Let’s look at Tinder’s example. 

In this episode, Chris O'Brien, Director of Engineering at Tinder, shares his insights on building and leading engineering teams, particularly focusing on turning around existing teams. He discusses transforming teams, transitioning into a leadership role, Tinder’s culture and hiring process and a lot more.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Building a new team by turning another one around
• Transitioning into a leadership role
• Tinder’s culture
• Keeping business, customer and team needs aligned
• Tinder’s hiring process

Excerpt from the interview:

“Change isn't easy for anyone, especially in the workplace where stability and predictability matter. Switching teams suddenly can be unsettling, and it takes time for people to adapt and build trust with their new colleagues. That's why I've always believed in prioritizing relationship-building. It's something my mentor taught me early on, and it's proven to be invaluable. When there's already a foundation of trust and camaraderie, transitions become smoother, and teams become stronger.”

Their Principal Software Engineer, Richard Young shares what challenges they faced, the strategies they implemented and gives valuable tips to those who consider joining or scaling a startup. 

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In this interview we're covering:

• Fleetio’s approach to scaling
• Fleetio’s approach to hiring
• Mentorship programs
• Scaling as a startup
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Bonus advice for scaling engineering teams
• Advice for engineers joining startups

Excerpt from the interview:

“Unlike many startups driven by external investor pressure to rapidly expand, Fleetio charted its own course, prioritizing autonomy and organic growth. This autonomy allowed us to make decisions aligned with our vision and pace of development, a significant draw for me when I joined the company.

Navigating the demands of a small engineering team posed its own set of challenges. With just a handful of us, balancing the delivery of customer features with support across various departments like sales, marketing, and product marketing became crucial. Our engineering efforts weren't limited to coding; we had to be nimble in assisting other teams to ensure customer satisfaction and sustained growth.”

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In this interview we're covering:

• Finding unbiased information
• Social implications
• State of remote working
• Asynchronous team management
• Remote work is here to stay

Excerpt from the interview:

"If you try to force employees back to the office, you'll likely end up with a team of B players, as the top talent will have the freedom to choose how they want to work. Right now, it's a seller's market, especially for engineers.

For managers uncomfortable with leading a remote engineering team, I don't have any comforting solutions. The reality is, if you insist on running your engineering team from the office, it's likely to fail. It's a tough truth, but there's no way around it."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Customer-centric approach and its impact
• Engineering principles
• Following the engineering principles in day-to-day processes
• Stories of the engineering principles in real life 
• The role of managers
• Finding the right engineering principles for Mattermost
• Are engineering principles set in stone?

Excerpt from the interview:

“Great companies are always changing and improving. We never reach a point where we say, "That's it, we've learned everything we need to know." Our values and principles are always evolving as we learn more and as our needs change. For example, we used to have a principle called high standards. It was important when we were struggling with quality issues early on. But as we improved our quality and introduced other principles like earned trust, having high standards started to cause confusion.

High standards were sometimes in conflict with our other values. For instance, it clashed with customer obsession when we needed to release features quickly. It also conflicted with high impact when we focused too much on polishing things instead of delivering important changes. So, we decided to remove high standards from our principles. We realized that its role could be filled by other values and that it was causing more confusion than clarity.

This shows that our values aren't set in stone. We're always willing to reassess and make changes when needed. Our goal is to create a culture that meets the needs of our team and our customers both now and in the future.”

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In this interview we're covering:

• Why isn’t product development great yet?
• Improving your software delivery system step by step
• Putting people first in practice
• The right mindset for better product delivery
• Value delivery system - Next steps
• Fitness for purpose
• Revising your value delivery system
• Real-life examples of the strategies

Excerpt from the interview:

"Success in software development requires continuous improvement, yet many companies seem to plateau after adopting certain methodologies. Few actively strive to enhance their practices throughout the development lifecycle. New methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps emerge, but their adoption is often partial and not fully effective. Implementing changes can create unintended consequences, leading to stalled progress. (...)

Oftentimes, there's no unified approach to developing successful products, which is concerning for the industry's future success."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Magda’s personal experience with mentoring
• How to seek mentors
• Magda’s mentoring program at Adobe
• Key takeaways from the program

Excerpt from the interview:

"Many people view mentoring as a one-way street, and understanding that it’s actually a two-way street only comes after you’ve been on both sides: being a mentee and a mentor later on. As a mentee, you may think your mentors won’t gain anything from helping you, but the reality is different. Being a mentor improves your communication skills, so that you can resonate with all sorts of people. You also gain knowledge, because your mentee will share stories and challenges from their industry. If there’s an age gap between the mentor and mentee, it’s also a chance to get new perspectives from a different age group. Last but not least, the feeling of helping others and giving back is just extremely rewarding. It’s an amazing feeling to see your mentee improve in their career."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Creating healthy work environments in bigger vs. smaller organizations
• Some aspects of a healthy culture
• Spotting an unhealthy culture
• The impact of managers
• Advice for managers

Excerpt from the interview:

“One thing I find very interesting about continuous integration is that it only works if the tests are successful. However, there are endless stories about engineers not understanding why the release failed on the test, so they change the test itself. 

It’s a good example of a broken company culture - instead of being vulnerable and admitting there’s an unsolved problem that the team needs to address, we just twist the tests around to meet a deadline. This way, nobody’s going to learn anything. Pull requests should be an opportunity for engineers to walk each other through the task, discuss solutions and overcome potential hurdles.”

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In this interview we're covering:

• Agile in Salesforce
• Some benefits of implementing Agile 
• What to keep in mind when implementing Agile
• How to empower developers when following Agile
• Setting up and managing virtual teams

Excerpt from the interview:

"View your organization as a doctor and your customers as patients; getting your customers’ desired business outcomes means you treated a patient. If one of your patients needs surgery, you need to focus on ensuring they recover as quickly as possible. Agile is nothing but an operational procedure ensuring you’re doing the operation methodically and iteratively.  It means you’re running a diagnosis first, then you come up with various techniques, and finally, you perform the operation the best way possible.  

But just because you have a thorough pre-surgery process, it doesn’t mean you can neglect postoperative care. You still have to monitor the patient, and if something seems off, you have to do the process all over again. 

A lot of times, I’ve seen people taking Agile for granted, thinking it’ll solve everything on its own without thinking about the culture or empowering their teams. It leads them to just force people to do more, causing lots of engineers to burn out eventually. What happens with these dysfunctional organizations is that the operation may succeed because they followed Agile, but the patient still died."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Robert’s open source journey
• Early vs. current principles
• The benefits of open source
• Current trends in the open source community
• Open source concerns & advice
• Main challenges in the future of open source

Excerpt from the interview:

"Releasing your software openly and letting people do anything they want to do with it definitely scares some people. Maybe it’s less of an issue for developers who are just writing a piece of code - as an individual, if someone finds my work useful, I’m pretty happy about it. However, when businesses make their software open source, they might worry about others using it to build a competing product.

The problem is, open source software is typically licensed in a way that you can do anything you want with it. You can build a new business out of it, competing against the people who wrote the code in the first place. This can cause real tension, and it’s not fully resolved at this point within the community. 

To grasp this issue from a philosophical standpoint, Cicero claims that there’s never a conflict between your own interests and doing the right thing. If you shape the problem the correct way, you can do the right thing, and that can also serve you at the same time."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Strategies for leaders
• Creating true diversity comes down to truly appreciating differences  
• Presenting constructive criticism
• More tips for leaders
• Common mistakes

Excerpt from the interview:

"A lot of people talk about leadership as if there’s a magic tool that’ll make everything fall into place. Here’s a secret: it doesn’t exist. In fact, looking for another tool or another technique to solve all of our management problems just creates even more confusion for teams. 

We need to stop looking for the secret tool and realize that leadership is about mindset. It isn’t a hat you put on when you come into work; it’s the way you think. Until leaders fully grasp this rule, attentive listening might remain a challenge. Leaders will probably think they’re great listeners, but their teams would say otherwise."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Max’s career development
• Skills for software engineering career development
• Choosing between different opportunities 
• Is being CEO for everyone?
• Advice for aspiring managers
• Advice for aspiring founders
• Challenges of CEOs
• Legacy aims

Excerpt from the interview:

"Both in entrepreneurship and product management, you have to say no to a lot more things than you say yes to. How to decide between a yes and a no boils down to what you’re focusing on: what kind of customers you’re serving or what problems you’re trying to solve. Based on this, you can differentiate between opportunities and see what would make your solution stand out in the market. At the beginning of the founding journey, your resources are usually very limited, so you’ll have to be very picky about what you say yes to."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Considerations of AI deployment
• Benefits of deploying AI in the enterprise
• Concerns regarding AI deployment
• Typical mistakes when deploying AI

Excerpt from the interview:

"When I think about the last 40 years, there hasn’t been a sparsity of software in the world; there are just more and more software companies providing more and more value. Every ten years, we’re having larger IPOs, and more companies are building systems that can automate different parts of enterprises. There’s more software that can be consumed and generated across companies, but that doesn’t reduce the need for employees. It’ll just increase the value businesses can provide. 

Perhaps in the future, AI systems are going to understand more and more company-wide context over time, which is a big gap in their knowledge currently. When they’re able to piece together more information from your systems, your documents in the cloud and your other products, they’ll aid humans to be even more productive and perhaps even enable stronger cross-functional collaboration."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The importance of communicating your engineering team’s impact
• Tips to get started on representing your engineers
• Communication channels to use
• Typical mistakes
• Storytime: Founding LinearB to track KPIs

Excerpt from the interview:

"We’re in the golden era of engineering leadership. I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be VP of Engineering or a manager or director. The reason is, a lot of companies are product-focused, and software is the key to their success - when you’re an engineering leader in that environment, the business is relying on your expertise a lot.

