Being an effective software engineering manager is a tricky job. Whether you’re hiring the engineering manager, are already one or report to one, in this session you’ll learn what makes the best engineering managers and how to build, participate in and manage great engineering teams. I provide tips and advice in five areas of focus: people, process, technology, product and execution.
Topics include: hiring, building a team to complement your strengths, management style, effective communication, mentoring, virtual teams, career guidance, technical leadership, team size/structure, agile development, strategic roadmap building and delivering on-time.
[To download this complete presentation, visit: https://www.oeconsulting.com.sg/training-presentations]
This introduction to Agile and Scrum is a presentation that provides a high-level overview of Agile and Scrum methodologies. The presentation is aimed at individuals who may have heard of Agile and Scrum but are not familiar with the concepts or principles.
The presentation begins with an introduction of the basic principles and values of Agile and Scrum, which includes an explanation of the Agile philosophy and principles, and an overview of the Scrum framework and its origins. It also discusses the benefits and drawbacks of Agile and Scrum and compares them to traditional project management methodologies.
The key roles and responsibilities within a Scrum team are discussed next, including the three key roles of Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Development Team. An explanation on how these roles interact with each other and the wider organization is provided.
The Scrum framework and its key components, including an overview of Sprints, Backlog, and Artifacts are also explained. The Scrum events, including Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective, are also covered.
Lastly, successful examples of how Agile and Scrum are used in various industries, such as software development, marketing, and education are presented. Discussions on how Agile and Scrum can be adapted to fit the needs of different projects and organizations are also provided.
By the end of the Agile and Scrum PPT presentation, attendees would have a solid foundation in Agile and Scrum methodologies, including a basic understanding of the principles and values, the Scrum framework and its key components, and the roles and responsibilities of the Scrum team. They would be equipped with the necessary knowledge to apply Agile and Scrum to their own work.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Understand the basic principles, values, benefits and drawbacks of Agile and Scrum.
2. Understand the key roles of the Scrum team, and the Scrum framework and its key components.
3. Understand how Agile and Scrum can be applied to various industries and projects and adapted to fit different situations.
Align, Inform, Inspire: Measuring Business Agility and SAFe® with Flow MetricsTasktop
During this on-demand webinar, Scaled Agile Principal Consultant and Framework team member, Andrew Sales, and Tasktop Sr. Value Stream Architect, Lee Reid, discuss how the three measurement domains of SAFe—Outcomes, Flow, and Competency—provide a comprehensive, yet simple, model for measuring business agility at every level of the enterprise and view data from an actual product value stream to demonstrate how Flow Metrics can enable productive conversations with the business about prioritizing work, while still maintaining the taxonomy of SAFe for teams to implement and improve.
10 steps to a successsful enterprise agile transformation global scrum 2018Agile Velocity
Presented at Scrum Gathering Minneapolis, Senior Agile Coach and Trainer Mike Hall provides leaders and managers 10 steps to a successful enterprise Agile transformation.
This presentation focuses on how to seek, recruit and retain good talent for your software development team. It also examines external human resource factors such as the job market, the competition and software trends.
Agile 2013 - Lean Change for Enabling Agile TransformationsAlexis Hui
Experience report summarizing our experiences with agile transformation in mid-large sized IT organizations and challenges we faced with current methods available. As a result, we saw a need for a better change approach to help us and others in the agile community with agile transformations. Borrowing thinking and tools from Lean Startup, Kanban and Kotter we have defined a structured framework known as Lean Change. The premise behind our thinking is that successful agile transformation requires learning and feedback as the keys for success. Lean Change is founded on three concepts, co-creation of changes through negotiated change, experiment based objectives using minimum viable changes, and validated learning to guide changes through a structured validation lifecycle.
[To download this complete presentation, visit: https://www.oeconsulting.com.sg/training-presentations]
This introduction to Agile and Scrum is a presentation that provides a high-level overview of Agile and Scrum methodologies. The presentation is aimed at individuals who may have heard of Agile and Scrum but are not familiar with the concepts or principles.
The presentation begins with an introduction of the basic principles and values of Agile and Scrum, which includes an explanation of the Agile philosophy and principles, and an overview of the Scrum framework and its origins. It also discusses the benefits and drawbacks of Agile and Scrum and compares them to traditional project management methodologies.
The key roles and responsibilities within a Scrum team are discussed next, including the three key roles of Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Development Team. An explanation on how these roles interact with each other and the wider organization is provided.
The Scrum framework and its key components, including an overview of Sprints, Backlog, and Artifacts are also explained. The Scrum events, including Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective, are also covered.
Lastly, successful examples of how Agile and Scrum are used in various industries, such as software development, marketing, and education are presented. Discussions on how Agile and Scrum can be adapted to fit the needs of different projects and organizations are also provided.
By the end of the Agile and Scrum PPT presentation, attendees would have a solid foundation in Agile and Scrum methodologies, including a basic understanding of the principles and values, the Scrum framework and its key components, and the roles and responsibilities of the Scrum team. They would be equipped with the necessary knowledge to apply Agile and Scrum to their own work.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Understand the basic principles, values, benefits and drawbacks of Agile and Scrum.
2. Understand the key roles of the Scrum team, and the Scrum framework and its key components.
3. Understand how Agile and Scrum can be applied to various industries and projects and adapted to fit different situations.
Align, Inform, Inspire: Measuring Business Agility and SAFe® with Flow MetricsTasktop
During this on-demand webinar, Scaled Agile Principal Consultant and Framework team member, Andrew Sales, and Tasktop Sr. Value Stream Architect, Lee Reid, discuss how the three measurement domains of SAFe—Outcomes, Flow, and Competency—provide a comprehensive, yet simple, model for measuring business agility at every level of the enterprise and view data from an actual product value stream to demonstrate how Flow Metrics can enable productive conversations with the business about prioritizing work, while still maintaining the taxonomy of SAFe for teams to implement and improve.
10 steps to a successsful enterprise agile transformation global scrum 2018Agile Velocity
Presented at Scrum Gathering Minneapolis, Senior Agile Coach and Trainer Mike Hall provides leaders and managers 10 steps to a successful enterprise Agile transformation.
This presentation focuses on how to seek, recruit and retain good talent for your software development team. It also examines external human resource factors such as the job market, the competition and software trends.
Agile 2013 - Lean Change for Enabling Agile TransformationsAlexis Hui
Experience report summarizing our experiences with agile transformation in mid-large sized IT organizations and challenges we faced with current methods available. As a result, we saw a need for a better change approach to help us and others in the agile community with agile transformations. Borrowing thinking and tools from Lean Startup, Kanban and Kotter we have defined a structured framework known as Lean Change. The premise behind our thinking is that successful agile transformation requires learning and feedback as the keys for success. Lean Change is founded on three concepts, co-creation of changes through negotiated change, experiment based objectives using minimum viable changes, and validated learning to guide changes through a structured validation lifecycle.
This slideshow is to teach one of the most critical cornerstones of the entire SAFe process and that is the Planning Increment (PI).
This shoud teach the bascis so an individual can go away and start their journey towards planning their first one and have a good understanding of what a day at a PI looks like.
Kanban in The Land of Scrum: Choose your Own Scrumban AdventureFernando Cuenca
Kanban is often described as something you layer "on top" of your existing process in order to stimulate improvement. So, what would that look like if your existing process is Scrum?
The term "Scrumban" has been used to describe this kind of combination, but it's much more than simply "Scrum with WIP limits". It's not about picking and choosing "the best of both", but the full application of the Kanban Method to a challenged Scrum implementation, to help it move beyond what's currently causing it to stall.
