Sizing engineering teams.
July 14, 2018 I've come to believe that most organizational design questions can be answered by recursively applying a framework for sizing teams. Over the past year I've refined my approach to team sizing into a bit of a framework, and even changed my mind on several aspects, especially the viability of small teams. This post describes how I now size teams
Selecting project leads.
July 12, 2018 Have you ever worked at a company where the same one or two people consistently got the most important projects? Me too. It's not only frustrating, I think it's a key indicator of poor organizational health. Over the past few years, I've started to use a very deliberate approach to selecting project leads, which has lead to a much wider set of leaders, and has been a great learning opportunity to evolve.
Writing strategies and visions.
July 9, 2018 As an organization grows beyond fifty people or so, you'll feel a building pressure to add a third layer of management, and eventually you will. This ought to be a benign event, what's the difference between supporting some managers and supporting their managers? It shouldn't be too different, but for me it was when my previous mechanisms of alignment stopped working very well. Two of the most effective tools I've found are strategy and vision documents, and this post introduces how to write both.
Guiding broad change with metrics.
July 6, 2018 Although folks often talk about goals and metrics when they're writing new plans or reflection on plans past, my fondest memories of metrics are when I've seen them used to drive large organizational change. This post covers the approach that I've seen effective to guide broad organizaitonal change relying on metrics and without requiring much organizational authority.
Goals and baselines.
July 5, 2018 There is a moment in every company's growth when top-level planning shifts from discussing specific projects to talking about goals. This can be a very empowering moment because goals decouple the "what" from the "how", but it can also be a confusing transition for everyone involved: writing clear goals takes a bit of practice. This post takes a look at how to write effective goals and how to use them during planning.