There’s a stereotype that executives tell engineering teams what they want, and they just build it without any desire to be at board meetings and have a say in business-level goals. That’s not the case anymore.

It’s becoming more and more expected from engineering leaders to be actively involved in business discussions, as they drive one of the most impactful and expensive departments of the company. Being part of these conversations also helps tech leaders allocate their engineering resources more effectively."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Getting to know open source
• Benefits of open source software
• Open source vs. proprietary software from a security perspective
• Common mistakes of releasing open source software
• Storytime: Becoming an open source advocate
• Open source at Pinwheel

Excerpt from the interview:

"There’s a common misconception about contributing to open source projects. A lot of people will say that it’s just altruism; you’re expected to work on projects for free. However, that’s not entirely true. 

By being active in the open source community, you’re building a public portfolio - even if you don’t work for prestigious companies like Google or Microsoft, you can contribute to their products, which improves your software engineer resume. As you build more, you’ll build an impressive library of contributions, which will help you stand out from the crowd in any job application. "

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In this interview we're covering:

• Defining DevStreams
• Main ideas of the book DevStreams
• DevStream’s impact
• What type of companies benefit most from DevStreams
• Implementing DevStreams 
• Common objections regarding DevStreams

Excerpt from the interview:

"After publishing the book, some VPs told me they liked the concept, but didn’t find it realistic to have streams where everyone does everything proficiently. My answer is, how do you know? Have you tried it?

When you start experimenting with the paradigm, you'll see that it’s not that far-fetched. Especially with today’s technological advancements in AI, it’s easier to pick up new skills than it was a year ago. We have so many tools available to make our work more effective, and our technology landscape is changing rapidly that it really merits a new paradigm. "

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In this interview we're covering:

• Defining innovation
• Encouraging innovation at work
• Building teams that prioritize innovation
• Common pitfalls when focusing on innovation

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In this interview we're covering:

• Analytics engineering 101
• Success metrics
• Assembling analytics engineering teams
• Processes
• Tools
• Common pitfalls

Excerpt from the interview:

"We’re a mission-driven team that wants to serve the environment and businesses as well. We’re looking at business impact and expertise, so we like to hire engineers who have the required skill set of climate modeling, remote sensing, machine learning and platform engineering and who also resonate with our mission. 

There’s an increased drive across junior and mid-level engineers to work in a climate-related field and to use technology to combat the climate crisis. There has never been a better time to get into the field of climate, and it benefits both parties. The companies are very lucky to have access to this kind of talent, and engineers who want to work in this field can choose from a lot of jobs recently."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Defining quiet quitting
• Quiet quitting vs. Acting your wage
• Quiet quitting nowadays vs. in the past
• How to prevent quiet quitting as an employee
• How to prevent quiet quitting as a leader

Excerpt from the interview:

"If a particular area of your job motivates you, you can tell your manager you’d like to do more of that. Offer some suggestions and see what you can do to contribute to the company in a way that keeps you motivated. It’s a win-win situation: not only will the company benefit from your work, but you can also surround yourself with enjoyable tasks and projects while improving your skillset, which makes you a better professional in your field. 

People may quiet quit because they had already made such suggestions to their bosses, but their ideas got shut down and they were stuck with a role that no longer fulfilled them. It might be true that the company is not interested in doing what they brought up, but too many nos take a toll on people’s motivation, and they might decide they aren’t going to bother coming up with new ideas anymore."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Defining information overload
• Dealing with information overload
• Possible drawbacks of poor information management
• Methods to track relevant information
• Dealing with information overload as EMs and ICs
• JetBrain's approach to managing information
• Finding the golden mean

Excerpt from the interview:

"Tooling doesn’t help you decide what to push and what to pull, because the issue isn’t rooted in your tech stack. It’s a people problem, and it has to be approached as such. 

When we talk about leadership and management, one of the characteristics that a leader must have is being able to see the bigger picture. They don’t just focus on the team they manage, but how their work relates to other teams’ work inside the company, and how that relates to products and services. Having this company-wide vision contributes to deciding what’s important and what’s unnecessary noise for each team."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Process management 101
• Creating engaging processes
• Making sure your processes work
• Common mistakes in process management
• Automating processes at Slack
• Creating more efficient and engaging processes - Storytime

Excerpt from the interview:

"We often feel the need to balance every confusing behavior with a process. The outcome isn’t great because a process doesn’t improve human behavior. Instead of processes, behavior problems can be solved by coaching conversations or retrospective team meetings. 

Processes enable us to collaborate much easier, but it’s the trust among teammates that powers the process. These two aspects have a snowball effect: when the challenges in behavior continue despite having a process in place, the team gets frustrated, which causes even more problems, so they introduce additional processes. It becomes a slippery slope, and it doesn’t help teams to do their work effectively."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Reasons to manage your energy, not your time
• Tips to manage your energy
• Aspects of managing your energy, not your time
• Energy management for senior leaders vs. ICs
• Communication with colleagues while managing your energy

Excerpt from the interview:

"I have flexibility over my calendar. I’m in a high-intensity environment, but I have more time than I used to. I have noticed that my previous habits didn’t suit my current situation, and I realized that managing my energy was more important than managing my time. "

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In this interview we're covering:

• Parts of a tech stack
• Choosing a tech stack for a project vs. digital transformation
• Other tools to consider when choosing a tech stack
• How to choose a tech stack connected to company values
• The process of digital transformation
• Common mistakes in digital transformation
• Story of choosing Deem’s tech stack

Excerpt from the interview:

"You need to make sure to customize the tech stack according to the company’s industry. Each industry has different needs when it comes to choosing the right tech stack. For example, in fields that use credit cards, you have to take PCI security standards into account.

Ten to 15 years ago, digital transformations were different. People came up with a tech stack, and they would implement it right away. Technologies are moving so fast nowadays that I recommend defining the tech stack only after you do your due diligence and digital transformation experts have looked at your company thoroughly.

In the age of agile implementations, we have to be flexible enough to try new things. We set hypotheses, and we try out whether they work, and we make necessary updates."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Defining high performance 
• Measuring high performance in software engineering
• Building high-performance teams
• Improving a team's performance
• Priorities in high-performance teams
• Advice for leaders on building high-performance teams
• Spotting high performers
• Building a high-performance team from scratch

Excerpt from the interview:

"Code is easy to alter to make it work better. Doing the same with people takes a lot of time and effort. The more people you have on your team, the more difficult your job is as a leader. 

You’ll have to make a conscious effort to allocate time for your team.

If you want to create a high-performance atmosphere, you have to be consistent. Day after day, you have to be clear about what you value and what you don’t tolerate. Your team will align with these values, and you’ll create psychological safety and a collaborative work environment as a result."

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In this interview we're covering:

• DAO 101
• The story of 1inch Network
• Lessons from starting a DAO
• Participating in 1inch Network
• Communication within the network

Excerpt from the interview:

"We built our project over two nights, and we didn’t sleep at all. We went through the hackathon, and pitched our idea to everyone. Someone said that it was going to be the next big thing. A few days later, we recognized that people started using 1inch. They did swaps because they got better rates there than on other platforms. 

It became famous because we solved a problem with it. When you build something that solves a problem, people will use it because it helps."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Introducing Blockdaemon
• Preparing for scaling
• Building successful teams
• Outsourcing 101
• Leadership challenges at Blockdaemon
• Responding to market changes and competitors

Excerpt from the interview:

"Having a plan is better than no plan, even if there are some obstacles while executing it. Our plan was to be in a position where we could pivot depending on market needs. 

We’ve always tried to make plans that enabled us to grow organically instead of creating a grand plan for the next few years. We’ve built some of our components knowing that we may or may not need them in the future, but they allowed us to react to market changes as they were happening."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Managers in engineer coaching
• Daily engineer coaching
• Coaching engineers in their career development
• Steps in engineers' career development
• Coaching engineers to be flexible
• Coaching engineers when choosing tracks
• Challenges of the leadership track

Excerpt from the interview:

"The key is that you’re working with people; they’re not just resources. People have things that happen in their lives, within and outside of work as well. Both are important, because they determine how they feel. 

You must be ready to manage your team’s feelings. They’re humans, and sometimes they’ll be more excited to be at work, and other times, they’ll be more focused on their personal lives. Engineering managers can ensure that the team is able to talk about these feelings. 

If you’re not mindful of that, you might as well have robots working with you."

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In this interview we're covering:

• OKR performance management 101
• OKRs in practice
• OKR-driven vs. non-OKR-driven organizations
• Choosing the right goal-setting method
• Introducing OKRs to your team
• Common OKR performance management mistakes

Excerpt from the interview:

"A few years ago, we were trying to shift to a more quantitative approach in performance management. We wanted to see how the input from engineers added up and how they contributed to the quality and the value of our product. (...)

We realized that setting up SMART goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals - wouldn’t be as aligned. 

For example, we wanted to be the best place for the best people, and provide the best opportunities, but it was hard to set the goals to achieve all these aims. Being “the best place for the best people” is a difficult goal to measure for anyone who’s not a manager working directly with people. It’s challenging to break it down into actionable steps."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Different cross-functional roles
• Cross-functional collaboration in practice
• Tips to improve cross-functional collaboration
• Encouraging respect among cross-functional partners
• Cross-functional empathy sessions
• Common mistakes during cross-functional collaboration
• Scaling cross-functional teams
• Involving management in growing cross-functional teams
• Hiring leaders for scaling

Excerpt from the interview:

"We have cross-functional empathy sessions, where people get together for 4 hours and represent all cross functions. The key tech lead, an IC, a manager, a product manager, a data scientist and a UX researcher will meet somewhere outside of the office, and spend the day talking to each other.

They could discuss what they do on a daily basis, and what’s frustrating about it. The representatives of each function gain a better understanding of the different positions, and why the work of each function is valuable and challenging in its own way. 

