Being passive is not the goal. We were recently discussing this article in a tech group I’m part of. For those who haven’t read it, the blog post describes a manager’s weekly schedule and demonstrates how hard it is to do anything proactive, given you are always in meetings. The…

This post is part of a series on Creating Effective Teams. One of the current philosophical discussions in software engineering is the challenge of balancing individual and team needs. Companies want highly productive teams but understand that software is a creative process that requires some personal inspiration. On the other…

This post is part of a series on Creating Effective Teams. Our industry has shifted from a process-driven focus, with Waterfall and then Agile methodologies, to a people one, where we have been focusing on engineers driving the output of teams independently. While this shift has made many things better…

How the software industry is leaving essential knowledge behind — This post is part of a series on Creating Effective Teams. I believe we have made delivering software more complicated than it should be. What used to be a process-driven industry has recently moved to a people-focused one. While this shift has made many things better, it changed a few…

A few tips on getting big results with small engineering teams — Technology is a fast-paced field, especially in early-stage companies where every hour and day count. The runway decreases, while the expectation to deliver results increases. The typical scenario looks like this: a small team trying to deliver multiple features just in time to hit a launch date for customers. A…

Views on a role that is more art than science — The Spotify model has been a de facto standard of organizational structure in the technology industry for the best part of the last decade. And recently an article outlining its failures has got a lot of attention. It shines some light in a model that nobody understood, but everybody tried…

For any project, a team will make decisions on different levels. What to build, how to build it, in which order to do it? High energy and time constraints within projects make it easy to fall into the trap of deciding to get things moving. Fast decision making leads to…

A practical view of software engineering metrics — In one of my last posts, I’ve mentioned metrics as a tool I use to manage both up and down. Since then, I got a few questions about which metrics I usually track and how I use them. Metrics are an essential part of engineering management for me, so here…

with Zoe Gagnon Although it’s always embarrassing to watch myself on video, here’s the recording of myself and Zoe talking about our experience implementing change at Meetup. Link to Presentation Thanks to QCon and Jason Yip for the opportunity to share our story!