Kanban is "a way of seeing"; in this session we will "see" Scrum through the lens of Kanban, and explore how those insights can be used to re-ignite the inspect-&-adapt cycle to create a highly customized process that is better suited for your particular context.
--
Delivered at Gatineau-Ottawa Agile Tour (GOAT) 2019
My keynote talk at Agile of the East, Kolkata on 11-Nov. In this talk, I have shared a perspective on what an agile transformation could bring, and some anti-patterns
Illuminating the potential of Scrum by comparing LeSS with SAFeRowan Bunning
Scrum implementations have the characteristics of an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is what is explicit in the Scrum Guide whilst the much larger mass under the waterline is deep adoption of the implications of Scrum and Lean. This is where far greater payoffs from Agile adoption are to be found. Unfortunately, few people are aware of many of the deep implications and far fewer have experienced a Scrum adoption that goes beyond the tip of the iceberg.
The recent articulation of LeSS and it’s contrast with SAFe is drawing attention to the difference between shallow and deep Scrum. This session will take you in a submersible below the waterline and use a spotlight to illuminate the vast potential to improve your organisation through deep Scrum.
In comparing LeSS with SAFe, we illuminate ways to…
1. Scale vertically, not just horizontally to help thousands pull together as one.
2. Reduce bureaucratic control and increase business-development collaboration.
3. Transform the win-lose contract game between business and IT into a win-win co-operative game.
4. Focus everyone on the end-customer and re-structure around this.
5. Produce a potentially shippable product increment every fortnight.
6. Enable the organisation to "turn on a dime, for a dime".
7. Enable anti-fragile self-optimising of both What customer value is created and How it is created.
8. Radically simplify organisational structure without the overheads of unnecessary specification, co-ordination and reporting roles.
9. Unleash the potential of real self-managing teams without this being unwittingly constrained.
10. Allow managers to shift from managing the what, the how and tracking to the much more impactful work of capability building.
Presenter:
Dr. Gail Ferreira, Agile Practice Leader, MATRIX Resources, San Francisco Center of Excellence
Rapid scale directly impacts all levels of decision-making, planning, execution, culture, and communications for executives in hypergrowth companies. In this session, we will discuss how to organize, support, and tailor agile practices for teams and sub-teams in companies with a rapid growth cycle. We will share contemporary case studies of hypergrowth companies who have delivered agile at scale.
Topics will include:
• Basic agile and lean methods
• Scrum of Scrums
• SAFe
• Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
• Agility at Scale (Ambler/Lines)
• Spotify model (Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds, DSDM).
Session Abstract:
Agile framework is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. It’s a set of values and principles that help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and continuous feedback.
Scrum is the most popular methodology under the Agile umbrella. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self-management, and striving to build shippable product increments within short iterations.
Kanban is another popular flavor of Agile that focuses on visualizing and managing the flow of work, in order to balance demand with available capacity and remove bottlenecks.
Learning Objectives:
> Gain a broad understanding of the Agile framework
> Discover Scrum and Kanban, the two most widely used Agile methodologies, and see how they can be used in construction industry
> Find out how Scrum and Kanban can be combined to have the best of both worlds (Scrumban)
Make simplified process decisions with the aid of our content ready Agile Delivery PowerPoint Presentation Slides. Discuss the technical requirements and schedule of your project using this professionally designed scaled agile framework PPT slideshow. The visually appealing PowerPoint complete deck contains forty-four topic-specific templates that help to represent agile delivery phases and goals. Take advantage of the sprint methodology PPT slides to showcase a strategic framework based on different criteria. Utilize the ready-to-use agile project management PowerPoint templates to represent the stages of the software delivery process such as initiation planning execution and release. Talk about the risk mitigations strategy that results in a decrease in risk and increase in value You can also use the scrum methodology PPT graphics to discuss the factors affecting the agile delivery such as market, customers, architecture impact, dependencies and so on. Thus, download our eye-catching and informative agile manifesto PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate the roles in disciplined agile delivery. Our Agile Delivery Powerpoint Presentation Slides ensure all elements combine beautifully. You will discover the best formula. https://bit.ly/3rUUrFL
Why transform to Agile? What are the impediments to Agile Transformation? How to plan the Agile transformation? How to accelerate and sustain the Agile Transformation.
Training materials for Agile Scrum. Starts with an overview of Agile and Lean. Followed with the Agile Scrum key concepts like Product Owner, Scrum Master, Scrum Team and Product Backlog. Theory is complemented with learnings and best practices from real life software development.
The major criteria standing in the way of agile adoption or improvement are in the hands of managers, not the teams themselves. But many managers have been trained to think in ways that are a century old.
Agile organisations require a new mode of management and a new style of leadership. This talk discusses why this is and what this new paradigm might be like for your organisation.
High Performance Software Engineering TeamsLars Thorup
Based on my experiences building high performance engineering teams, this presentation focuses on the technical practices required. These practices centers around automation (build, test and deployment) and increased collaboration between Engineering and QA (TDD, exploratory testing, prioritization, feedback cycles).
06/18/2014 - Billing & Payments Engineering Meetup @ Netflix
For this Meetup, we have invited speakers from several tech companies to give a series of lightening talks on challenges related to billing & payments systems.
This event is for engineers who are interested in learning more about billing & payments systems. No previous experience with this kind of system is required to attend.
Presenters:
- Mathieu Chauvin - Engineering Manager for Payments @ Netflix
- Taylor Wicksell - Sr. Software Engineer for Billing @ Netflix
- Jean-Denis Greze - Engineer @ Dropbox
- Alec Holmes - Software Engineer @ Square
- Emmanuel Cron - Software Engineer III, Google Wallet @ Google
- Paul Huang - Engineering Manager @ Survey Monkey
- Anthony Zacharakis - Lead Engineer @ Lumos Labs
- Shengyong Li / Feifeng Yang - Dir. Engineering Commerce / Tech Lead Payment @ Electronic Arts
This slideshow is to teach one of the most critical cornerstones of the entire SAFe process and that is the Planning Increment (PI).
This shoud teach the bascis so an individual can go away and start their journey towards planning their first one and have a good understanding of what a day at a PI looks like.
Kanban in The Land of Scrum: Choose your Own Scrumban AdventureFernando Cuenca
Kanban is often described as something you layer "on top" of your existing process in order to stimulate improvement. So, what would that look like if your existing process is Scrum?
The term "Scrumban" has been used to describe this kind of combination, but it's much more than simply "Scrum with WIP limits". It's not about picking and choosing "the best of both", but the full application of the Kanban Method to a challenged Scrum implementation, to help it move beyond what's currently causing it to stall.
Kanban is "a way of seeing"; in this session we will "see" Scrum through the lens of Kanban, and explore how those insights can be used to re-ignite the inspect-&-adapt cycle to create a highly customized process that is better suited for your particular context.
--
Delivered at Gatineau-Ottawa Agile Tour (GOAT) 2019
My keynote talk at Agile of the East, Kolkata on 11-Nov. In this talk, I have shared a perspective on what an agile transformation could bring, and some anti-patterns
Illuminating the potential of Scrum by comparing LeSS with SAFeRowan Bunning
Scrum implementations have the characteristics of an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is what is explicit in the Scrum Guide whilst the much larger mass under the waterline is deep adoption of the implications of Scrum and Lean. This is where far greater payoffs from Agile adoption are to be found. Unfortunately, few people are aware of many of the deep implications and far fewer have experienced a Scrum adoption that goes beyond the tip of the iceberg.