Every time we have these cross-functional empathy sessions, everyone goes home humbled by what others are doing and the struggles they’re facing. They realize that everyone is working hard. They often describe it as “an eye-opening experience.” "

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In this interview we're covering:

• The definition of agile
• Characteristics of agile organizations
• Truly agile practices
• Behaviours to encourage
• When not to choose agile
• Agile products at J&J
• Challenges of agile organizations
• Common mistakes
• Becoming an agile organization - J&J's story
• Measures of success in an agile environment

Excerpt from the interview:

"Our team was working on a video recording feature, and we thought that including a passcode would be useful. Surgeons would have exclusive access to the recording tool, and they could ensure that they were the only ones who could start and stop the video.

The feedback we got was an unequivocal no. They told us that they wouldn't care about pushing buttons in that high-stress environment, and that they would probably put the passcode on a sticky note on the device, making it pointless.

We removed the feature because it didn’t add value. It only created friction."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The basics of tech audits
• Different approaches to IT audits
• Making the most out of the IT audit process
• Flexmail's tech audit story
• What auditors observe
• How to prepare for an IT audit

Excerpt from the interview:

"We were teaching people how to communicate in a more agile way, and to collaborate effectively. We made sure the code was well-tested, and that everything was documented so we didn’t lose important information.

It was more about team shaping and making sure that the work was flowing in a proper way. Of course, there were technical challenges as well, but those were manageable.

Since then, the company has grown immensely. We worked with them for a long time, but we’ve stepped away, and they’re thriving.

For us, this is success. They took the lessons to heart, they understood our philosophy, and they continue to build on it."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Establishing the right environment for growth
• Culture change management as a leader
• Benefits of strong company culture
• Challenges of culture change in the workplace
• Introducing new standards
• Importance of team autonomy
• Scaling tips

Excerpt from the interview:

"When I joined Typeform, there was 20% time dedicated for personal projects on Fridays. It wasn’t working. People try to do things, but there is always somebody missing, and you lose context from Friday to Friday. 

So we tried a different approach. 

Instead of working on those projects on Fridays, we dedicated the last 10 days of the quarter to them. Suddenly, people got their Fridays back to do their normal work. On the other hand, they dedicate all their attention to their side projects in these dedicated sprints. During the side project sprints,  on Mondays, we kicked off ideas, and had the demo on the second Friday. 

It blew our minds: without even asking, around 60% of the projects were product oriented."

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Interview with Dylan Hansen, Senior Director of Engineering Enablement & Engagement at Salesforce dicussing the results of the State of Engineering Management 2022 report. We analyze the most interesting findings to get more insight and commentary from a fellow engineering leader.

In this interview we're covering:

• Self-improvement in leadership
• Hiring and retention
• People and performance management
• Engineering brand
• Remote work

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In this interview we're covering:

• Takeaways from the pandemic
• Improving employee retention and motivation
• Communication in a hybrid environment
• Supporting leaders at Meetup
• Improving work-life balance
• Building a community
• Communicating your mission right

Excerpt from the interview:

"I received an email a few days ago from a Meetup organizer. The subject line said, ”Thanks for Meetup.”

The email read, "David, I'm grateful for Meetup. My mom is in the hospital, and she's probably going to die. Because of all the great friends I've made through running my groups, I'm not alone. People come over to support me at this difficult time. Thank you!"

This is a real story. Every few weeks, I get a few powerful emails like this. As a leader, you need to connect with your customers, and you need to find ways to tell these stories to your team, so they connect with the customers as well."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The path to Respawn Entertainment
• Adapting to remote management
• Hiring video game engineers
• Process changes
• Utilizing feedback in video game engineering

Excerpt from the interview:

"Video game development is a cross-disciplinary process. You have artists, designers, and engineers, and you have to keep them aligned. For example, an artist may do something that impacts the performance of the game, so you have to get in front of these problems.

This is difficult to manage with a team of 60 people. You can't have a conversation with each of them, so you have to rely on your engineers to gather information on the ground level. You need to create an environment for that and focus on building relationships with other department heads, so the information flow works on each level."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Signs that you need a platform
• Getting buy-in for a platform product
• Communication in platform engineering
• Prioritization in platform engineering
• Necessary skills for platform engineers

Excerpt from the interview:

"The original idea for our project was to have one place for all the core reports. It didn’t start out as a platform engineering project; we just realized along the way that we couldn’t easily plug other reports into one place. We needed to build an end-to-end tool, and we had an opportunity to turn it into a centralized platform that scaled across data types, report types and teams.

We built a core reporting platform first, then we worked on our own customer facing applications on top of it. Afterwards, we started talking to teams that had point solutions for reporting about getting these supported by our infrastructure.

The difficulty of building a tool for everyone is that it won’t be perfect for anyone. For example, the email team knows what type of reports their customers prefer, and the centralized tool may not fit their needs. In platform engineering, you have to compromise on some functions and build a central solution that works for 80-90% of use cases."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition of trust in the workplace
• Differences between building trust in virtual teams vs the office
• Methods for building trust in a virtual team
• Encouraging team members to build trust among each other
• Measuring trust in a virtual team
• Feedback channels in virtual teams
• Anand's story of building trust in his virtual team

Excerpt from the interview:

"At the organizational level, the metric can be transparency around communication. Once you’ve built trust with individuals, you can build organizational trust on the back of that.

As an engineer, I used to think, “I wish leadership would tell us about every problem; there is no reason not to.” As a leader partaking in some of these conversations, I’ve had to realize how fluid strategic decisions are. I prefer going to my reports with concrete information rather than updates on discussions that may change by next week.

I put effort into coaching my team to understand the leadership's position. I assure them that we’re working on a strategy, and I’ll make sure to update them when we have a plan to execute. Their reaction lets you know how much they trust the organization."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Importance of ethics
• Applying ethics to software engineering
• Current ethical problems in the software industry
• Selling companies on software engineering ethics
• Cornerstones of software quality
• Thought experiments with software engineering ethics
• Role of the individuals in creating software ethics
• The deadline on software engineering ethics

Excerpt from the interview:

"Currently, software developers carry the lifeblood of civilization. Nothing can function without software, and developers' behavior isn’t in line with that responsibility. I want us programmers to behave in a stalwart way, and acknowledge our responsibility which is likely to keep growing.

There have been high profile calamities caused by software over the past decades. Software developers need to start discussions about what may be done before a disaster happens that takes control out of our hands.

I expect a disaster to happen eventually that overtakes politics and causes legislation to constrain the software industry. We need to get ahead of this and be ready with a code of ethics and a set of standards by the time the politicians come to regulate us."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Organizational decision making issues
• New organization structure
• Finding the solution
• Role of leadership in rebuilding organizational decision making
• Getting buy-in from the teams
• Changes in hiring
• Common mistakes in organizational decision making

Excerpt from the interview:

"The challenge was enabling fast decision making based on the customers’ needs. Foursquare has been in hypergrowth, and we’d been developing teams based on profession. You often had to cross VP boundaries just to discuss a product feature, and our products require a lot of this type of collaboration.

We were slow to innovate, which made it difficult to drive change. You needed at least three to four teams to work together to get anything done. This caused a cascading effect where delays in one team impacted other teams as well.

This also made prioritization difficult. When you had an emerging idea, you often needed executive involvement to set up priorities. This slowed down innovation and the overall workflow."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Customer obsession in software engineering
• Customer obsession event
• Origins of the customer obsession event
• Getting buy-in from leadership
• Getting buy-in from software engineers
• Feedback for the customer obsession event
• Lasting changes on the development process
• Pitfalls of customer obsession

Excerpt from the interview:

"This idea didn’t originate from one person. It came from different parts of the company. People on different teams and different levels started thinking about similar ideas, and we all came together and made it happen. It came from engineering, management, and from our support team.

I had co-conspirators who helped me plan it out and make it happen. Shout out to Mehdi, Lee, Cal, and Ariana for all the help. They were working on their own pitches about similar ideas.

We all got together and worked out the common patterns across our ideas that resulted in this event."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Differences between managing ICs and managing managers
• Story of transitioning from manager to director
• Necessary skills to managing managers
• Common mistakes of new directors
• Warning signs for new directors
• Choosing from director candidates
• Support from executive leaders to new directors
• Story of coaching a director new to managing managers
• Bonus advice to managing managers

Excerpt from the interview:

"I first became a director and started managing managers about 17 years ago. My team consisted of five sub-teams, about 50 people combined, and I had six or seven managers reporting to me. We were going through an Agile transformation.

I spent all my time focusing internally, working with my team. I attended stand-ups, we were teaching Scrum and we were introducing new tooling to manage the Agile process. We changed our release method and other internal processes.

I was proud of what we managed to accomplish, but when it came time for performance reviews, I received the worst review of my career. My peers and everyone around me outside my team said in their feedback that they had no relationship with me. They didn’t know what I was doing, they just saw me making changes in engineering without involving the leaders of the project management team, the release management team, or the QA team."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Defining empathy in the workplace
• Defining empathetic leadership
• Infusing leadership with empathy
• Challenges of leading with empathy remotely
• Story of learning about the importance of empathetic leadership
• Coaching leaders towards empathetic leadership
• Common mistakes when leading with empathy

Excerpt from the interview:

"As a leader, you need to be willing to put yourselves in other people’s shoes, and process what they’re going through. Leaders, especially former engineers, often get into the habit of trying to fix everything.

When I switched from engineer to manager, I thought my job was to fix things, but I was wrong. I had to learn that my colleagues don’t need me to fix everything. They need me to help them fix their own problems.

