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Kindle Notes & Highlights
we recommend considering alternatives to hiring first. Process improvements, organizational changes, or canceling unnecessary projects may allow you to meet your goals with fewer new hires. This costs less, simplifies your job, and adds less risk to your business. In our experience, the complexity of managing a 100% growth rate team is more than twice as difficult as managing a 50% growth rate team.
Ruby.” Prefer CVs that highlight specific accomplishments, such as, “Designed and implemented feature X, which positively impacted user satisfaction by N%.”
identified the core areas in engineering and created a presentation for each of them.
presentation to provide an overview of the mothership code base.
we changed the presentations to workshops/interactive sessions, where presenting engineers discussed the top five issues in their component, whether they were key concepts, shortcomings, or bugs. This worked much better.
A buddy is a colleague — not a manager or supervisor — who is assigned to a new hire for the first few months of employment and who acts as a guide for the day-to-day activities of the company. A buddy is someone who can be available to show the new hire around the office, go over protocols and policies, and generally help familiarize him or her with the company’s inner workings and culture.
When the attrition is regretted, it means the company would prefer that the employee remain on the team.
Technical management Ensure the right technical decisions are being made by the team. Project management Ensure projects are tracked accurately and shipped on time. Product management Ensure the right product is being built for the customer.
“Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence.
avoid surprises and an erosion of trust.
A common concern voiced during rollouts is that engineers will have less influence over the roadmap than managers, despite having a greater base of knowledge about the product and technology in use at the company.
Ask any gathering of engineering managers how many of them were trained as engineers and you’ll consistently get responses in the 80%–100% range. And yet, if you ask them how many received formal management training before becoming managers, the response will be shockingly the opposite, 0%–10%. For some reason, the tech industry treats engineering management as almost entirely a “learn on the job” profession.
A new manager needs to learn how to feel good about the things their team builds, and realize that this depends on their work as a manager: providing clear direction, helping the team develop their skills, and removing obstacles from their path.
team members often become blind to the flaws in their processes once they adjust to them.
“Ensuring the team is happy and productive by providing motivating work assignments, appropriate compensation, learning opportunities, and career guidance.”
It isn’t practical to try to prevent all mistakes, so instead focus on improving how you react and learn from them.
team leaders should be careful not to send email or other messages to the team early in the weekend, since this can easily lead them to burn precious personal time researching and responding to the issue. Even if the sender doesn’t require an immediate response, it can be difficult to ignore a question from the boss until Monday.
Nothing kills morale like finding out that those 27 urgent features didn’t actually need to be done by the end of the month.
It can be hard to convince a busy team to dedicate cycles to mentoring when there are pressing deadlines and angry customers. It’s important for leaders to reinforce that such investments will pay dividends in the long run, and model this in their own behavior by spending time on training and mentorship.
Make sure whatever process you use, you emphasize learning over blame assignment.
delivery teams are truly self-sufficient if they can deliver the vast majority (~95%) of their backlog items to production without depending on other teams.
Trust issues are usually the main obstacle to empowering teams.
Shared values can help ensure that individuals make the right trade-offs when facing uncertainty or tough decisions, without requiring leadership to weigh in.
Ownership is accountability, not control.
For culture statements to be motivating, they need to be broadly understood and reflected in the actions of the team. If they aren’t, they will be rejected as “corporate bullshit” by the team, and the effort to create them will be wasted.
Nothing undermines culture statements more quickly than a leader whose actions contradict them.
“A lot of people say don’t fire great engineers — but they’re wrong. It only takes one asshole to destroy an entire team.”
Rapid growth is the enemy of team culture.
“Tell me about a professional conflict you had at your previous job. How was it resolved?”
“What skills are you most interested in learning?” or “What is the most interesting problem you’ve wrestled with?”
recommend treating values and culture as a first-class part of on-boarding.
Leaders must model the behavior they want to see from the team.
Conversely, any leadership behavior that conflicts with team values must be addressed and corrected quickly before employees start to perceive culture statements as hollow and useless.
building a culture that emphasizes learning can make teams more resilient to common scaling challenges like finger pointing and politics.
“a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.”
the first step is to prepare the team by explaining the motivation for the change, the “why” behind the “what.” In the absence of a clear, well-communicated rationale for the desired change, employees may fill the information vacuum with incorrect motivations, such as “this is just leadership posturing” or “they’re trying to get rid of our startup spirit!”
The work required to define core values and evolve a team culture based on those values is a small price to pay to build a company that employees love working for and want to be a part of for years to come.
All meetings must have an owner, who provides a stated purpose or an agenda.
Distribute all relevant documents before the meeting so participants can prepare and meeting time doesn’t have to be used to bring everybody up to speed.
If the purpose of the meeting is not to inform people but to make decisions, restrict the number of attendees to only the most essential stakeholders;
need to make a decision urgently, don’t wait for the scheduled meeting. Assemble the right stakeholders and make the decision as soon as possible.
Consider offering communication training to all employees. Explaining something to an audience with a different background (e.g., engineers explaining their work to salespeople) is a common and important task for many employees. If they are unable to explain domain-specific concepts to a lay audience, they may end up wasting a lot of people’s time.
If a change won’t solve a problem you’re having right now, don’t introduce it.
