Posts tagged coaching.
Every engineering leader has lived this nightmare: two days from deadline, the team discovers the core architectural assumption doesn't work, the third-party API is missing critical functionality, or the algorithm can't handle production scale.
Through managing teams across multiple clients, I've observed that engineering productivity isn't just about technical skills. It's about recognizing that different engineers thrive under different working conditions.
Most teams focus on faster incident response. The real solution is preventing incidents from happening in the first place.
Traditional war games work great for single teams. But what happens when you have three subsystem teams, a dedicated SRE group, and multiple stakeholders who all need to respond to incidents together?
Time management lives alongside prioritization and communication as the foundational skills for being an effective team leader. Team leads (alongside everyone else in most organizations) have more work than they can handle, so what work should they do and when?
How long do you spend talking about your burndown chart during your sprint retrospectives? Burndown charts tell you so much more than if you finished all the work in the sprint or not. From these charts, you can learn:
When I was a backend team lead, I would sometimes jump in and help during sprints by writing code or diving into operations. Occasionally I would even be the best person for the job because I had domain knowledge for that service or sub-system.
I like to joke that every problem, at its core, is a communication problem.
When I started my development career, I thought I was hired to write feature code. What else is there to building a product? I only now realize how wrong I was.
Over the last two articles (SaaS War Games - Part 1 and SaaS War Games - Part 2), we dove into the value of War Games. In this article, the rubber meets the road on how to run one.
This article builds on SaaS War Games - Part 1, so I recommend reading that article before diving into this.
It’s 3 AM and your phone is ringing. There’s only one number you let ring through your Do Not Disturb settings. You open one eye and look at the first of 12 on-call notifications.