Running Retrospectives People Do Not Dread
The retrospective is the one ceremony almost every team keeps and almost no team protects. When schedules tighten, the demo survives, standup survives, and the...
11 min736Read →
Tagged #management — Page 4
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...
12 min650Read →
Building Psychological Safety on Your Team
Every engineering leader I know says they want psychological safety on their team. Far fewer can tell you what they actually changed to get it. The phrase has...
11 min321Read →
How to Give Feedback That Lands
I have given a lot of feedback over the years, and for a long time I was bad at it. I confused honesty with effectiveness. I thought that if I said the true...
10 min437Read →
The Manager's Guide to Saying No
Early in my career I thought that being a good engineering manager meant being a reliable yes. Yes to the new feature, yes to the cross-team favor, yes to the...
11 min958Read →
Why Standups Fail and What to Do Instead
The daily standup is the most cargo-culted ritual in modern software teams. Somewhere along the way we decided that standing in a circle, going around the...
9 min391Read →
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 →
The Quiet Cost of Hero Culture in Engineering Teams
Every engineering organization has a hero. The person who saves the launch at the last minute, who fixes the outage nobody else understands, who works the...
4 min389Read →
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 →
Technical Debt Is a Business Decision, Not an Engineering Failure
For most of my early career I talked about technical debt as if it were a moral failing, something sloppy teams accumulated and disciplined teams virtuously...
5 min741Read →
Why Your Best Engineers Leave, and How to Make Them Stay
Every time a strong engineer resigns, there is a temptation to reach for the simplest explanation: they got a better offer, it was about the money, nothing we...
4 min924Read →
Scaling an Engineering Team from 5 to 50 Without Losing the Plot
The hardest growth I have ever managed was not technical. It was watching a five-person team, where everyone knew everything and decisions happened over a...
5 min758Read →