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!
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.
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!
Great Twitter thread with some hard truths about “we need to hire more engineers”
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. It’s organized roughly in the order that I’d want to have read them. If you’re a new engineering manager: I hope this list helps you succeed.