The recent articulation of LeSS and it’s contrast with SAFe is drawing attention to the difference between shallow and deep Scrum. This session will take you in a submersible below the waterline and use a spotlight to illuminate the vast potential to improve your organisation through deep Scrum.
In comparing LeSS with SAFe, we illuminate ways to…
1. Scale vertically, not just horizontally to help thousands pull together as one.
2. Reduce bureaucratic control and increase business-development collaboration.
3. Transform the win-lose contract game between business and IT into a win-win co-operative game.
4. Focus everyone on the end-customer and re-structure around this.
5. Produce a potentially shippable product increment every fortnight.
6. Enable the organisation to "turn on a dime, for a dime".
7. Enable anti-fragile self-optimising of both What customer value is created and How it is created.
8. Radically simplify organisational structure without the overheads of unnecessary specification, co-ordination and reporting roles.
9. Unleash the potential of real self-managing teams without this being unwittingly constrained.
10. Allow managers to shift from managing the what, the how and tracking to the much more impactful work of capability building.
Presenter:
Dr. Gail Ferreira, Agile Practice Leader, MATRIX Resources, San Francisco Center of Excellence
Rapid scale directly impacts all levels of decision-making, planning, execution, culture, and communications for executives in hypergrowth companies. In this session, we will discuss how to organize, support, and tailor agile practices for teams and sub-teams in companies with a rapid growth cycle. We will share contemporary case studies of hypergrowth companies who have delivered agile at scale.
Topics will include:
• Basic agile and lean methods
• Scrum of Scrums
• SAFe
• Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
• Agility at Scale (Ambler/Lines)
• Spotify model (Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds, DSDM).
Session Abstract:
Agile framework is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. It’s a set of values and principles that help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and continuous feedback.
Scrum is the most popular methodology under the Agile umbrella. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self-management, and striving to build shippable product increments within short iterations.
Kanban is another popular flavor of Agile that focuses on visualizing and managing the flow of work, in order to balance demand with available capacity and remove bottlenecks.
Learning Objectives:
> Gain a broad understanding of the Agile framework
> Discover Scrum and Kanban, the two most widely used Agile methodologies, and see how they can be used in construction industry
> Find out how Scrum and Kanban can be combined to have the best of both worlds (Scrumban)
Make simplified process decisions with the aid of our content ready Agile Delivery PowerPoint Presentation Slides. Discuss the technical requirements and schedule of your project using this professionally designed scaled agile framework PPT slideshow. The visually appealing PowerPoint complete deck contains forty-four topic-specific templates that help to represent agile delivery phases and goals. Take advantage of the sprint methodology PPT slides to showcase a strategic framework based on different criteria. Utilize the ready-to-use agile project management PowerPoint templates to represent the stages of the software delivery process such as initiation planning execution and release. Talk about the risk mitigations strategy that results in a decrease in risk and increase in value You can also use the scrum methodology PPT graphics to discuss the factors affecting the agile delivery such as market, customers, architecture impact, dependencies and so on. Thus, download our eye-catching and informative agile manifesto PowerPoint presentation to demonstrate the roles in disciplined agile delivery. Our Agile Delivery Powerpoint Presentation Slides ensure all elements combine beautifully. You will discover the best formula. https://bit.ly/3rUUrFL
Why transform to Agile? What are the impediments to Agile Transformation? How to plan the Agile transformation? How to accelerate and sustain the Agile Transformation.
Training materials for Agile Scrum. Starts with an overview of Agile and Lean. Followed with the Agile Scrum key concepts like Product Owner, Scrum Master, Scrum Team and Product Backlog. Theory is complemented with learnings and best practices from real life software development.
The major criteria standing in the way of agile adoption or improvement are in the hands of managers, not the teams themselves. But many managers have been trained to think in ways that are a century old.
Agile organisations require a new mode of management and a new style of leadership. This talk discusses why this is and what this new paradigm might be like for your organisation.
High Performance Software Engineering TeamsLars Thorup
Based on my experiences building high performance engineering teams, this presentation focuses on the technical practices required. These practices centers around automation (build, test and deployment) and increased collaboration between Engineering and QA (TDD, exploratory testing, prioritization, feedback cycles).
06/18/2014 - Billing & Payments Engineering Meetup @ Netflix
For this Meetup, we have invited speakers from several tech companies to give a series of lightening talks on challenges related to billing & payments systems.
This event is for engineers who are interested in learning more about billing & payments systems. No previous experience with this kind of system is required to attend.
Presenters:
- Mathieu Chauvin - Engineering Manager for Payments @ Netflix
- Taylor Wicksell - Sr. Software Engineer for Billing @ Netflix
- Jean-Denis Greze - Engineer @ Dropbox
- Alec Holmes - Software Engineer @ Square
- Emmanuel Cron - Software Engineer III, Google Wallet @ Google
- Paul Huang - Engineering Manager @ Survey Monkey
- Anthony Zacharakis - Lead Engineer @ Lumos Labs
- Shengyong Li / Feifeng Yang - Dir. Engineering Commerce / Tech Lead Payment @ Electronic Arts
Ads personalization / Netflix Ad Tech Event Nov/2017Liviu Tudor
A look at Netflix online advertising personalization platform which supports our digital marketing efforts and delivers billions of highly targeted ad impressions monthly.
2017 10-10 (netflix ml platform meetup) learning item and user representation...Ed Chi
Learning item and user representations with sparse data in recommender systems
Ed H. Chi
Google Inc.
Recommenders match users in a particular context with the best personalized items that they will engage with. The problem is that users have shifting item and topic preferences, and give sparse feedback over time (or no-feedback at all). Contexts shift from interaction-to-interaction at various time scales (seconds to minutes to days). Learning about users and items is hard because of noisy and sparse labels, and the user/item set changes rapidly and is large and long-tailed. Given the enormity of the problem, it is a wonder that we learn anything at all about our items and users.
In this talk, I will outline some research at Google to tackle the sparsity problem. First, I will summarize some work on focused learning, which suggests that learning about subsets of the data requires tuning the parameters for estimating the missing unobserved entries. Second, we utilize joint feature factorization to impute possible user affinity to freshly-uploaded items, and employ hashing-based techniques to perform extremely fast similarity scoring on a large item catalog, while controlling variance. This approach is currently serving a ~1TB model on production traffic using distributed TensorFlow Serving, demonstrating that our techniques work in practice. I will conclude with some remarks on possible future directions.
6 to 106 in 4 years - The story of the Atlassian Design teamAlastair Simpson
4 years ago Atlassian had 6 designers. Fast forward to today and the design team numbers 106. Building and managing a design team of this size is one thing, integrating it successfully into a traditionally engineering led organisation is another. Alastair Simpson (Head of Design — Confluence) will share how Atlassian has successfully embraced design as a first class discipline and is changing from being an engineering, to an experience led company. At the end of the session, you’ll be armed with a basic playbook for how to manage your team of designers to affect meaningful change within any organisation. Come for the practical tips about how to grow and manage design as you scale, and hear some of the road bumps along the way as we grew from 6 to 106 designers in just 4 years.
Costanoa Expert Series: What Business Leaders Should Know About Design- Order 4Costanoa Ventures
What do you measure to make sure your user experience improvements move the needle for your product and go to market strategies? How do you invest in UX wisely?
Audrey Crane from DesignMap presents the last of the four orders of design: Value, Vision, and Hiring.
[#DevRelAsia Keynote 2020] Developer Centric Design for Better ExperienceTomomi Imura
Tomomi Imura talks about improving the developer experience of technical content & docs and her own experiences from the most recent project at Microsoft and her previous work at Slack.
