The Two-Pizza Team Rule, Revisited
The first time I heard the two-pizza rule quoted back to me in a planning meeting, it was being used to justify keeping a team at four people while they owned...
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Tagged #career — Page 2
Running Sprint Planning That People Respect
The worst sprint planning meeting I ever sat through ran for three hours and ended with nobody able to say what we were actually building that week. Fourteen...
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What a Decade in Fintech Taught Me
When I started in fintech, the word itself still carried a faint whiff of novelty. We were the upstarts, the people building software around the edges of banks...
10 min455Read →
The Engineer-to-Lead Transition
The most consequential promotion of my career was also the one I was least prepared for. I had spent years getting good at writing systems that settled...
12 min390Read →
Why Great Engineers Sometimes Make Poor Managers
Over the years I have promoted more engineers into management than I can easily count, and I have watched a meaningful fraction of those promotions struggle....
11 min627Read →
Career Ladders That Actually Motivate
Every few years I rediscover the same uncomfortable truth: the career ladder I inherited was built to satisfy HR and finance, not to motivate engineers. It...
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Delegation Is a Skill, Not a Reflex
For years I treated delegation as something that happened automatically once I had enough people. Hire competent engineers, point them at problems, and the...
11 min878Read →
Managing Up Without Losing Yourself
Early in my career I thought managing up was a euphemism for office politics, the kind of thing people did instead of shipping. I was wrong, but not entirely....
12 min507Read →
Mentoring vs Coaching: Knowing the Difference
Somewhere around my third year leading engineering, I realised I was using two words interchangeably that I had no business confusing. I told a senior backend...
12 min433Read →
Hiring for Potential vs Experience
Every hiring decision is a bet on the future, but the two ways we frame that bet could not be more different. When I hire for experience, I am betting that the...
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From Code Reviews to Career Reviews: Growing the Engineers Around You
The single transition that most defined my growth as a leader was realizing that my job was no longer to write the best code in the room. It was to grow the...
5 min915Read →
Running 1-on-1s That Actually Change Outcomes
The one-on-one is the most powerful tool a manager has and the most commonly wasted. Done well, it is where problems surface while they are still small, where...
5 min632Read →