The first step towards leading with empathy is listening, reflecting and acknowledging how the other person is feeling."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Defining a team that's ready to scale
• The first challenges of scaling a team
• Improving knowledge sharing to scale your team
• Top processes to standardize before scaling your team
• Creating alignment in your team as you scale
• Story about standardizing communication channels
• Building management as you scale your team
• Introducing new management layers as you scale up
• Process to reiterate standardized processes

Excerpt from the interview:

"At one point, I was in a fundraising company that had no intake process. We had different functions, like finance operations, account management, sales, product, etc.

Whenever someone in a different department wanted something from engineering, they directly messaged an engineer or had a conversation with them in the office. The engineers usually agreed to help out, and the rest of the company took it as a commitment that engineering would get them what they needed.

This led to weird commitments that nobody was tracking and no one was working on. When the deadlines passed, the teams that made these requests got mad and blamed engineering for committing to help in the first place. The engineering organization turned into a black box, and from the perspective of the rest of the company, we were missing deadlines that we didn’t even know about."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Utilizing your principles of decision making
• Role of decision principles in leadership
• Using decision principles with your team
• Using decision principles with your peers and manager
• Dangers of using decision principles
• Origins of the decision principles
• Tips to create your own decision principles
• Evolving your principles of decision making over time

Excerpt from the interview:

"I don’t think my principles should be applied by everyone. For example, if you keep picking safe bets, you’ll probably fail to create a competitive advantage as a startup. However, in a corporate environment, safe bets might be a better path for your career.

I’ve been collecting my decision principles over time, and they’re based on my experiences. I’ve done a lot of reflection on what has and hasn’t gone well, and which principles have helped me make better decisions and which haven’t. They change over time, and I’ve been keeping track of them over the years.

I recommend every leader to come up with their own principles of decision making. You don’t have to treat them as absolute truth. Use them as guidelines that remind you to stop and reflect on whether you’re headed in the right direction."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The definition of work-life balance
• The process of improving work-life balance in leadership
• Strategies for a healthy work-life balance in leadership
• Using a sabbatical to improve work-life balance
• Work-life balance tips for new managers
• Spotting the signs of burnout in a remote environment
• Helping your team improve work-life balance
• Asking your team to sacrifice from work-life balance
• Action plan for employees failing to hit deadlines

Excerpt from the interview:

"When I came back from my sabbatical, I decided to set guardrails around my work time, and I wouldn’t check any work email before 7:00 AM or after 5:30 PM. When I was done, I shut down my laptop and picked it up the next day.

This started making me anxious when at 5:00 PM, I found myself with more to do and in the flow, so I knew I could get it all done by 6:00 PM. That goes 30 minutes beyond my pre-set stopping time. These situations made me go through a lot of mental gymnastics.

As I examined the situation, I realized that boundaries are great, but you have to be able to flex them to fit in an extra 30 minutes when necessary. You have to be able to make yourself available for irregular events on both sides of the work-life balance."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition of virtual offsites
• Ground rules for virtual offsites
• Realistic expectations for virtual offsites
• Challenges of virtual offsites
• Preparations for virtual offsites
• Virtual offsite ideas

Excerpt from the interview:

"I consider an offsite a state of mind rather than a physical location.

Going to a different location can help you achieve this state of mind. Depending on your preference, it may be a different location at your house, a coffee shop, a coworking location, or a different continent.

The idea is to get yourself away from daily tasks and to put your brain into a different gear."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Getting into leadership at Prezi
• Scaling yourself with your company
• Finding mentors and mentoring others
• Overcoming internal resistance
• Key leadership skills
• Balancing the dual role of VP of Product and Enginering
• Scaling in and out of the office

Excerpt from the interview:

"My most controversial move was adding the first full-time product manager to an infrastructure team. The resistance mostly came from the engineers. They didn’t understand what the product manager was going to do, or they didn't think they needed that type of help.

I explained everything step by step. We went through everyone’s roles and responsibilities, but the infrastructure engineers have been working without product help for so long, I couldn’t convince them it was going to be helpful. On the other side, I worked closely with the first product manager to make sure he fit into the team, and in time, the engineers started seeing the value of his work.

Today, our platform teams always work with product managers and they like it, because they understand what tasks they take off the table, so the engineers can focus more on writing code. Some of the platform engineers enjoy doing interviews with product engineers, but most of them are relieved that the product managers take care of it."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition of a platform engineering team
• Differences between product and platform engineering
• Priority differences for product and platform teams
• Communication channels between product and platform teams
• Communication challenges in platform teams
• Necessary skills for platform engineers
• The time to create a platform engineering team

Excerpt from the interview:

"Communication works best when a product team reaches out directly to a team in the platform organization. They can communicate quickly about what they need and find a solution. The more you involve senior leadership in early stages, the slower and more complex the process can be.

Sometimes you don’t have a choice but to escalate the situation because the platform team you’re in contact with lacks the bandwidth to address your problem. I aim to provide flexibility for my platform teams to work with their product counterparts, but it has to be balanced.

If the platform team is constantly working on fulfilling one-off requests, it hurts productivity. If you see that happening, you need to figure out what the product teams are trying to do, and plan ahead to provide the necessary tooling."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The importance of writing in engineering management
• Why is writing important in software engineering
• Why is writing important in meetings
• Improving your writing skills as a manager
• Writing tools for engineering managers
• Common mistakes of managers
• Teaching your team about the importance of writing

Excerpt from the interview:

"Recently, I had a disagreement with a project manager regarding a project. We had a meeting about it and it was productive, but we didn’t manage to completely resolve the conflict. He suggested that we continue the discussion in a document.

We wrote down the points that we agreed on, and the points we disagreed about, and we started a back and forth. He wrote his response and sent it to me, and I could answer when I found some time, and then send it back. We resolved the conflict in about four to five rounds.

It was a misunderstanding, and we came to a compromise. It was an efficient way of working out a conflict in written format, which we probably wouldn’t even have tried pre-pandemic, working fully on-site."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The definition of systems thinking
• Applying systems thinking to leadership
• Key concepts and potential traps of systems thinking
• The steps of applying systems thinking
• The importance of exploration in systems thinking
• Tools for systems thinking
• Bonus advice to apply systems thinking in leadership

Excerpt from the interview:

"Systems thinking focuses on emergent behavior. It’s about qualities that the individual parts alone don’t possess.

Human life is a good example for this. We’re made up of parts, such as skin, brain, etc., but none of these parts can be alive on their own. Life only happens when you combine them.

The reductionist view is still important and valuable. Systems thinking is a complement to the classic scientific view. It can help you take a holistic approach to understand complex systems."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The evolution of Product Hunt's structure
• Going from IC to leader
• Evaluating yourself as a leader
• The effects of the pandemic on remote work
• Leadership challenges in product development
• Learnings about product development
• And more!

Excerpt from the interview:

"I have a technique that I call my manager journal. I write a log of everything that happens every week.

This includes the general things, like what I was doing or what core events happened to our system. I also use it to keep track of what I’m worried about that week. For example, there might have been an outage, or an argument in my team, or some of my points didn’t go through.

For example, my concern right now is the design system we’re building. My main concern was balancing its flexibility with performance. I write these in my journal every week and check back every month to track how my concerns have changed and to see whether they’d been resolved."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Mistakes while creating an internship program for software engineers
• Recruiting to an internship program
• Evaluating candidates going into the program
• Evaluating candidates at the end of the program
• Choosing teams and mentors for interns
• Stages and expectations in an internship program

Excerpt from the interview:

"Early on, we put the new interns into their own team, gave them a task to rewrite a system or a project for us, and checked in on them periodically. The point wasn’t to test whether they could do it, but we thought it was a good way to gain experience.

It didn’t work out well.

This is why we transitioned to embedding interns into teams to give them the full experience of working on a product engineering team."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition of performance reviews
• Steps of a performance review process
• Preparation tips for giving and receiving feedback
• Rules to giving feedback based on a performance review
• Sharpening your skills in giving feedback
• Supporting your team to give feedback

Excerpt from the interview:

"You want to make a performance review discussion a two-way conversation.

I’ve seen people say that you should end your feedback with a request like, “Could you pick up more tickets, please?” I consider this a terrible way to deliver feedback that shuts down any chance of a conversation.

Leading questions may serve you well in a toxic situation, or when working out a performance improvement plan. When it comes to delivering constructive criticism in a regular performance review, make it a two-way conversation. This is the best you can do for everybody."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition of remote employees and distributed teams
• Integrating remote employees to distributed teams vs remote teams
• Challenges of managing remote employees in a distributed team
• Engaging remote employees in the office chit chat
• Engaging remote emplyoees in team building activities
• Tips to set up the office to better engage remote employees
• Managing the return to the office in distributed teams
• Increasing retention by getting remote employees engaged

Excerpt from the interview:

"A few years ago, I had a remote member on my team who left the company after about a year. I asked him what happened and he said, “I saw all the cool stuff you all were doing in the office and I wanted that too.” It turns out, he considered moving to Lincoln to work with us in the office, but he had family ties, so he ended up joining a local company that had a similar culture to ours.

This left me wondering how much of this is our fault for bombarding him with reminders and videos of the office events. These might feed his feeling of being left out. Holding events every few weeks was an integral part of our engineering culture, but you had to be in Lincoln to partake.

Currently, we make our events visible in a way that if somebody is interested, it’s easy to find them. This is valuable to remote employees when they’re looking for times to visit headquarters. Looking at the calendar and picking the events they like makes this choice easier."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Leadership takeaways from Slack
• The darkest day of Slack
• Tactical vs strategic focus as VP of Product Engineering
• Retaining your direct reports
• Creating processes before they're necessary
• The experience of Slack going public
• Story about telling the truth
• And much more!

Excerpt from the interview:

"I suggest executives in growing companies tell the truth as quickly as possible.

It’s great advice, but this story is about how it backfires. Really, this was a failure on my part as a senior leader, and it flowed from this approach. If I get a question, I answer it. If you ask, “How are we doing on hiring women in engineering?” I’ll say, “Here’s the answer and here’s the data.”