Designing a Recruiting Strategy for Hiring DesignersChris Avore
Presentation to help recruiters understand the nuances of hiring design positions in a hyper-competitive job market.
Presented at Recruiting Trends 2014 in Alexandria VA.
Crash course- managing software people and teamsRon Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
Bio:
Ron Lichty has been managing and, more recently, consulting in software development and product organizations for over 25 years at companies like Apple, Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. Before that, as a programmer, he coded compiler code generators, was awarded patents for compression and security algorithms for embedded microcontroller devices, wrote two widely used programming texts, and developed the computer animation demo that Apple used to launch and sell a next-generation line of PCs. He has mostly managed development teams and organizations, but also product managers, project managers, testers, designers, … pretty much everyone on product teams. The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last four years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career has spanned web applications, system software, entertainment, shrinkwrap products, ecommerce, interface development, embedded devices, professional services and IT - and grew from first level managing to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering and Acting CTO roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and coaches teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
His 450-page book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. He also co-authors the biannual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person freelancer, a budding 5-10 person agency, or an established small to mid-sized company - you will always contend with the challenges of growth. This month, key employees from Raleigh-based web shop Atlantic BT (ABT) will share their experiences on how to build and maintain a foundation for growth in light of pressures from increasing demand.
COO, Software Development Manager, and Creative Director will share some patterns that triggered growth, and how each handled them.
Developing High Performing Architecture Teams sallybean
Slidedeck for a workshop delivered at the EAC Europe conference in 2016, about how to develop an effective architecture function within an organisation, focusing on the need for soft skills
What is the job of a CTO and how does it change as a startup grows in size and scale? As a CTO, where should you spend your focus? As an engineer aspiring to be a CTO, what skills should you pursue? In this inspiring and personal talk, I describe my journey from early Red Hat engineer to CTO. I will share my view on what it means to be a CTO, and ultimately answer the question: Should the CTO be coding?
Crash Course - managing software people and teams (sfelc, 10.26.16)Ron Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
UXSG2014 Workshop (Day 1) - Leading UX (Trend Micro)ux singapore
Leading UX - are you kidding me?
Facilitated by
Hsin Olive Eu
Director, HIE
Trend Micro, Taiwan
and
Mike Chou
Staff UX Designer, HIE
Trend Micro, Taiwan
https://kyvio.com
Everything you need to know as a non-technical CEO / founder about choosing your stack (technologies to build on), high-level overview of the development process, which technology roles to fill and how to fill them with the right people.
This presentation is for anybody who wants to develop anything (from small to big)
Scaling Product Thinking with SAFe - The Secret Sauce for Meaningful Product ...Cprime
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the agile methodology of choice for many large enterprises. It promises predictable and frequent delivery in complex environments.
Our experience with organizations that adopt SAFe shows that an organization’s willingness to blend product-thinking, technical agility and a culture of learning is the secret sauce for catapulting the organization from “process excellence” into meaningful product impacts.
In this webinar, we’ll share tried and tested ways of introducing product thinking and engineering practices into SAFe organizations, covering organizational, product, and technical ground.
You'll learn:
- How to establish products as value streams and gently reorganize ARTs over time without sacrificing product community or continuity.
- How to use product stories to engage your teams before and during PI planning in a way that invites collaboration on a healthy blend of continuous discovery and delivery.
- How customer, architectural, and operational learning pave the way for scaling to teams of teams from a DevOps perspective, including patterns and anti-patterns.
Adopting Lean innovation thinking involves deliberately practicing Lean innovation routines. too often companies attempt to reduce innovation to a set of tools. Great companies make innovation a part of the fabric of the organization through continuous improvement. We provide thought starters here. Learn more about how organizations are doing this at the 2014 LPPDE Conference on September 23-24 in Raleigh/Durham, NC (www.lppde.org).
Design Thinking Dallas by Chris BernardChris Bernard
These are the slides I gave for a keynote at a conference hosting by IMC2 for the Design Thinking Dallas Conference. Some of the content here is repetitive across other presentations I give.
Questions? Email me at chris.bernard@microsoft.com
Javantura v7 - Learning to Scale Yourself: The Journey from Coder to Leader - Daniel Strmečki
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2. Who is this guy?
• http://BrianLink.me @blinkdaddy
• Engineering Manager Experience
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Dell Software Engineering Director of 5 teams
Dell KACE Engineering Manager for ITNinja.com
CTO and Engineering Manager at ShapeUp.com
CTO and Engineering Manager at Toobla.com (dead)
