Eric Merritt

Don't fall back on your engineering skills when you face challenges. You can't code your way out of organizational issues.

There is magic in mundane processes applied with discipline. Use RCAs and processes to massively improve your world.

Organizations build out teams around 'Engineering Productivity.' It takes fundamental changes to the organization's structure and a management to improve productivity.

Technologists hate estimating. They know that any estimate they give is wrong, and that makes the team look bad. That is our fault. We ask the team to provide us with estimates that are both precise and accurate.

Organizations need to be comprised of agile, autonomous teams that can deliver with minimal coordination with other teams. Those teams must plan work, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress in service of a specific set of projects and services.

You must communicate change for it to be effective. Randomly mentioning it to a direct is not enough. Learn to communicate change effectively with low overhead.

TLDR; Job Descriptions are often a useless grab bag of bullet points that may or may not be related to accomplishing the mission of a role. In the vast majority of cases, they focus on compliance rather than optimizing them as a tool that supports a positive culture. If you

Firing is easy when someone is misbehaving. It is much harder when they are performing inconsistently. How do you know when to fire?

Successful change requires doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. It requires the using the right lever with the right pivot point.