that has caught the car that you've spent so long chasing, you didn't know what you'd do when you finally caught it. You can start to feel like you'
fundamentals Don't Rush Your Current Work At work it can often feel like you need to hurry up and crank out the current piece of work. And so you think, maybe I'll just cut corners a bit. I'll just skip writing those tests. Or I'll just skip refactoring the code
management The Three Essential Feedback Types for Your Next 1:1 There are three critical kinds of feedback you ought to be using during your 1:1s. Evaluation, appreciation, and coaching.
engineering-management Making Training Time Stick Recently I was asking some software engineering leaders about what they do for training for members of their team or organization. The answers wouldn't surprise most engineering leaders. Aside from many stating that their organizations don't offer any training, most called out the standard fare of
management You're Encouraging Your Team to Lie to You Not intentionally, but there's a good chance you're behaving in a way that encourages your team to lie to you.