At Slack, we had a lot of data come in about hiring in a big spreadsheet. It’s data like the number of people hired, diversity in hiring, and so on..."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Definition and qualities of entrepreneurial engineers
• Hiring entrepreneurial engineers
• Onboarding and retaining entrepreneurial engineers
• Nurturing the business mindset in software engineers
• Culturally supporting the business mindset
• Giving feedback to engineers
• Preventing burnout for entrepreneurial engineers

Excerpt from the interview:

"At Opendoor, we need to ingest a large amount of data. Real estate data is public, so we need to process all that data to make informed decisions. We had a hard time importing MLS and home data because it was so messy.

At the end of the day, a few of our engineers went to shadow agents at a different company who were importing this data. They tried to understand the customer’s perspective and what they were doing. They took the insights they’d collected, and managed to build a better data ingestion pipeline.

Understanding their customer made it possible to build a faster and scalable tech solution. This initiative and creative thinking got us to the point where we could ingest more data with higher reliability. This is an example of why we want to work with entrepreneurial engineers."

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In this interview we're covering:

• The optimal number of remote meetings daily
• Making remote meetings productive
• Structuring remote meetings
• Necessary extra meetings in a remote environment
• Tools to support remote meetings
• Meetings that don't work remotely
• Providing a flexibility of schedule in your company

Excerpt from the interview:

"This is my rule of thumb: remove status updates and announcements from meetings, and communicate them as asynchronous updates. You can use a tool like Loom for this. Leaders can record a short video message, and the employees can watch it at any time and leave comments.

Use async channels with anything that doesn’t require discussion, or where you can start out without a discussion.

Don’t rely too much on meetings; move everything you can to asynchronous updates. For example, it’s easier for me to reply to an email than it would be to find 15-30 minutes to discuss the same thing in a video call."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Relationship between performance and autonomy
• Role of the leader in self-managed teams
• Description of self-managed teams
• Making time to coach your employees
• Measuring the manager's performance in self-managing teams
• Leadership strategies to build self-managed teams
• Communicating your expectations
• Building self-managed teams in a new company
• Building self-managed teams in an established organization

Excerpt from the interview:

"In a self-managed team, even the most junior employee is empowered to make a meaningful decision that affects the team’s performance. They’re not dependent on management to make all the decisions. No winning team requires the coach to explain how to kick the ball; the coaching happens before and after the game.

Leadership’s job is to make the vision and the goals clear. In my one-on-one meetings, I always ask these questions from my reports:

• Is the company vision clear?
• Are the company goals clear?
• Do you understand what we’re trying to accomplish and the near-term objectives?"

Click here to read the full interview!

Interview with John Ford, VP of Engineering and Country Leader at LogMeIn discussing emerging industry trends based on data from the State of Software Development 2021 report. We touch on the effects of COVID-19 on the industry, old and new challenges, hiring, retention and more.

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In this interview we're covering:

• The effects of COVID-19 on the software industry
• Top challenges in software development
• Comparing the perception of managers and engineers
• Hiring and retention
• Performance management
• Outsourcing development

In this interview we're covering:

• Advantages and disadvantages of a hybrid team
• Leadership challenges in a hybrid team
• Preparing your team for hybrid processes
• Extra support requirements in hybrid teams
• Future plans with the hybrid environment
• Key skills to lead hybrid teams
• Keeping the community alive in a hybrid environment

Excerpt from the interview:

"I joined Calm remotely, and I’ve hired the majority of my team for remote work. My previous company was focused on working from the office, so we chose carefully who we allowed to work remotely. We came up with certain criteria, which I use when hiring for my hybrid team.

Look for these qualities in your interview:

• Inclusivity and kindness
• Good communication skills
• Proactivity
• Openness to feedback

For example, if they have issues conveying their points, and you have to keep asking follow-up questions, they may not be a good fit for remote work."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Challenges in hypergrowth
• Finding the right employees
• Key moments for a startup in hypergrowth
• Scaling management as the organization grows
• Planning hypergrowth
• Preparations for projected growth

Excerpt from the interview:

"Startups often don't recognize that the teams in the frontline should make their own decisions. The top leaders are far from the problem, their insight is limited, and their knowledge of the ground level work may be outdated. Micromanagement has its place, but it often leads to bad decisions.

As you grow from 20 people to 40 and 100, you need to start making decisions differently. As a high level leader, your job is to help your employees make decisions, show them how to align a good decision, spot a bad one, and help them learn from their mistakes.

Cities don’t involve the prime minister in details, and the frontline workers make the big decisions. The problem is that people lack experience in making decisions quickly, sticking with them, learning from them, and taking responsibility for them."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• How they came up with the idea of Dashbird
• Challenges of going from engineer to CEO
• Essential skills for a CEO
• How his engineer background made him a better CEO
• How he improved the skills necessary to be a CEO
• Networking tips

Excerpt from the interview:

"A CEO has to continuously learn just like a software engineer. My background in engineering helped me with the following:

• Iterating different solutions
• Setting expectations toward solutions
• Learning from past activities
• Tracking variables

The first years of a new tech company are about learning what strategy is viable on your market. Your best bet is using data and making logical decisions. Engineers are good at this."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Importance of soft skills in engineering leadership
• Essential leadership soft skills
• Story about building up leadership soft skills
• Practices to improve leadership soft skills
• Common challenges for engineering managers
• Helping direct reports improve their leadership skills
• Integrating leadership soft skills into your engineering culture

Excerpt from the interview:

"I had a heated argument with a friend of mine at Ustream, and he told me, “This is why I don’t like working with you.” At first, I thought, I’m just trying to find the best solution, but really I was defending my ego in that conversation.

Moments like that made me realize that I should improve, and research why I react the way I do in certain situations. That’s when I started to learn about my psychological drivers.

The first step I took was learning about personality types. This didn’t give me a lot of answers, but it helped me understand why others are stupid..."

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This is how Shopify deals with onboarding remotely.

In this interview we're covering:

• Differences between remote onboarding and in-person onboarding
• Methods to integrate new hires into a group remotely
• Stakeholders in the remote onboarding of new hires
• Breakdown of Shopify's remote onboarding process
• Tracking the progress of new hires
• Mistakes when setting up the remote onboarding process

Excerpt from the interview:

"Solving problems together energizes people. On the other hand, spending an entire day on a video call drains their energy. Knowing this, we redesigned the onboarding experience to be active, synchronous, and hybrid.

We give a group of new employees a real challenge, like ship a dashboard or build a data pipeline. They work on it together at the same time. We provide them with support structures like a virtual pod for better collaboration, and experts on the topic to answer their questions via Slack.

This gives them a sense of being with a group and working on an interesting problem without being trapped in a video call for eight hours straight."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Assessing team performance
• Velocity goals for a productive engineering team
• Focus points for underperforming teams
• People improvements
• Process improvements
• Technical improvements
• A story about turning around an underachieving team
• Bonus advice

Excerpt from the interview:

"My advice for engineering managers and leaders is to keep an open mind because there might be many reasons for suboptimal performance. There are lots of differences between companies in engineering culture, team history, management, etc.

If you’ve been running your team for a while, and the performance is dropping off, the reason is often a lack of clarity around the high-level objectives. In this case, you need to link the product or company strategy to the daily work of the team, and to provide direction about the higher-level strategy. Consider these questions:

• What's important for my manager?
• What’s the team doing..."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Picking the right methods for sharing knowledge in your team
• The best knowledge sharing methods in engineering teams
• The rules of using documentation
• The best methods to help junior engineers grow
• Onboarding software engineers to your team
• Making time for knowledge sharing
• Tools for knowledge sharing in engineering teams
• Encouraging engineers to partake in knowledge sharing
• The key to Facebook's success in sharing knowledge

Excerpt from the interview:

"Facebook has offices all over the world and employees get to travel to other offices for free with business reasons. As it turns out, software engineers are very innovative when it comes to figuring out business reasons for free travel.

My team was based in London, and we worked with a team in New York for a while. We were struggling with effectively analyzing data. One of my engineers came up with the idea to fly our team to New York, and hold a data week, where the two teams analyze data together.

I'm pretty sure that the motivation was to get a free week in New York. Still, it was the most productive week we’d had for a long time. It took a lot of preparation, but people didn’t mind, because the traveling made it fun.

This is just an example; there are far more affordable ways to make knowledge sharing fun..."

Click here to read the full interview!

Here's everything you'll ever need to know about why you want to have your own skip level meetings, what they look like, what questions to ask, how to break the ice, keep track of them all, and much more. Master skip level meetings to become a great engineering leader yourself!

In this interview we're covering:

• Skip level meeting definition
• The reason they started doing skip level meetings
• Skip level one-on-one meeting and regular one-on-one comparison
• Choosing the people to schedule skip level meetings with
• Notifying the in-between manager about skip level meetings
• Skip level meetings' role at Mailchimp's engineering culture
• Keeping track of the content of skip level meetings
• Skip level meeting questions
• Icebreakers for skip level meetings
• Sensitive topics at skip level meetings
• Advice for new leaders on skip level meetings
• Skip level meeting stories

Excerpt from the interview:

"Even though a key reason for the meeting is to talk about the manager, I don't want to support gossiping. It's a structured meeting that we use for giving feedback, not to talk trash behind people’s backs.

When I get feedback about what employees wish their manager would do, I listen, but I try not to reinforce it in any inappropriate way. I say things like, "That sounds difficult," or "I understand why you want that," while I avoid saying, "Your manager really screwed up." I have to be..."

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In this interview we're covering:

• Connection between happiness and performance
• Prerequisites for high performance
• Create a company culture based on experimentation
• Methods for managers to learn their team's needs
• Surveys and measuring team happiness
• The process to build a management system for happiness
• Signs of a happy team
• Methods to engage employees to take action for their happiness

Excerpt from the interview:

"There isn’t one process to manage for happiness.

