Organizations
- Keep innovation and maintenance together. No bug fixing team.
- Teams should have 6 to eight members
- To create a new team grow an existing team and split it
- Never create empty teams
- Managers manage no more than 8 individuals
- 4 states of a team -- falling behind -- trading water -- repaying debt -- innovating
- Teams stop growing and consolidating (good thing!) while the company still grows a lot. Gives enginees freedom to iterate.
- Never kill high performance teams!
- If a team has a lot of slack then give them more scope (aka responsibilities)
- You can also move out individuals to another team for a fixed amount of time if there is help needed.
- You only get value from projects when they finish
- Interruptions from Slack and so are a prodctivity killer
- Block parts of your calendar with "focus" time to prohibit ad-hoc meetings
- Documentation is important - also to minimize ad-hoc meeting requests
- Succession planning is very important!
- Take list of your employees and identify employees that could do another job (manager etc)
- Find out things that you can delegate
Tools
- Simple framework for product discovery -- Write customer letter for launch announcement -- Identify prior art -- find reference users -- Prefer experimentation over analysis -- Find the path more quickly traveled -- Justify switching costs
- Strategy: Documents that explain trade-offs to address challenge
- Visions: Aspriational documents to enable individuals to make decisions that fit together
- Have goals with monetary boundaries
- Contextualize. Numbers alone are meaningless. But in context they are helpful: "You are the team that spends most of the money of all teams" vs. "You are spending 100k".
- Migrations (rewrites) the only scalable way to fix tech debt
- Good advice how departments look like and what teams have to have (mission statements, ownership etc)
- You have to develop careers - even when it is unclear for themselves.
- Head of engineering must be skilled at organizational design, process design, business strategy, mentoring, coaching, public speaking and written communication.
- Some good advice how to speak with the media: -- Answer the question you want to be asked -- Stay positive -- Speak in threes (Make three points)
- Leading without authority: Model, Document, Share. Basically do something good that people will copy.
- Presenting to senior management: -- Start with the conclusion. The show how you got there.
- Prioritize long term success over short term quality
- If you are underwater. Don't silently drop things, but delegate them.
- Hire before you get overwhelmed (aka hire early)
Approaches
- Management is a moral profession
- If you cannot explain velocity and/or priorities then you got a relationship problem.
- With the right people any process works. And with the wrong people no process works.
- Do hard things first
- Do the right thing for the company, the right thing for the team and the right thing for you - in that order
Culture
- Have a lot of people that can lead critical projects.
- Evaluate managers of managers on the following criteria: -- Partnership -- Execution -- Vision -- Strategy -- Spoken and written communication -- Stakeholder management
- Kill your heroes, stop doing it harder
Careers
- Careers are a mix of stable times with unstable times (growth, new role)
- Make interviews resemble a real work situation
- Improve your hiring process step by step
- Three big sources of candidates: Referrals, inbound applications and sourced candidates. -- Referrals only work if your network is large
- Good explanation how to build a cold sourcing pipeline
- Good explanation how to design an interview loop and funnel
- Don't hire for potential. Hire for what they can do now. It's a bias.
Appendix
- Every team should have a vision document. A concise statement of the team's goals and how to accomplish them.
- If you are in middle management also do skip-level one on ones.
- Director Level: Manage a bunch of managers based on metrics.
- Good idea how to run staff meetings. Do a quick review at the beginning.
- Team updates can also be done as team snippets.
- A lot of good book recommendations are given as well.
Verdict
A must-read for anyone working on tech. Especially good content if you want to scale organizations and grow as a leader.