CTO and Engineering Manager at Digg.com
CTO and Technology Advocate at NSB Group
13 years in software development consulting at Cambridge Technology Partners
VP of Engineering at other startups and companies
• Just a guy passionate about technology glorifying a hobby into a career
2
3. What will I get out of this?
• If you are an engineering manager or aspiring to be one
– How to be better at what you do
– How to hire and manage great development teams
– How not to screw it up
• If you’re a software developer
– Learn how to participate and contribute to your team
– Learn what you should expect from your manager
– Learn how to support your manager
• Every great engineering manager was once a great software developer
3
5. What is an Engineering Manager?
People
Process
Technology
Product
Execution
Staff Mgt
Change Agent
Architecture
Lean Thinker
Budget
Scrum
Master
Strategy
Vision
Risk
Mitigation
Problem
Solver
End-user
Advocate
Instigator
SME
Programmer
Roadmap
Planner
Recruiter
Career Guide
Mentor
Obstacle
Remover
Facilitator
Culture
Cultivator
5
Coordinator
On-Time
Expectation
Setter
Operations
6. Do You Need to Be Good at All of These?
People
Process
Technology
Product
Execution
Staff Mgt
Change Agent
Architecture
Lean Thinker
Budget
Scrum
Master
Strategy
Vision
Risk
Mitigation
Problem
Solver
End-user
Advocate
Instigator
SME
Programmer
Roadmap
Planner
Recruiter
Career Guide
Mentor
Obstacle
Remover
Facilitator
Culture
Cultivator
6
Coordinator
On-Time
Expectation
Setter
Operations
7. Do You Need to Be Good at All of These?
People
Process
Technology
Product
Execution
Staff Mgt
Change Agent
Architecture
Lean Thinker
Budget
Scrum
Master
Strategy
Vision
Risk
Mitigation
Problem
Solver
End-user
Advocate
Instigator
SME
Programmer
Roadmap
Planner
Recruiter
Career Guide
Mentor
Obstacle
Remover
Facilitator
Culture
Cultivator
7
Coordinator
On-Time
Expectation
Setter
Operations
8. Do You Need to Be Good at All of These?
People
Process
Technology
Product
Execution
Staff Mgt
Change Agent
Architecture
Lean Thinker
Budget
Scrum
Master
Strategy
Vision
Risk
Mitigation
Problem
Solver
End-user
Advocate
Instigator
SME
Programmer
Roadmap
Planner
Recruiter
Career Guide
Mentor
Obstacle
Remover
Facilitator
Culture
Cultivator
8
Coordinator
On-Time
Expectation
Setter
Operations
9. Do You Need to Be Good at All of These?
People
Process
Technology
Product
Execution
Staff Mgt
Change Agent
Architecture
Lean Thinker
Budget
Scrum
Master
Strategy
Vision
Risk
Mitigation
Problem
Solver
End-user
Advocate
Instigator
SME
Programmer
Roadmap
Planner
Recruiter
Career Guide
Mentor
Obstacle
Remover
Facilitator
Culture
Cultivator
9
Coordinator
On-Time
Expectation
Setter
Operations
10. Do You Need to Be Good at All of These?
People
Process
Technology
Product
Execution
Staff Mgt
Change Agent
Architecture
Lean Thinker
Budget
Scrum
Master
Strategy
Vision
Risk
Mitigation
Problem
Solver
End-user
Advocate
Instigator
SME
Programmer
Roadmap
Planner
Recruiter
Career Guide
Mentor
Obstacle
Remover
Facilitator
Culture
Cultivator
10
Coordinator
On-Time
Expectation
Setter
Operations
12. The Ideal Engineering Manager Scores High in All Areas
Manager
(People)
Strategist
(Product)
5
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Scrum Master
(Process)
Architect
(Technology)
Programmer
(Technology)
12
Leader
(Execution)
13. If You Don’t: Share Responsibility and Delegate
You
•
•
•
•
Someone else on your team
Manager:
Strategist:
Scrum Master:
Leader:
• Architect:
• Programmer:
Great (4)
Great (4)
Awesome (5)
Awesome (5)
Manager
(People)
Strategist
(Product)
5
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Scrum
Master
(Process)
13
Manager
(People)
Leader
(Execution)
Strategist
(Product)
You
Ideal
Architect
(Technology)
Programmer
(Technology)
Awesome (5)
Awesome (5)
5
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Scrum
Master
(Process)
Leader
(Execution)
Tech Lead
Ideal
Architect
(Technology)
Programmer
(Technology)
14. Horrible Engineering Managers
Obvious
• Not technical enough
• Coding full time
• Arrogant
• Overprotective of team
• Stubborn
• Too nice
• Indecisive
• Jumps to conclusions
• Poor Communicator
14
Not so obvious
• Talks too much
15. Essential attributes of an Engineering Manager
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
15
Build trust
Earn respect
Ask good questions about challenges and technical details
Contribute code and insightful ideas
Express an opinion
Know when to delegate
Be transparent, share company news, executive decisions
Protect team from unnecessary interruptions
Involve team in decisions whenever possible
Drive productivity by creating just enough process for your team size
Be an advocate for your developers
Shield developers from politics
But shine a spotlight on successes and amplify their voices
18. Horrible Hiring Strategies
Bad Ideas
• Coding syntax
• Coding problem
• Theoretical questions
• Specific thinking Q’s
• Tell me about your jobs
• Deep on most recent
• Tell me about yourself
• Ask for specific stories
• Best/worst attributes
18
Good Ideas
• Proud/regret stories
19. Richard Branson – Founder and CEO of Virgin Group
"The first thing to look for when
searching for a great employee is
somebody with a personality that
fits with your company culture.
Most skills can be learned, but it is
difficult to train people on their
personality. If you can find people who
are fun, friendly, caring and love
helping others, you are on to a
winner."
19
Credit: LinkedIn “How I Hire”
series
20. Jack Welch – Successful Executive from GE
Must haves: Integrity and IQ.
Should haves: Energy (lasting
enthusiasm), Energize (infect others), Edge
(make hard decisions quickly), Execution
and Passion (work and life).
Game changer: “Generosity Gene"
(passion for people, rewarding/positive
manager)
20
Credit: LinkedIn “How I Hire”
series
21. Steve Blank – Retired Serial Entrepreneur and Author
Senior executive: “Searching For” or
“Executing”… a business model?
Greatly affects characteristics.
Make pie chart of desired attributes change size, measure
candidates by how well
they cover each pie slice.
Compare visually.
21
Credit: LinkedIn “How I Hire” series
22. Randi Zuckerberg – Zuckerberg Media, Facebook Marketing
Excited about your specific company.
Knowledgeable of interviewer.
Could I see myself ever working for them?
Learn from, be inspired, taking company to
next level.
Relevant and interesting social feed.
22
Credit: LinkedIn “How I Hire”
series
23. Eric Ries – Author of The Lean Startup
Finding great engineers: conduct good
tech interview.
Requires a whiteboard.
Ask question like creating an
algorithm, which forces them to show
you how they think, execute
collaborative problem solving.
23
Credit: LinkedIn “How I Hire”
series
24. Elon Musk – CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity
“It Matters Whether Someone Has A
Good Heart” and Passion
Biggest mistake: Hiring the wrong people.
(Don’t hire talent over kindness)
Better to balance personality and
kindness with talent to find better hires.
“No a**holes policy”
“I hire people in spite of an MBA”
24
Credit: http://read.bi/J1dBlO
25. Personality, heart, passion, culture-fit, intelligence, aptitude
• Resume
‟ Not real important
• Experience
‟ Think carefully about what matters
‟ Use standard questions? Use a coding test?
• Recruiters
‟ Don’t just trust the recruiter. Coach them.
• Personality and Culture Fit
‟ Start here. Everything else can be learned.
• Trust your gut
‟ Think you found an under-qualified person who might just surprise you?
‟ Think some senior guy can learn a new language and be your tech lead?
‟ Be open. Paint a very true picture of reality of the role and your expectations.
25
27. Building a great company culture through hiring
“More than just atmosphere (great
benefits, snacks and ping pong) the
best developers want to be
challenged, fulfilled and rewarded for
doing work they love in a way they
can help define.”
27
28. Embodying Company Values
• Netflix culture deck describes 9 company values
(behaviors and skills):
judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, inno
vation, courage, passion, honesty, and
selflessness
• Facebook lists their values up front on its jobs
page too: focus on impact, move fast, be
bold, be open, build social value
28
Netflix Culture Deck Facebook Hiring
29. The Manager’s Behavior Directly Changes the Culture
•
•
•
•
Honesty Always
Not rewarding hours worked but quality, focus
Live the work-life balance you want for your team
Groom and reward responsible people (selfmotived, self-aware, self-improving)
• The developer has an equal responsibility in
maintaining the company culture
• Everyone must embody the company values
• Happy developers are loyal and hard working
29
“A great workplace is
stunning colleagues”
“Responsible people
thrive on freedom and
are worthy of freedom”
-- Reed
Hastings
31. Hiring Strategy
• How quickly can you ramp up a developer? 3 wks? 3 mos? Build a timeline.
• What mix of senior and junior developers make sense for your team?
• Do you need to hire another senior person before you can absorb more junior
ones?
J
31
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
32. Team Management
• Management style should complement your hiring strategy
‟ Are you a better disciplinarian who can coach and mentor junior team members?
‟ Do you focus on product and process and rely on a senior self-managing team?
32
33. What’s the right team size?
• Agile says 5 +/- 2
• Five seems to work well
• But decide for yourself and experiment
• Complexity of intra-team communication
increases according to Metcalfe’s Law
• As team grows, split into more teams
• QA: dedicated or central?
• UX: shared? how thin?
• Defining roles and structuring teams is an
art. I often trust my gut instincts and
commit to adjust as needed
33
Credit
34. What can a developer do to help the team?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
34
Culture of sharing vs. heroism. Demo day Fridays?
Speak up when something’s not working
Volunteer to help people in need
Understand why you’re building stuff
Contribute ideas that solve business problems
Identify risks
Keep track of technical debt
Be brave about trying new things
Be bold about trying new technology, but ask first
35. Career Guide & Mentor
People
Staff Mgt
Recruiter
Career Guide
Mentor
Facilitator
Culture
Cultivator
35
Credit
36. Career Guidance and Performance Feedback
• What do you want to do with your life?
‟ Don’t be selfish as you give advice about career growth
• Annual reviews
‟ No one likes them. Why?
‟ Be direct. Be succinct. Truly aim to help your team grow, meet their goals.
• Performance feedback. Good and bad
‟ Be timely in sharing feedback. No surprises in annual reviews.
‟ Praise team members. Share appropriately.
• Poor performers and culture misfits
‟ Immediately on an improvement plan. Remove if appropriate.