The best way is to think outside the box and to do the things you enjoy and others might enjoy as well. Here are some examples of what I did as an engineering manager:

1. I invited people for dinner at my house and surprised them with the fact that we would cook together.
2. I put a bell in the office..."

Click here to read the full interview!

He shares unique insight into the process of hiring for a big tech company. We also look at tips to stand out from the crowd with your software engineer resume, and what companies should do differently to find talent more effectively.

Giveaway ended.

In this interview we're covering:

• The importance of a software engineer resume
• The goal of a software engineer CV
• Highlights in a great tech resume
• The resume review process in a big tech company
• The role of referrals in the tech industry
• Why you get no response to your application
• Remaining objective for hiring managers
• Improving the hiring process in a tech company

Excerpt from the interview:

"Before COVID-19, resumes were less important for software engineers, especially with a few years of experience. Engineers new to the industry have always needed a resume that represented them fairly. But COVID-19 changed the way we work, and it made resumes more important than before.

The challenge when recruiting engineers, especially with a few years of experience, used to be to get them interested in your company. This was true even for Uber.

COVID-19 unfortunately brought layoffs, even to the tech world, and resulted in fewer companies hiring. Now these people are applying for jobs, and they need to submit a CV."

Click here to read the full interview!

Squads, tribes and guilds are the essential elements of the Spotify model, but there is a lot more to it. Leadership is the force that drives all the elements, makes the model come alive and deliver a great product. You get all the answers here about how that works.

Giveaway ended.

In this interview we're covering:

• Comparing traditional organizations vs the Spotify model
• The keys to effective engineering in the Spotify model
• What makes the squad system successful
• Contribute as an engineering manager
• Role of engineering leaders in the Spotify model
• Incentives to keep up developer motivation
• Performance management in the Spotify model
• How to improve when you're missing deadlines

Excerpt from the interview:

"In 2014, Sony came to Spotify to set up a partnership, because their music service was shutting down. This instantly became our biggest project, and a lot of squads started working on making Spotify work on PlayStation. I was coaching a team working on this.

At one point, I realized that the launch date was coming up, and we were behind schedule. I thought we were in trouble. At the next all-hands meeting, I told everyone that the deadline was in jeopardy.

In any other company I’ve been part of before, this would have been a big deal. Instead, the program director said, “Thank you for the information. We'll let the team tell us if they think there's a problem.” Then she simply moved on.

This left me puzzled, because I expected the CEO and everyone else to get up in arms and demand action. This showed me how much trust Spotify puts in their teams."

Click here to read the full interview!

This isn't a template you can just copy and paste, then forget it ever even existed. This is a guide to creating a meaningful engineering career ladder from Tim, who has been through it more than once.

In this interview we're covering:

• Building a software engineer career ladder at Zenput
• The first steps of building a career ladder
• People to involve in the process
• Key differences between the career levels
• The importance of experience in the career ladder
• The transition to engineering management
• The role of engineering leaders and managers in the career ladder
• Updating your engineering career ladder
• Common mistakes in creating software engineer career ladders

Excerpt from the interview:

"The first four levels of the engineering career ladder are about writing code. Engineers on these levels do their part in supporting their team too, but it isn’t their focus. As they move beyond the senior engineer level, supporting the team becomes their priority.

Either they choose engineering management and do one-on-ones, feedback sessions, and everything that comes with it, or they pick technical leadership, and help people make the right technology decisions.

They end up working with people on the highest levels either way."

Click here to read the full interview!

Why do you want to put up the effort? How do you balance it with hiring the most competent developers? What goals are realistic? You get these answers and more right here.

In this interview we're covering:

• The difference between diversity and inclusion
• How to balance hiring for diversity and competence
• What makes an inclusive hiring process
• Obstacles in implementing diversity in recruiting
• First steps to make your hiring process more diverse
• How to make your interviews inclusive
• How to encourage your team to be more inclusive

Excerpt from the interview:

"When you’re running a business, you always want to hire the best candidates. Increasing diversity and inclusion broadens the pool of qualified candidates applying to work at your company.

If the pool is limited, then your ability to hire the best is limited as well. You always want to work towards broadening the pool of exceptional people who may have gone through a non-traditional path in their career.

My story is an example of this..."

Click here to read the full interview!

Great engineering managers and leaders can do a lot to stop that from happening, facilitate growth for their developers and advancement from junior engineer to the senior level and beyond that. Get the know-how from Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, Shopify!

In this interview we're covering:

• Differences between a junior and a senior engineer
• The best way to level up coding skills
• Potential career roadmaps in software development
• A manager's methods to develop the career of their engineers
• A company's options to facilitate professional development
• Creating a career plan in software engineering
• Motivating developers to keep honing their craft
• Incorporating soft skills training

Excerpt from the interview:

"I was talking to one of our senior developers about a promotion. The next career level from there is either staff engineer or engineering manager. This person was interested in the staff engineer route.

We figured out that to move up the ladder, this person at this time needed to have an impact beyond his group. Helping with building software for Shopify in a broader context is the job of a staff engineer. So this person shifted focus toward that.

We checked in again after six months. He was doing well, and he was about to receive the promotion, but it turns out that he didn’t enjoy the staff engineer work. He saw how it would broaden his skills, how he’d work with other groups, and he didn’t want to do that.

Here's what we did..."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• The essential elements of a big company's feedback culture
• GitHub vs Facebook feedback culture comparison
• Formal performance reviews at GitHub
• The benefits of a healthy feedback culture
• Crucial elements to build a feedback culture
• Keeping feedback useful
• Handling strong emotional reactions to feedback
• A leader's role in a good feedback culture
• Gathering feedback as an engineering leader
• When to avoid giving feedback face to face
• HR's involvement in GitHub's feedback culture

Excerpt from the interview:

"When I’m encouraging people to share feedback, I tell them to consider their feedback a data point. I used to be nervous about giving critical feedback about others, because I didn’t want to cause trouble for them.

As a director, if I hear one thing from one person, but I don’t hear it from anyone else, I consider it a small issue. I’ll look into it and ask around if others are observing the same thing. If I see more corroborating evidence, only then will I consider acting on it.

No one is exclusively responsible for the consequences coming from their feedback."

Click here to read the full interview!

The raffle is closed.

In this interview we're covering:

• The goal of a one on one meeting
• The ideal frequency of one on one meetings
• One on one preparation tips for engineering managers
• Handling challenging personalities
• Documenting your one on ones
• Critical feedback at one on ones
• Common mistakes of engineering managers
• Walking versus sitting one on ones
• One on one meeting with a new team member
• One on one meetings questions and topics
• Doing one on ones with individual contributors vs managers
• Preparing engineering managers to run one on ones
• How direct reports should prepare for one on ones

Excerpt from the interview:

"Remember; venting to your manager is fine. Sometimes people get frustrated and need to blow off steam in a private setting. You should support this.

If it becomes a recurring thing though, it's your duty as a manager to turn this into constructive energy. In this situation, you rarely have anything to say; you're just listening to a frustrated person. Sometimes you try to turn the conversation in a positive direction, but they just vent more, and you end up getting frustrated yourself.

I’ve dealt with employees who were venting all the time. I’m a good listener, but it can backfire when I run into these people. The first time I had a team member doing this early in my management career, I had no idea what to do.

Many weeks went by until I finally said..."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• The challenges of transitioning to a new company as an engineering leader
• HubSpot's engineering leader onboarding process
• The idea behind the process
• Differences between the leadership onboarding and the engineer onboarding experience
• The documentation of the process
• The crucial factors
• Measuring the success
• Alternatives of HubSpot's manager onboarding process

Excerpt from the interview:

"Engineering leaders during the embedding process don’t have privileged access to information, nor management responsibilities. They’re expected to focus exclusively on doing an individual contributor’s job. They take the same training courses and go through the same engineer onboarding process as everyone else.

Leaders and managers are switching between the different engineering teams they will be responsible for in this period. They’re building features, fixing bugs, and reporting to the manager of the team they’re working with at the time.

The embedding experience is a great way to learn HubSpot’s tech stack, the product details, and the guiding principles. But really, it’s all about the relationships you get to build with the engineers. The whole point is the trust you build."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Concepts of antifragility
• Internal and external sources of stress for engineering teams
• Necessary characteristics of an antifragile engineering team
• Agile methods and antifragility
• How to measure antifragility in an engineering team
• The leader's contribution to antifragility
• How to make an agile team antifragile
• Hiring for antifragility

Excerpt from the interview:

"What I don't like about agile is that it's become more like a cult than a set of ideas. It has great basics, like the team should get together every day to discuss what they're doing, or to run development in a few weeks of increments. Agile also preserves optionality well if development doesn’t go smoothly.

What I sometimes miss from agile software development is the longer arc.

Agile can be surprisingly short-sighted. You set a goal, and you work towards that in two-week increments. It lacks the moments where you consider a black swan event and the monthly checkpoints where you make sure if you’re still building the right product..."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• The biggest challenge in leadership
• Mastering the finer points of leadership
• The biggest takeaway from decades of leadership experience
• Traits and skills of great engineering leaders
• Daily practices of engineering leadership
• Building your influence
• Common mistakes in engineering leadership
• Building a personal brand as a leader
• Delegating effectively

Excerpt from the interview:

"Engineering leadership is all about your ability to delegate, and it’s hard to do.

You get a big task, hand it to an engineer on your team, and you’re not doing the actual work. Maybe you slice it up into different tasks, and then give it to others. This is fundamentally tough for engineers, because we like building things ourselves.

