Most people suck at managing up. They waste their boss’ time with too much (or too little) information. Here’s how to give the right amount of context: Star employees are exceptional at communicating and managing up. This is even more important in a remote working environment. They proactively…

Honeycomb has a reputation for being a very engineering-driven company. No surprise there, since it was founded by two engineers and our mission involves building an engineering product for other engineers. We are never going to stop being engineering-driven in the sense that we are building for…

4 min read· Jan 17, 2022 -- LeBron James isn’t happy. He’s having a fantastic personal season. At age 37, he missed fewer games due to injuries compared to the last three seasons, he scores an average of 29 points per game (his best in the last ten years) in good percentages, his assist and rebound…

I’m often asked how best to interview VP Engineering or other engineering leadership candidates. It’s a hard problem. One of my standard answers seems to work for a lot of people, so here it is. I thi

I Asked Managers of Managers I Look Up To for Advice As I Transitioned From Team Lead to Director of Engineering 7 min read· Jan 5, 2022 -- I recently stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Lemonade. Though I’ve been leading teams for quite a few years now, managing managers is a new…

What if we could visualise the cost of attrition? Here’s a team. Someone leaves. We hire a replacement.We get lucky and manage to find someone more skilled. Looks like we’re better off? Really when someone leaves we lose all the relationships they had with the rest of the team as well. The team is a…

It’s inevitable that your team will need things from other teams. This is especially common in product engineering. You can use the “Independent Executor Model” to avoid making this a problem. What pain do dependencies cause? It’s very common to get into a situation where you need something from…

My Software Estimation Technique Last time, I explained that, although estimating software project timelines is hard, you should do it anyway. With that background, I want to go into some detail and share the technique I use when I need to develop a project timeline. The critical characteristic:…

You have 1 article left to read this month before you need to register a free LeadDev.com account. Breaking down silos isn’t always easy. But bringing diverse perspectives together is essential if we want to build great products. Great software products fulfill a broad range of use cases, including…

Contents The Short Answer A common question I hear in my technical leadership workshops is, “How many people can someone (e.g. a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager) lead?” What’s the magic number? My answer is generally 5-7 people for an experienced leader, but many factors affect the final number.…

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The virtual office skeptic says, “we can’t go fully remote, because the serendipity of personal connection is too important.” The theory goes that watercooler conversations and elevator encounters add up to an emotional bond. Add to that the happy coincidence of overhearing a conversation where you…

I’m enjoying Marianne Bellotti’s book Kill It With Fire, which is a kind of guidebook for software modernization projects (think: migrating legacy systems). In Chapter Five, she talks about the importance of momentum for success, and how a crisis can be a valuable tool for creating a sense of…

9 min read· Aug 25, 2021 -- There’s a fairly well known concept in Lean Manufacturing called Just In Time Inventory Management. Put simply you want to produce your goods on demand rather than maintaining high levels of inventory. In order to accomplish this you must identify the waste in your…

4 min read· May 31, 2021 -- By “high growth”, I mean in terms of employee count and roughly doubling or more every year. Even at slower growth rates, some of the phenomena I’ll describe may be relevant. Two reasons why building teams in high growth is difficult: can’t assume stable teams, can’t rely…

Words are loaded pistols. – Jean-Paul Sartre The horrific killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many other Black lives have resulted in written statements by CEOs, COOs, college and university presidents, provosts, deans, department heads, and numerous others that promise to…

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I get the occasional email from former colleagues asking for advice, and one of the most popular inquiries is, "Hey, I really liked that interview thing you did. Can you send me something I can share with my new company?" Hiring strategies are an evergreen topic, probably because it's so important,…

Having worked for a decade as an engineer at various companies, I noticed how most teams in software often have "the" manager and "the" tech lead or "the" senior engineer. These are the decision-makers and ones that lead all projects. Many engineers go to these people asking, "What do you think I…

This twitter thread seemed to strike a chord with people, rather astonishingly so. I am transcribing parts of it for the sake of longevity and findability. I keep talking to engineers who are antsy to get to senior and beyond, frustrated that it is taking so long. And I've encountered one very, very…

👋 Hi! I’m Julie Zhuo. I help companies scale and build people-centric products informed by data. I’m the author of a popular management book. I used to lead design for the Facebook app. The Looking Glass is my once-a-month-ish musings on products, teams, and our journey as builders. Once upon a…

Note: With dad-hood I’m doing more lists. They’re easier to write while learning to care for this awesome little farting/burping/pooping/smiling human. Apologies if you’re a fan of the longer posts. I’ll get back to them eventually/occasionally. A quick list of hints that there may be an opportunity…

Bikeshedding is a metaphor to illustrate the strange tendency we have to spend excessive time on trivial matters, often glossing over important ones. Here’s why we do it, and how to stop. *** How can we stop wasting time on unimportant details? From meetings at work that drag on forever without…

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply…

If there is one debate that is the endlessly circling “Star Wars versus Star Trek” of product development, it is what I refer to as “The Tradeoff Between Quality and Time” (TTBQT). Here’s how it typically goes: Alice: The way we’ve built X is pretty janky/slow/hacky. I have a better solution. Bob:…

MicroStockHub/Getty Images Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a PowerPoint deck explaining how we shaped the…

Recursive Cactus has been working as a full-stack engineer at a well-known tech company for the past 5 years, but he’s now considering a career move. Over the past 6 months, Recursive Cactus (that’s his anonymous handle on interviewing.io) has been preparing himself to succeed in future interviews,…

“Technical debt” is a metaphor for all software design choices that turn out to be suboptimal, no longer valid, or just plain wrong. These choices incur a cost on future development, and the shortcuts taken today will later slow you down until you “pay back” the debt by fixing the problems. And it’s…

I pressed “publish” on almost three years ago. Someone asked me recently about my “current thinking” on feature factories, so I took advantage of that prompt and gave it some thought. Here are twelve current thoughts on the feature factory challenge. I’ve got more to say on the topic, but this is a…

(Note: This was written in 2016. I recently — in late 2019 — wrote a post about some things I’ve learned since then.) I’ve used the term Feature Factory at a couple conference talks over the past two years. I started using the term when a software developer friend complained that he was “just…

There are at least two overarching mental models for looking at the world: One could be called the bell curve and the other, the 80/20 curve. When I was marketing my book, The End of Jobs, I spent a week sending personal emails (in Gmail, one by one, not in bulk) to two hundred people who I thought…

Career coaching August 11, 2015 Flashpop/Getty Images Leer en españolLer em português Over the years, I’ve asked hundreds of executive students what skills they believe are essential for leaders. “The ability to give tough feedback” comes up frequently. But what exactly is “tough feedback”? The…

Managing people From the Magazine (September 2002) Leer en españolLer em português Giving feedback to your employees, particularly when their performances fall short of expectations, is one of the most critical roles you play as a manager. For most people, it’s also one of the most dreaded. Such…

John Allspaw has a great tweet on problem discovery: I’ve always loved the tweet, but I only recently noticed the paper he cites in the thread. It’s called “ The Art of Problem Discovery: Adaptive Thinking for Innovation and Growth “, by Brian Mathews. In the prologue, the paper tells the origin…