‟ PIP needs to happen right away and create an audit trail. Build path to success.
36
37. Mentoring
• Are you the architect or are you grooming one?
‟ Should the engineering manager tackle all the most difficult problems?
‟ If you help someone else solve the problem on their own it’s much more beneficial
• Mentoring is about understanding people’s goals, instigating them to explore
areas they’re good at or need improvement in + coaching them on how to grow
37
Credit
38. Technical Leadership
• Ask dumb questions
• Look for opportunities for sharing
and spreading knowledge
‟ “So when I run this
code, this happens… oh
nevermind, I figured it out”
‟ Everyone can learn something
from each other
38
Credit
39. Regular Communication
• Best if manager schedules regular 1:1’s with each direct report
‟ Weekly or every other week as needed
‟ Two way open agenda. What’s going on? What’s on your mind?
• What do you do if your manager isn’t doing this?
‟
‟
‟
‟
39
Proactively send a brief status every week perhaps
Schedule a 30 minute meeting to discuss your topics
Ask for specific advice
Send short messages on achievements and successes (review fodder)
41. Scrum Best Practices
• User stories, estimated with story points. Track and adjust velocity each sprint.
• Just in time everything: estimates and design. (Limited documentation)
• Daily standups kept brief: what’d you do, what’s next, any impediments?
• Use epics to plan a healthy yet rough roadmap for 12-18 months
• Concentrate on 1-2 month horizon in detail, some detail on next quarter and fuzzy
goals beyond that
• Don’t waste time estimating a future that will change
• Software company? Consider release planning process to set expectations
41
42. Scrum Master – Obstacle Remover
• Owner of process – adjust as needed
‟
‟
‟
‟
Just enough process
Adjust process with team size as needed
Ears open for ideas in hallways
Rigor in tracking, updating ideas as they change
• Remove Obstacles
to
Lots
Do
‟ Politics or prerequisites
‟ Dependencies on upcoming sprints
Bad
Thing
42
„ Remove
„ Protect
Team
Success
44. Technical Strategy
• What does a CTO do? [article reference?]
‟
‟
‟
‟
Vision
Future roadmap and impact on technology
Architecture
Technology selections
• Engineering manager hat
‟
‟
‟
‟
‟
Logistics like code streams
Team structure and hiring plan (balance of skills)
Technical debt and technical backlog items
Estimation gut check and unturned rock finder
Process challenges
›
›
›
44
Product strategy coordination – clarity on user stories
QA integration, continuous delivery model (2:1 ratio?)
UX integration, ahead of time or just in time?
46. The Developer’s Advocate
• Are developers visible enough?
‟ A good manager amplifies the voices of his or her team
‟ The best ideas often come from the developer who’s quiet
‟ Let everyone be heard. Encourage it.
• Focus
‟ “Can I ask you a quick question?” 30 second interruption
can cause 30 minute delay
‟ Communication style. Meeting window? Most productive
time? Flexible hours?
‟ A good EM is the roadblock remover and team
productivity protector
46
48. You’re not that slick anymore!
• The Engineering Manager is also a programmer, maybe hasn’t coded full-time
in a few years but stays sharp so he can still think like a programmer.
• Good career trick: straddle the line between technology and management
• No matter how much responsibility, I think it’s important for the Engineering
Manager to contribute some code occasionally
48
50. Lean Thinking
• Goal: Eliminate waste
‟ Does this product even make sense? Can we prove it?
‟ What’s the least we could do to validate our idea?
• Feedback: Hey, you, would you use this? Tell me why not.
‟ People tend to give positive feedback.
V1 Working Product
MVP
Prototype
Paper
$5K
$5 Million
50
$1 Million
$50K
52. If Product Owner owns product what does Eng Mgr do?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Should have a strong cooperative relationship
Help prioritize the future roadmap
Help define product with technology bent in mind
Add clarifying details (“don’t forget about this and that”)
Facilitate conversation between engineering and product
Ensure estimates are conducted properly using story points
Product
52
Technology
53. Product Definition
• User stories, MRD/PRD or requirements doc
• Why create an Marketing Requirements Doc (MRD)?
‟ Clarity, purpose
‟ Metrics, expectations
‟ Go back and validate, track those expectations. Teams rarely do.
• Well structured User Stories
‟ As a <user>, I’d like to accomplish <task> because it will <benefit>
‟ Acceptance criteria
›
›
›
53
Must work in the following browsers, OS’es, etc.
Don’t forget to try doing this without logging in
Must prohibit two users from performing action at same time
54. Tactical window vs. Strategic window
• Different kinds of product roadmaps and timelines
• Short term: what are you doing this month or so?
• Long term: what are your goals by quarter?
Sprint
Backlogs
Release Plans
Product Roadmaps
54
56. How to delivery on-time and mitigate risks?
• Use your tools: communication, metrics, hire/fire, process changes, team
changes and don’t forget about you (you are the twelfth man)
• Ultimately, you’re responsible for getting things done. Everything.
‟ Not meeting goals? Address it. Not getting there fast enough? Hire or innovate.
• It means owning the budget.
‟ Working with the business. Spending their money like it’s your own.
• It’s understanding, recognizing risks and knowing when to take them.
‟ Also, knowing how to build mitigation strategies.
• Execution is the intersection of process, technology and people.
‟ Your job is to craft the recipe just right.
56
58. Summary
• People: Great engineering teams are built first on great people
• Process: Agile drives success through predictability
• Technology (Architect): Steer the ship but amplify the team’s voices.
• Technology (Programmer): Must earn respect to lead a great team.
• Product: Do the bare minimum, then iterate. Stay lean my friends.
• Execution: Requires style (rope vs. whip). Heavily depends on culture.
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Hi. My name is Brian Link and I’m here today to talk about building great software engineering team
Just to set your expectations, I’m not a mobile developer. But I do manage an iOS + Android dev team right nowI’ve been building and managing software dev teams since the 90sMostly in the web spaceAt both established and fledgling StartupsCoolest job was as the first CTO at Digg.com where I hired 40 people and ran all of tech for 3 years
I know there’s a mix of software developers and managers here.I do spend a lot of time focused on the development managerBut I do think the lessons about hiring, culture, product and process are relevant to anyone who works in a team building softwareI’m hoping that no matter what your background you’ll find a thing or two from my talk today that you can bring back and help your current team in some way.And this last point, I say perhaps with some prejudice. It may be an ideal and a high standard but that’s what I’m talking about.
So let’s start here – before we get to teams and more detail – let’s talk about what makes a great engineering manager
These 5 categories are the critical competency areas that every EM should have. TOC. people manager. direct reports, drive hiring, guide career, mentor, deal challenges and cultivating the culturefocus on agile today – owns the development process. coordinate with QA and user experience, drive the scrums removes obstaclesTech 2 roles. Prog+arch. strategy and everything technical are your responsibility. still able to program –and be problem solveroverlap between Prod+tech.as u define work and build roadmapsThen execution. Job to get things done and deliver.That’s a lot of stuff!
It begs the question – does an engineering manager need to be all of these things?
It begs the question – does an engineering manager need to be all of these things?
It begs the question – does an engineering manager need to be all of these things?
It begs the question – does an engineering manager need to be all of these things?
It begs the question – does an engineering manager need to be all of these things?
The answer is YES. I realize this image dates me. I am a child of the 80s.
A great engineering manager will be highly skilled in all 5 of those categories. Have you see this? Radar chart or spider chart or star chart. The graph is the blue line and this depicts the ideal – EM scores a 5 out of 5 in all 6 roles (5 categories with tech counting twice)And I’ll say If you aren’t strong in all those areas – you can really screw it up.The reality though, is that it’s super hard to find people like this.
