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leadership

Pragmatic guidance on how to lead an engineering organization to success.

The Value of Frustration: Your Untapped Guide to Improvement

The Value of Frustration: Your Untapped Guide to Improvement

Frustration isn't just a roadblock—it's an untapped metric for improvement. It often serves as the sole indicator of issues in complex systems. By practicing monitoring and employing second-order thinking, you can transform this emotion into a metric for personal and organizational betterment.

Coding is a bad habit

Coding is a bad habit

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

Magic in the Mundane: Compounding Interest For Organizations

Magic in the Mundane: Compounding Interest For Organizations

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

Productivity Plow, Clear a Path to Success

Productivity Plow, Clear a Path to Success

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

Get Your Teams to Estimate Well

Get Your Teams to Estimate Well

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.

Set up Your Engineering Teams for Success

Set up Your Engineering Teams for Success

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.

Happy People Know What's Going On

Happy People Know What's Going On

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.

Use Job Descriptions to Build Great Culture

Use Job Descriptions to Build Great Culture

TLDR; Job Descriptions are often a useless grab bag of bullet points

How to Decide to Fire

How to Decide to Fire

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

Use the Right Lever for Successful Change

Use the Right Lever for Successful Change

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.

Things Are Great, Right? Measuring Progress

Things Are Great, Right? Measuring Progress

How do you know you are improving? You measure it. In an organizational setting that is hard. This article gives you the solution.

Joy in Aligning With Product

Joy in Aligning With Product

Organizations are not naturally aligned and most leaders can't restructure the org to improve alignment. Here we provide some approaches that help improve alignment with Product.