Leaders don't get to do any of this work. Management is a ton of work, but you don’t do testing, don’t improve performance, don’t do anything that’s been your work as an engineer."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Synchronizing the engineering brand coexisting with the company brand
• The challenges of building an engineering employer brand
• The key elements of a powerful engineering brand
• The tools to build your engineering brand
• The first steps to building your employer brand in engineering
• Involving your employees in facilitating your brand
• Keeping your employer brand consistent across different offices
• Organizing an internal tech conference
• The results of investing into the FInancial Times' engineering brand

Excerpt from the interview:

"The Financial Times came up with a list of cultural values about a year ago that we wanted to demonstrate. I attended a workshop with people from all over the company to figure out how to demonstrate these values. Some key values were creativity, trust and integrity; I focused on creativity.

I found it interesting that many suggestions coming from other departments were ones engineering had been doing naturally. The 10% days came up as an idea, but in product and technology, we've been doing 10% days for a long time.

This shows there’s a fit in our overall values, but each department ends up being specifically focused on their own area. We write software and operate systems, so that leads to inherent differences."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Time management 101 for managers
• How to do a calendar audit
• How to use time dedicated to proactive management
• Metrics of productivity for managers
• How to develop team members
• Delegating tasks
• How to handle your emails
• How to lead meetings productively
• Productivity myths managers should avoid
• The signs of good time management for managers

Excerpt from the interview:

"I've struggled with delegating effectively in the past. It's easy for managers at all levels to take on more work than they need to.

The toughest thing about delegating is that you’re often better at doing a task. Usually, you get promoted for a reason. You know the context, you have the information, and you've probably been a great individual contributor.

You might be the best person for a task, but that doesn't mean you should do it. If there's an opportunity to put a task on a team member, think critically about delegating it to them."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• What's Included and excluded in the Foxbox culture document
• Why do you need a company culture document?
• The steps of creating a culture document
• The impact of a culture document on an engineering team
• How does the document help to sustain the culture
• How to change your copmany culture
• How to check for cultural fit
• Whether it's better to hire for diversity or for cultural fit

Excerpt from the interview:

"We've always had a strong company culture, but early on, it was accidental. I hired engineers who I thought were great, and the engineering culture formed organically.

By now, we've had cultural miss-hires, some contentions and issues. These are signs of a bad culture.

So, we tried to distill the good parts of our culture down to a cultural document. The purpose was to be able to maintain the culture as we scale up."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• The 3 base leadership styles
• Determine the best leadership style for your developer team
• How to train yourself to always find the right leadership style
• Common mistakes
• How the leadership styles improve team performance and employee retention
• 5 core leadership attributes
• Bonus advice

Excerpt from the interview:

"If you demonstrate both the three leadership styles and the five critical leadership attributes, your people will be more productive and more likely to stick around.

If you become a leader doing all this to meet the needs of every individual working for you, you’re a fair boss and a rare commodity.

You'll find one or two of those leaders in your lifetime in corporate America."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• How to measure the strength of an engineering team
• The definition of social engineering
• The process of using social engineering to build your team
• Examples of social engineering in a positive context
• Common mistakes when using social engineering in management
• How to use social engineering with a new team
• Possible conflicts when using social engineering on your team
• The timeframe to successfully use social engineering

Excerpt from the interview:

"I used to work in higher education as a learning technologist with online courses for universities. I was on a team with 12 different program directors from areas like accounting and healthcare. I needed all program directors to give me information to get their courses up and running.

Some directors gave me what I needed right away, but I had to track others down and work hard to get them to give me what I needed. As you might imagine, this resulted in delays, and I had no idea why they'd make it hard for me.

Then I looked at it from the social engineering perspective. I started thinking about why these different directors would want to give me what I needed..."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• The difference between managing developers and leading engineering managers
• How to get direct information as an executive leader
• How to transition from engineering management to leadership
• What new tech leaders should do in their first 60 days
• How to build trust
• Characteristics of a great engineering manager
• How to evaluate the performance of your engineering managers
• And more!

Excerpt from the interview:

"I felt overwhelmed. I felt I couldn't finish anything. I didn't feel safe making decisions.

One night, in the midst of my agony, I started to write down all my duties, tasks, initiatives, and everything I couldn't finish. There were hundreds of items, and I put them into 20 categories and 80 subcategories. Then I buried my face in my hands, and the only thing I could think was, "What am I doing?"

It was insane.

I grabbed the list, and the next day, I reached out to my boss and mentor and asked to go out for a coffee or beer. He saw that I was upset, and I threw everything at him. The list, my feelings about it—I told him I was thinking of resigning because I couldn’t handle the pressure."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Definition of clean code
• Metrics of clean code
• Consequences of bad code
• Tips for engineering managers
• Communication tips
• On-boarding to clean code
• Scaling with clean code
• Clean code vs deadlines
• And more!

Excerpt from the interview:

"The underlying theme is that if you want to go fast, meet schedules, and keep your customers and your managers happy, keep your code as clean as possible. Nothing will make you work faster than keeping your workspace clean.

One of the most important things a developer can say to a manager is the word no. You must be able to look your manager in the eye with all the empathy and sympathy you can muster, and say, “The answer is no.” You will save a lot of money if you say no at the right time.

Never promise to do something you know you can't do. They will believe you, bet a lot on your ability to do it, and you will let them down."

Click here to read the full interview!

Jeff Perry has faced all these problems, and he'll help you find the way to success in this new role.

In this interview we're covering:

• Challenges of becoming an engineering manager
• Misconceptions about becoming a manager
• The process to transition to management
• Common mistakes of new engineering managers
• Necessary skills for a great engineering manager
• How to get accepted as a new manager
• How to manage former teammates
• And more!

Excerpt from the interview:

"Listening is critical for leaders. I struggle with this because I'm quite a talker. It’s amazing what you can learn when you ask a question and truly listen to the other person without interrupting or letting your mind wander.

Here’s a quote from Stephen R. Covey, “Seek first to understand and then be understood.” We’ll understand more if we start by listening more than we talk.

To help with this, I have an exercise the whole team can do together..."

Click here to read the full interview!

Discussion about the latest trends in the software industry, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic with Camille Fournier (Managing Director at Two Sigma) and Juan Pablo Buriticá (taking a break, running his consultant company, ex-VPE at Splice) based on the State of Software Development 2020 report.

In this panel discussion we're covering:

• The effects of COVID-19 on the software world
• The state of remote work
• The top industry challenges
• The latest recruitment trends
• And more...

Follow our guests, Camille Fournier and Juan Pablo Buriticá on Twitter!

In this interview we're covering:

• Challenges of becoming a tech leader
• Early priorities when becoming a tech leader
• Focus areas for a tech leader
• Things you'd do differently
• Common mistakes for tech leaders
• How can a company help you transition?
• Bonus advice for tech leaders

Excerpt from the interview:

"You have to make sure you figure out your architecture. But you shouldn't rush it. First, you need to understand the business problems.

Wherever I go, I build trust and culture around me. This is interesting in WhyHotel, because it isn't a tech company. Most people here come from real estate and hospitality. It’s a challenge because we’re from different worlds.

I try to breed trust by making decisions so I don’t tear people apart. I don’t just go and question, “Why did you make this decision?” Instead, I say, “I'm sure there were reasons why we made these decisions. Let's talk about them.

You need to prove yourself a team player. I believe as an executive, you have to lead by example. This is how you build the culture.

You have to show them that you're open and transparent about communication. You need to be empathetic and you use your emotional intelligence before you expect it from others. I demonstrate my core values of being accountable and transparent to show my reports the way.

Doing this is very softy-feely. It may sound weird from a technologist, but if you can set this tone and build trust across the organization, a lot of things become easier long-term."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Key elements of a great engineering culture
• Monzo's engineering culture
• Cultural on-boarding
• Engineering culture metrics
• Building your engineering culture
• Signs of a weak engineering culture
• Dangerous behaviors
• Improving your engineering culture
• Implementing changes to your culture
• Scaling your engineering culture

Excerpt from the interview:

"My favourite thing in the culture here is that defaulting to transparency is a key value for us. It doesn’t mean everything is transparent, but we keep as much in the open as possible. This includes engineering proposals as well.

When somebody is looking to make a change to the architecture or to the culture, they write a proposal, and anybody in the company is free to comment and to share their views. This way, everyone can see what's going on. Everything goes through Slack, so everything is visible.

Slack is an important tool from a cultural point of view as well. One of our senior engineers built the Guys bot, which pings up on Slack if anybody uses the word “guys.” It’s not an inclusive phrase.

We've built these things into our wider culture by using our engineering skills to create tools. I love how these gently nudge people to live out the key company values."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

•   How to build your employer brand?
•   Asana's steps to recruiting engineers
•   How to make the final decision?
•   Key elements to recruiting engineers
•   Top channels to recruiting engineers
•   Intern program
•   What skills and traits do you need to recruit developers?
•   How do you evolve your recruitment process?

Excerpt from the interview:

"We do what we call a huddle-meeting, where everyone who has interviewed the candidate gets in a room. Each interviewer has an impression to start with, whether they think the person would be a fit for the rule, and we all discuss it.

The final decision comes down to the facilitator of the huddle based on the interviewers opinions. The facilitator hasn’t interviewed the candidate, so they bring a fresh mindset to the discussion. We train our engineers to facilitate meetings and make decisions collaboratively with a group.

It doesn't have to be a complete consensus."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

•   Common conflicts in an engineering team
•   How to step in and handle conficts as a manager?
•   Steps to prevent conflicts
•   Rules for giving feedback
•   How to give feedback to help improvement?
•   Common mistakes at giving feedback
•   Bonus advice
•   How to get feedback as an engineering manager?

Excerpt from the interview:

"At one point I had a new developer join a team of senior developers. The new guy was a junior both in skill level and age. The senior team members were used to each other and worked very well together, but the new guy didn't fit in well.