What’s more likely is something like this. Maybe you’re not a technical all-star Maybe you were once a Microsoft Project gantt chart producer who learned how to get more technical…The red area is just there to show the area where this person has this weakness.So what do you do? Easy – you need to delegate to a senior member of your team. The same is true for any of the other big roles we’re talking about here. I’ve worked with some great engineering managers who were just lousy people managers. Funny how that happens.
And we’ve all worked with some lousy managers, right?More than just not technical enough – some personality traits really make for a lousy manager. Some reasons are obvious.But there’s other things maybe not quite so obviousPersonally I think a dev manager coding FT leads to problemsBeing overprotective or too nice can also be bad.I’m a friendly manager + people pleaser, but it is definitely bad to be “Too nice” - Leaders must take charge, be responsible, and have an opinionSo what are the other aspects and personality traits that do make a great manager?
There’s a ton of things that are important:Trust, respect, ask, contribute, express, delegate, transparency, protect, involve, drive, advocate, shield, shine, and amplify
OK so now I’ll shift focus to the team. Using the same 5 categories. First we’ll start with people.
I’ll spend a good amount of time on people and talking about hiring because I think it’s super important. It’s the core of building a great engineering team.
not a lot of focus on establishing standards or coaching people on hiring. expected to interview +make good selections. maybe that works. But I have opinions do and not to do.C++ of a copy constructor. So Microsoft and Google are famous for these “manhole covers” and “gas stations”. fun over beers – there’s a better way to find out how someone thinks. MySQL vs. Hadoop. Instead recent project specific details about problems they solvedWhat are you passionateabout. What do you do in your free time that’s technical in nature. What technical achievement are you most proud of. What’s something you’ve done that you now regret. Asking for stories helps you better understand people.
OK – so instead of just standing up here and telling you what I think about interviewing I thought I might also share some quotes I found from successful people I respect. These quotes are kinda cool. And they do happen to echo a lot of the things I believe in when interviewing.Richard Branson for example focuses heavily on personality and culture. He says he looks to find people that are fun and friendly and that care about helping others.
Jack Welch look for classic intelligence and integrity. He also looks for people who have energy and can infect others with their enthusiasm. He also focuses on passion, which you’ll hear me mention a lot. And he too like Branson talks about generous people – who are passionate about helping the people they manage.
Steve Blank wrote the book the 4 steps to epiphany. When hiring a senior manager: craft or create a business. They can be very different people. He also suggests using a graphical pie chart to easily compare candidates on the metrics that matter to you. I think part of the value here is just knowing what these metrics are. So if someone has bigger pie pieces all around they’re the best candidate. It’s smart to put a little science into your hiring process.
RandiZuckerberg wants to make sure the candidate is truly excited about the company. She tries to imagine what she’d be able to learn from working with this person. And no surprise, working at Facebook, she also puts a strong emphasis on what the person shares online - what’s in their social feed.
Eric Ries – the lean startup guy says you need to use a whiteboard when you interview any kind of technical candidate. Then ask detailed questions – like creating a certain kind of algorithm that forces them to both solve a problem and communicate visually on the whiteboard. It’s a great way to see how people think – and how well they communicate and collaborate.Funny - I just realized putting this deck together that Eric looks a little like Seth Rogan.
Alright ElonMusk is a super smart guy. He hits on some of the same themes with having a good heart and being passionate. But he also says some of his worst hires were when he focused too much on technical skills and not personality and kindness. I think you find that in hiring all kinds of senior roles. The exact technical skills matter less – aptitude and adaptability are so much more important. Elon also doesn’t put a whole lot of credence on MBAs which I think is funny.
Sosome themes that stand out. Personality, heart, passion, culture fit, intelligence and aptitude.Here’s a few more things I focus on when interviewing.Resumes don’t matter much –careful filteringExperience: Be careful because it can be deceiving. You may decide Recruiters: coach them. Be super clear. Tell them exactly what you need. And what you’re tolerant about. Give examples of good vs. edge cases.Personality and culture fit: everything else can be learnedThe ideal candidate is passionate about some aspect of your business, goals, technology and/or vision
OK that’s enough about hiring. What I want to talk about next is another super important topic for engineering managers and building great teams. And that’s culture.
See if you agree with this.“More than just atmosphere (great benefits, snacks and ping pong) the best developers want to be challenged, fulfilled and rewarded for doing work they love in a way they can help define.”I tweeted this last week and it resonates with people. It speaks to the culture of a technical team – one that respects the team members and involves them in everything.Culture means lots of things. It’s only partly defined by nerf guns and beer and work/life balance type topics…
When I think of culture, I immediately think of the deck that Netflix put together. Howmany people know what I mean when I say the Netflix Culture deck on slideshare? It’s 126 slides and I don’t care whether you work at a startup or a big dumb company, you need to read this deck and instigate your team to think like this – and adopt as many things as you can from this presentation. Just search for netflix culture deckStarts with company’s values and how that represents how they drive their company and what they expect from employees. It’s brilliant.Facebook does it too. values front and center on their jobs page. As technologists when we look for jobs – the culture and the way a company treats its employees is of critical importance.
The way a manager interacts with and treats the employees directly affects the culture. These things are obvious – but it comes down to small actions. Focusing on quality. Enabling great work life balance.Everyone needs to embody this culture.Perhaps it’s obvious but “Happy developers are loyal and hard working”. There’s some more quotes from that netflix deck that I added to this page. A great workplace is stunning colleagues. Responsible people thrive on freedom and are worthy of freedom.That’s a great way to think to build a great team.
OK. More People stuff. Let’s talk a bit about team management
This is probably super obvious, but it took me a while when I was the CTO at Digg to get it right. I have huge expectations on people to get up to speed quickly – and throw people into the fire as soon as I can. people learn on the job really well that way. Maybe no critical tasks – but give them real problems to solve and they’ll get to know what they need to know quickly and your team will rally to teach them in that context.But how fast is too fast to assimilate new people? You need to find your own cadence, but generally you need enough senior people to help mentor and train before you hire more junior people.
The way you structure your team – with who reports to who and your attitude about building an agile self-managing team can greatly affect your hiring strategy.Some people like to crack a whip and manage by fear and maybe therefore it suits them to hire a bunch of more junior peopleI like to give my teams a lot of rope. But that also means I have different expectations about their ability to self-manage and help make decisions.My own mgt style tends to work better when my team is more senior. That way I can focus on strategy, vision and product my strengths.
Without getting into too many details about agile, I’ll just say that team size is very important. Agile best practices say about 3 to 7 people on a team makes sense.The diagram on the slide illustrates Melcalfe’s Law – which states the value of network is proportional to the number of users on the network.If you draw lines between every person on a team and think about the number of conversations that can and need to happen in order to coordinate things – the complexity dramatically as the team grows.As a rule of thumb, if you get over 6 or 7 people, split your team into two. You’ll likely be smarter and more productive.
What can a developer do to help the team? I tend to focus on the mgr –that’s my role. there’s a lot every team member can do to help make the team great.Your team should encourage sharing. Do demo Fridays so people can share work and problems solved. Better than code reviews.Understand Why. Why are you building stuff? What business problems are you solving? Suggest other ways to solve problems for your customers.Be brave and be bold – about trying new things.
Last people related topic. You are the career guide and mentor for the team.
