Tag: engineering
🔗 Reflections on Palantir October 17th, 2024
I suspect the tone here — largely laudatory, abd looking up to people like Peter Thiel and Paul Graham — will rub most of my readers the wrong way. Look past that, and pay attention to the notes on what makes Palentir work. I completely agree with a lot of the conclusions about how important being embedded with real customers is. It happens also to be the model that I saw working at 18F and USDS!…
Tracking Engineering Time February 7th, 2024
How do you understand what engineers are doing with that time? How do you know if they’re working on the “right” things? Here’s how I suggest answering those questions.
Managing Technical Debt December 20th, 2023
My playbook for managing technical debt.
🔗 Meetings for an effective eng organization. January 17th, 2023
Great (as usual from Will) roundup of the kinds of meetings effectve eng orgs have. My only addition: I find demo days (mentioned breifly) quite useful; they seem to really drive a culture of shipping.
🔗 Measuring an engineering organization. January 3rd, 2023
For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I actually include in the report? Any discussion about measuring engineering organizations quickly unearths strong opinions. Anything but sprint points! Just use SPACE!…
DORA Metrics: the Right Answer to measuring engineering team performance June 17th, 2022
“What metrics should I use to measure my engineering team’s performance?” Believe it not, there is a Right Answer: the so-called DORA metrics.
🔗 Shreyas Doshi on the hiring fallacy December 4th, 2021
Great Twitter thread with some hard truths about “we need to hire more engineers”
Simple Product Management Tricks October 20th, 2021
Three simple tricks product I’ve picked up that help me be more than completely useless when I need to wear a Product hat.
The VPP/VPE Relationship June 16th, 2021
For an organization to succeed – to reliably and consistently deliver great products that customers want – Product and Engineering need to work well individually, but more importantly, they need to work well together. The working relationship between these two organizations starts with the relationship between their two leaders. If these two individuals don’t have a strong individual working relationship, the team relationship is doomed. This article covers what a strong relationship between the VPE and the VPP looks like, and how to build that relationship.
Designing Engineering Organizations January 5th, 2021
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.
The Innovation/Execution Spectrum February 18th, 2020
Lately I’ve been working with our startups to establish their engineering strategies. One model I’ve found useful is to place their technical challenge on an innovation/execution spectrum.
A reading list for new engineering managers May 2nd, 2018
Like many engineers, I got thrown into management without any real guidance. I thought management was just telling people what to do. I thought there wasn’t any real science to it; you just needed to feel your way through it. I was wrong: there’s a whole field of study here, and you can learn a lot by, you know, studying! This is the reading list I wish I’d been given as a new engineering manager.…