Where to stash your organizational risk?
June 13, 2018 Lately, I'm increasingly hear folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems, which are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Organizational risk is the more volatile subset of organizational debt.
Consider the team you have for senior positions.
May 19, 2018 I've been hiring engineering manager of managers roles over the past six months. These roles are scarcer than line management roles, and vary more across companies. This process has taught me a bunch of new things, and been remarkably rewarding.
Setting organizational direction.
May 9, 2018 Over the past year, as I've transitioned into largely working with managers of managers, and it's gotten much more challenging to define direction for the growing organization. Let's explore that a bit.
Model, document and share.
April 26, 2018 One of the trickiest, and most common, leadership scenarios is leading without authority, and I've written about one of the styles that I've found surprisingly effective in those conditions. I call it Model, Document, and Share.
Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt.
April 15, 2018 Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. This post takes a look at why migrations are so important, and also how to run them effectively.