It was partly the new developer’s fault. Sometimes he joked around in ways that would annoy the others, and didn't take the learning opportunities seriously enough. When his first round of feedback came, it was mostly bad. He didn't see it coming and he was devastated.

I did what I talked about earlier, and got them all in the same room. We had a painful and awkward but ultimately healthy conversation. Everybody got to name what they didn't like about the situation, let it be behaviors or anything else. It resolved some misunderstandings too, because often problems are just that.

I also had a one on one conversation with the new engineer. My expectations were clear: he had to stop with certain behaviors, and he had to take some things more seriously.

To my surprise, he did everything I asked, and turned himself around. He applied himself, and improved the situation dramatically..."

Click here to read the full interview!

We interviewed Camille Fournier on the topic of productivity, to learn what she's been doing as a tech leader to keep it high in her developer teams.

In this interview we're covering:

• Defining engineering productivity
• How to measure engineering productivity
• Challenges for managers with engineering productivity
• On-boarding for maximum engineering productivity
• Effects of mentoring on engineering productivity
• Keeping engineering productivity high
• How to improve engineering productivity

Excerpt from the interview:

"Many engineering managers struggle with setting goals. They think about goal setting in a way that’s inspiring to their team without making it easy or pushing too hard.

Some managers say the way to build a productive team is to hire smart people and get out of their way. I have never seen that work. It might work in theory if you have clear goals and if you motivate people to achieve those goals.

Most managers aren’t good at setting clear goals. When you're always adjusting your goals, you can’t expect to just hire smart people, get out of their way, and watch them be productive.

Most engineers don't learn how to be productive on a team without having experienced it. If you've never been an engineer on a hyper-productive team, you won’t know what it’s like or what you could do to make a productive team happen."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this interview we're covering:

• Challenges of scaling distributed engineering teams
• Steps of scaling distributed engineering teams
• Difference between scaling from small to medium, and medium to large size
• How did you scale distributed engineering teams at Splice?
• How to change a process while scaling distributed engineering teams?
• Your key takeaways from scaling distributed engineering teams
• Bonus advice for scaling distributed engineering teams

Excerpt from the interview:

"Scaling an organization requires a lot of work with no tangible output. It’s about building a culture and processes; it requires a lot of attention, moderation, curation, and loads of conversations with humans. Humans can be exhausting with insecurities and all the stuff we bring with ourselves, because we're not machines.

As a leader, that falls on you. I’ve done it twice, and if I had to do it again, I may use some shortcuts, but it's going to be different, and still a lot of work. That’s the first takeaway. Looking back, it was worth it, because it was exciting. It’s rewarding when you get it to work well, and I'm proud of our team.

When scaling distributed engineering teams, be ready for a lot of work, repetition, communication, convincing and loads of complaints. Some people have followed me through teams. We agreed that when they complain, I ask, “Do you want me to solve this?” If they say yes, I do, but then they have to look for something else to complain about. We just laugh at that.

I like complaints, because it's feedback as we're scaling. I've seen other leaders who can't deal with it."

Follow Juan on his Twitter!

Click here to read the full interview!

In this episode, we're covering:

• Challenges of managing a distributed developer team
• On-boarding remote engineers
• Balancing synchronous and asynchronous work
• Managing distributed developer teams
• Measuring productivity at distributed developer teams
• Giving feedback in distributed developer teams
• Running meetings in distributed developer teams
• Management tools at distributed developer teams

Excerpt from the interview:

"I don't measure productivity specifically. It’s been a struggle, because the definition of productivity is a difficult one, particularly in the software engineering world. Is fixing a hundred bugs or implementing ten features better? What if none of those features affect the company positively?

Firstly, I start by making sure we're working on the right things. If not, I try to fix that, because all the productivity in the world working on the wrong things is not going to get us where we need to be.

The next question: are we working the right way? Are we doing things that are going to cost us in the long run? This is a classic technical debt conversation.

Do we have the infrastructure to support the team to be productive? Does the team have to overcome difficulties to demonstrate what they've done? I try to assess those things and remove the impediments. Then the team can focus on doing what they like, which is problem-solving, and building new things.

When all this is sorted, I look at the individual level. There, I see that if they say they're going to do something , do they get it done? If not, why not? Sometimes, folks need to be held accountable for what they commit to..."

Click here to read the full interview!

In this episode, we're covering:

• How to make sure an engineering manager prospect is ready?
• Challenges of training engineering managers
• Challenges of transitioning to engineering management
• Common mistakes in training engineering managers
• How to build a system for training engineering managers

Excerpt from the interview:

"People tend to think of engineering management as an opportunity to become a leader.

In reality, accomplished engineers are also leaders; they’re involved in everything. You get opportunities to mentor and you have a say in project leadership decisions and technical decisions, whether you're an individual contributor or a people manager.

Being a people manager entails all the administrative aspects of leadership. So, a lot of it comes down to hiring and firing people, performance management, dealing with HR or legal issues, finance, budgets and all these other things.

I think a lot of people want to become software engineering managers for the wrong reason. Also, many people get out of it once they realize what they're doing. You should look at the end goal. Do you want to be a senior leader managing hundreds of people, or do you want to be an accomplished person on a small team?"

Click here to read the full interview!

We sat down for an interview with Dan Rummel. He is currently the Senior Director of Engineering at One Medical, and he’s held engineering and leadership positions at various Bay Area startups.

He shares this invaluable insight with you on creating a workplace with psychological safety, so you get to understand his way of thinking and pick up actionable tips you can apply at your company.

In the interview we're covering:

• Why is psychological safety important?
• The difference between psychological safety and the comfort zone
• Requirements for psychological safety
• How did Dan build psychological safety?
• How to promote psychological safety as a leader?

Excerpt from the interview:

Leading by example

"Leading by example is often neglected. It’s a real challenge for leaders and managers because their typical personality types can take up a lot of space in the room. I think leading by example means making space for others.

We need to actively make space for others to chime in during meetings. It also helps a lot to show vulnerability, talk about some of your challenges, or throw out the occasional wild or even silly idea. Even if you know it will likely be shot down, this lets your team know you’re fair game for debate as well.

Perhaps the most important thing to do is to admit when you're wrong, and not make it a big deal. Just saying, “I was wrong; you've got it,” helps the healthy debate and makes it comfortable to rumble through ideas and to find the best outcomes.

The reason healthy teams produce better outcomes is that there's a diversity of experiences and perspectives that come to the table. When people can build mental models with everyone else's experiences, your outcomes get exponentially better, and you get beautiful results from those debates."

Click here to read the full interview!

We sat down with Katie Womersley, the VP of Engineering at Buffer. She’s managing many remote engineering teams, and she shared a lot of invaluable experience she picked up over the years in dealing with all the obstacles of working with distributed teams.

In this episode, we're covering:

• Usual challenges remote developer teams face
• Key elements to make a remote team work
• DOs and DONTs of managing a remote team
• Handling time zone differences
• On-boarding people new to remote work
• Remote rewards

Excerpt from the interview:

The dark side of managing a remote developer team:

“Remote developer teams often have mental health issues that people don't talk about. It could make your teammates less productive, less healthy, and more likely to quit and go work somewhere in an office where they feel better. Anxiety and depression correlate with feeling lonely or being isolated. Naturally, when working remotely, people often work from home most of the time.

Many but not all developers find themselves a bit more introverted, a bit more on the quiet side, so they’re not going out every day with a ton of friends. One thing we see is that the rate of anxiety and depression is higher with remote workers, so the most practical advice is to be very open in talking about mental health with people, because it really affects their work and their ability to be a successful teammate on the job.

Remember, a manager is not a therapist; it's not your job to solve the issue, but it’s your job to be aware of it and to make sure your teammate gets proper help. Make sure they go see a doctor, go to a co-working space, get out and do some exercise, or get an actual therapist before it ends up becoming a real health problem.”

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In this episode we’ll be covering:

• Biggest challenges when scaling a developer team
• How he overcame these challenges
• First steps to scaling teams
• How to get hiring right

Excerpt from the interview:

Common mistakes when scaling engineering teams...

"I would say the biggest one is not putting enough emphasis on hiring for behavior and attitude. It’s the most expensive one too. Understand the team you're hiring for, and what's the balance you need to have in there.

The mistake we made in the past is hiring too many juniors. Unless you've got two seniors to match every eight juniors, you don't have a viable team. I call it guns and bullets. There's no point having a lot of bullets, if you don't have any guns to fire them, or the other way around.

Hiring 10 junior engineers can reduce the capacity in your organization, because your best people who were executing at a high rate, now have to mentor juniors. It takes a lot of their time for about six to nine months, and the overall capacity takes a hit. Make sure you understand the balance of strengths in your organization, and you're not just thinking about adding people, but strengthening the team."

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In this episode, we're covering:

• Mentoring in tech today
• His approach to mentoring
• Challenges in mentoring
• How to build a mentoring program

Excerpt from the interview:

How do you think a company could implement a mentoring program?

"I've not seen many companies with good mentorship programs and this includes Uber. It's a work in progress, but at least there's something. On the other hand, despite the fact that there's not much structure or best practices, I hear people talk about mentorship all the time, so somehow it’s working. It means that people really want mentoring and it has real value, but I think companies have a long way to go.

At companies, there are two ways a process can go: from the bottom up, or from the top down. Mentoring has to be voluntary, so neither of them will fully work. It cannot just be fully organic, because you might have some teams where people mentor each other, but it will not spread to other parts of the company. You surely can’t make it mandatory.

The number one thing that helps a lot is tying mentoring into performance. Good mentoring happens in a lot of places, but often it’s left unrecognized. The most obvious place to recognize it is when you have your performance review or promotion conversation. That makes it tangible. If mentoring doesn’t come up there, it turns into a side project some people will do and others won’t."

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