Blogs about Management

It’s the only way to survive as an engineering leader. Hand off tasks/work to the team Give guidelines, execution tactics, or constraints to keep things on track Set an expectation of what to deliver and …

A look into the books I read in 2023, the goals I set and how I did.

We are now living in the age of OpenAI narrative, and a lot of problems are to be aligned to fit it. What are going to be side-effects of its implementation is going to be …

I recently joined Pat Kua on his Managing Managers podcast. We had a great conversation about many topics including strategy vs tactics, how to split your time as a technical leader and about my CTO …

Related posts: Tell your freelance story and help others go freelance! Free 5-day freelance course How Charities Are Using Instagram to Engage Their Communities Today is my birthday, here’s a present for you Find New …

The common wisdom in project work is that you have two choices between three options: a project can be good, fast, or cheap. It can never be all three. Good, fast projects are usually expensive. …

As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I …

Leading Technical Change is a small, live, remote seminar aimed squarely at a single topic: Real Change in the Real World. A new cohort is open now: March 11,12,14, & 15, 10am to noon Eastern …

As discussed in Components of engineering strategy, a complete engineering strategy has five components: explore, diagnose, refine (map & model), policy, and operation. However, it’s actually quite challenging to read a strategy document written that …

I’m excited to share some innovative but experimental practices today. You can use them to improve the reliability of your engineering organization. They are based on ideas from chaos engineering. What is chaos engineering? The …

Today, I’m working on our new deck. It’s a little uncomfortable, because there’s no furniture. I’m sitting on a blanket. The furniture is in the yard, being spray-painted. Before my husband left for the day, …

Back in early 2021, I started a new three year goal cycle (following, as always, the 12 Week Year planning cycle). I only succeeded on 2 out of 7 yet it feels like a very …

Chapter 5 of The Staff Engineer’s Path is going to be about leading big projects, the kind that involve a lot of teams, or where the stakes are high, or the path forward is ambiguous–or …

A model I return to a lot when talking about engineering processes is Push and Pull. Often when we design a new process or system we struggle to get buy-in. That lack of buy-in can …

This year, I’ve helped 5 design teams draft their charter. At the outset of this work is a series of 4 2-hour group sessions (it used to be a one-day workshop in a conference room) …

A few years ago, we interviewed Jen Cardello for Finding Our Way, and she shared that her team (UX Research) is peered with “market research, behavioral economics, brand, and advertising research, and customer loyalty” in …

You ask, "Should I be making a new directory for this feature I'm building?" You expect a return value of: "yes" or "no." You had a 50% chance of guessing the "correct" answer...right? Four hours, …

As an engineering leader, I'd like to share some harsh truths about managing engineers.