Back in the Engineering Saddle Again

A little over two years ago, fresh off the heels of helping ready my company’s part of the Internet for the GDPR, I offered to again take up the leadership of a small team I had led before - this time to launch another SaaS offering - this time in payments. The opportunity aligned well …

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

I am so happy I tapped on Episode 27 of the POPCAST this morning. And so glad Dan interviewed Charity and especially the focus of the podcast: her post about the "Engineer/Manager Pendulum" I quote: The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on …

Engineering “Smell”

In software development, a phrase that gets used frequently is "code smell" - referring to an "odor" that code has or develops due to poor initial design or inattention to refactoring during continued development or maintenance.  Hallmarks of "code smell" include things like copying and pasting blocks of code instead of refactoring into callable functions, …

Don’t let the dangerously innocuous pandas maul your career

A firm warning about career blind spots from the Harvard Business Review couched in an amusing metaphor. Having assessed over 2,000 CEOs and over 18,000 C-suite leaders since 1995, we are struck by how often careers of talented executives stall or even derail because of seemingly trivial issues, many of which are utterly fixable. We …

Why Being Nice as a Leader Backfires

Valuable advice from the folks at Know Your Team: Ultimately, being nice as a leader is selfish. It doesn’t serve the team. It serves your ego. The team is looking to you to help them achieve a goal. And instead, you’re looking to have your decisions, actions, and yourself perceived as positive by them.Claire Lew

Manage People as Adults, Not Children

A great article from Entrepreneur on the downsides of having employees overly reliant on leaders for decision making.

Always Be Clarifying What Success Looks Like

By the end of the project, we had done more than we probably needed to. Honestly, _far_ more than we needed to. The requirement had come down to build "Service X", and the team rallied and pulled it off. But, in hindsight, I think we might have been able to deliver sooner - if I …

Thoughts on “The Manager’s Path” by Camille Fournier

It’s a quick read, focusing on some of the unique challenges of leadership at technology companies, and the progressive structure (e.g. team lead to manager to manager of managers) makes it easy to jump in at whether level you find yourself at on the ladder (and to see what you missed and should have picked …