I like to help people outside the context of our current roles and positions. People move around a lot and I’m still connected with people I worked with 20 years ago.Instead of big company templated annual reviews – I focus on 1:1s weekly and give direct and timely feedback.Share freely when people are doing well. And don’t hesitate to give constructive criticism when needed. A manager should strive to improve everyone – and sometimes that means putting someone on a PIP and if they don’t improve – be decisive and move on
As EM it’s sometime difficult to not step in and solve the team’s toughest problems. But if you help someone else solve the problem on their own it’s much more beneficial.You are also the mentor, helping coach both senior and junior developers. This means you must be technical enough with great breadth in skillsto ask good questions and offer advice to anyone on the team.Mentoring is also about understanding people’s goals and instigating them to do more, explore their strengths and grow.
Establishing a culture of learning is important. You can do brownbag lunches, demo fridays like I mentioned. Lots of ways for someone to share stuff they’ve learned. Especially as your team gets bigger – everyone no longer knows everything that’s going on.I also think there’s a talent in knowing how to ask good dumb questions. It’s funny how a developer often solves a problem simply by trying to describe it to you.
Regular 1:1s are important for both the manager and the developer. Dev should keep a running long of things to discuss. Goals, challenges, complaints, career, tech ideas.And if your manager isn’t doing this? Schedule a meeting yourself. I still sometimes do this – I’ll just keep an email draft with a bunch of thoughts and send a periodic update to my boss. Make sure you do this with small successes – accomplishments, big problems you solved, ideas you contributed. EM’s are busy – they’ll steal your content for annual reviews!
So process. As an a EM you are the process owner and that means facilitating the daily scrum and removing obstacles for the team.
Agile is a big universe. I’ve coached and trained many teams. This is a short list of stuff I think is important.Use story points and velocity. Keep user stories at business value. Comparative estimates – login=breadbox. Allows consistent estimating and velocity accommodates perfect-work-day challenges and avoids counting hours. Even if you team sucks at estimating, adjust velocity per sprint. Do daily standups.Do sprint planning so you know the next few sprints in detail over next month or two. Wait to estimate future stuff later.Sprintswork best at 2-3 weeks
As I said, as process owner – establish least amount of process necessary. A small team can be chaotic. As you get bigger, may need MRD or some sort of approval processes, etc.Today I mostly manage virtual teams – but one thing is the same – ykeep your ears open for ideas in the hallway. In meetings as questions come up – encourage everyone to write stuff down – put items in theThere are many kinds of obstacles that can get in the way of productivity. Renewing a domain name. Getting approvals from management. Getting ahead of dependencies. Fighting political pressures. Both stupid and strategic things. Your job is to keep your team productive, no matter what it takes.
Now on to the topic of Technology. You wear multiple hats here.
As Architect, you should take from your experience to help guide, craft, and teach what architectural patterns or strategies make sense for the products being built. Like a CTO – you should have an eye to the future, and own everything technical.As Engineer manager – more detailed things like code streams, team structure, managing technical debt and ensuring your team’s estimates are in check. And deal with with all and any proces challenges. Coordinating things with QA and UX
I also like to think of myself as an instigator – looking for things that might slip through the cracks.And I’ve always been an advocate for developers – to make sure their concerns and ideas are voiced to the rest of the company.
In all the team’s I’ve managed,someone with great ideas who’s quiet. Encourage team to share ideas. Are the developers visible? I make it my job to make sure developers voices are heard.The other thing I’m an advocate for is respecting the dev process. You all here understand. Interruptions can kill productivity.A developer with multiple windows open and a complex set of changes’ context in his mind is like a big stack of cards and can be knocked down easily with the simplest interruption. What can you do? I’ve tried a few things. Maybe no-meeting windows, if say your team is most productive in the mornings. No meetings before 11. I also think IM and group chat goes a long way to help this problem – dev can ignore. I don’t subscribe to the Joel on Software everyone gets a room with door.
OK if you’re a great manager you might still think of yourself as a great programmer. Like a slick sports car. (this was my best opportunity to sneak in a picture of a Tesla)
The reality is, if you’re like me, you’re not that slick anymore. But it’s OK. You do still need to be a programmer – maybe you haven’t coded full time in a few years but you sstill think like a programmer.And that’s why you can be a better manager. Devs won’t share tech details with a manager that doesn’t get it. You miss stuff. Plus I don’t think you can earn enough trust if you can’t keep up and speak the language.No matter how much responsibility you take on – I think it’s important to still submit some code occasionally.Being the lead technical guy. It’s like being the store owner of the shop on the corner. After everyone’s left for the day, and before you lock up you make sure everything’s ok and ready for tomorrow
It may be surprising to some that I made Product one of the 5 categories that an engineering manager needs to be good at. There’s actually a lot you can do to help the product team.
It all starts with Lean Thinking. This is the underpinning of agile. Lean was inspired by Toyota carmanufacturing – eliminate waste, build sustainable continuous process improvementMake sure your ideas make sense before you build them. Will customers use it or buy it?Instead of marching immediately towards your V1 or MVP – consider prototypes or better yet pen and paper. Take that and ask for feedback. Find mistakes before you even start coding.And when you ask for feedback – as why somone would NOT use your product. People tend to give positive feedback only
The VP of Product or Product Owner is the one that owns the roadmap. But the engineering manager has a lot they can do to help.
What can you do? With technology dependencies in mind you can help prioritize the backlog and future roadmap.There’s a tight relationship here and you need to figure it out. I’ve been CTO for a number of small companies where I’ve been both product and tech so maybe it’s closer for me.You don’t want to step on PO’s toes – so come up with a strategy where you can work closely with them and step in and help when needed.
Maybe you’ve decided to do MRDs. Maybe you just write really good user stories. As a user I’d like to do this because it will help accomplish that.Either way, as EM your job is to make sure there’s enough detail about the bus. Reqt’s that the team can implement it.Not talking about technical spec here – just completeness. Edge cases. Negative tests. Consequnces – after you do this, this other thing should happen. Dependencies – cross platform, multiple browsers, etc.
I use the term roadmap really loosely. There’s really 3 terms I should use to be more specific. Sprint backlogs. Release plans. And Product roadmaps.Every company I’ve worked with has struggled with this. Pure agile essentially says – I have no ideas 6mos+ - but it’ll be most important.Mgmt and marketing don’t like that – especially at software company. They need a FY roadmap. Multiple major milestones planned out. So I suggest prioritizing epics and keeping it very fuzzy – but setting realistic high level expectations only.
OK last category. Execution.EM is on the hook to delivery on time and on budget. And that means managing and mitigating risks, setting expectations and ensuring smooth operations.
As EM you have a number of knobs and dials you can control to adapt to change and mitigate risks. Level of comm. Metrics. Hire/fire. Make process changes. Shuffle roles on teams. And don’t forget you are your team’s insurance policy. You can dive deep wherever you team may need you.Ultimately you need to make sure things get done. Own the budget – spend it like it’s your own money.Understand and recognize risks. Also – know when to take risks.Execution is the intersection of process tech people. Your job is to craft the recipe just right.
As you think about what makes you and your team great. It’s finding the stuff in all these buckets on your team. The engineering manager owns them – but will smartly delegate what he can to senior team members.
So to reflect on these 5 categories Great teams are built first on great people.Process using Agile drives success through predictabilityAs technology manager wearing your architect hat – steer the ship but amplify the team’s voicesAs the programmer, you must first earn their respect to lead a great team.As for product - Do the bare minimum and iterate. Stay lean.And to execute requires style (I prefer rope vs. a whip) and it heavily depends on a great culture.
Please feel free to connect with me online or ask me questions. And you can find this presentation on slideshare. Feel free to share and use this if it’s helpful.Thanks for having me today. Hope it’s helpful.