“Can I stay on a purely technical track and still advance my career?” I have heard this question asked of me many times over my career and have asked the same question to myself many times.

As a technical leader you need to have a strategy on how you will grow and retain your best engineering talent. One part of this is clearly defining a path of growth for your engineering talent. Here are a few things to consider when developing technical tracks.

Continue reading “Strategies for Technical Tracks”

“We need to get our people to understand that they should stop seeking promotions!” my colleague stated. “They should be excited about their work and not worrying about being promoted.” We had been discussing who we felt were good candidates for promotions in that year’s review cycle. I responded “That is easy for you and me to say. We are executives and have some of the highest ranks in the company. The company created a ‘game system’ complete with these levels. The levels are things like ‘Sr Manager’, ‘Director’, ‘Vice President’. We reward handsomely the players that beat the previous level and move up to a new level. We send out nice congratulatory emails. We give extra perks and equity to those that level-up. And now you are saying they shouldn’t play the game? This seems hypocritical given that you and I made it the top levels of this game, benefited from it and now you don’t want others to play the same game?”

Continue reading “The Magic Number 72”

While I write a lot about management, I actually spent the majority of my career focused in non-management roles on writing software and designing products. In fact, I actively resisted moving into management.

For people in the software engineering field, one common topic is should I focus my career on a purely technical track or should I focus on a management track. Let me share a bit of my career journey. It will illustrate that the decision isn’t really a binary one. But can actually look a bit messy.

Continue reading “My Reluctant Journey to Management”

Reasonably smart people, given enough context, do reasonably smart things.

I remember a particular time at Netflix where we had a site outage. Of course we had more than one of those as most companies do at that scale. In this case the outage was caused by the decision of a single engineer. I don’t actually recall the specific details that led this engineer to make the fateful decision he made. But he made a mistake that appeared innocent enough but ended up impacting millions of customers.

This isn’t though what makes the story interesting. It is the response by leadership that taught me a lesson that I still learn from each and every day.

Continue reading “The Power of Context”

As Amanda & I thought about forming Teams Thrive, we had to ask ourselves is there something unique about our approach that we think the industry needs? There are a lot of fantastic executive coaches out there. What we came away with is that coaches are often focused on the leader of a team with a strong emphasis on the person in context of leadership & communication principles. We believe the fuller context of success is how do their teams function as a team (the Who), with a purpose (the What), with just enough process (the How) and still produce a great product (the What). 

Over and over we have seen that the right people with the right purpose working with the right processes create the best products. And leaders are only as good as the teams they produce. And teams are only as good as how they work together to solve real customer problems. We use these four dimensions as a “forensics” tool to evaluate where a team is. By looking at all four aspects we get a fuller picture of what needs to be done to move the team to a high functioning and thriving level.

Continue reading “The Who, Why, How, and What of Thriving Teams”

Over my time as a senior leader, I inherited a lot of teams. These teams came in various states of health. It was important for me to do some forensics and determine a path to either keep teams thriving or find a way to get them there. I needed a framework for evaluating teams.

In reality, this framework started coming together in a much more mundane way. Every year we had to outline a set of goals for our teams. The goals fell into categories that were always passed down from the top. Being a reductionist, I started seeing patterns in the categories that got handed down from year to year. They had different names of course. And different wording. But I began to see that there were only so many dimensions that a team can organize goals around and on the flip side only so many ways a team can be evaluated on their progress toward those goals.

Continue reading “How We Evaluate Teams”