Let's imagine that you are just taking on an engineering organization. Maybe it is new to you or maybe it is completely new. What should you do to set yourself up for success? What are some of the important, or critical, aspects to think through, write down, nail down, or get agreement on?

In a five-part series, Mon-Chaio and Andy look back over the long, and sometimes rambling, episodes of The TTL Podcast and try to condense them down to something more digestible. In episode one you learned about defining your cultural and structural north star and in episode two, hiring strategy, clarity of tasks and boundary, and explicit intentionality. This episode dives into building your team fabric, the threads of process and ceremony that underly everything your engineering organization does.

Let's imagine that you are just taking on an engineering organization. Maybe it is new to you or maybe it is completely new. What should you do to set yourself up for success? What are some of the important, or critical, aspects to think through, write down, nail down, or get agreement on?

In a five-part series, Mon-Chaio and Andy look back over the long, and sometimes rambling, episodes of The TTL Podcast and try to condense them down to something more digestible. In episode one you learned about defining your cultural and structural north star. This episode summarizes the tactics that are necessary to flesh out those north stars, including hiring strategy, clarity of tasks and boundary, and explicit intentionality.

References:

 Let's imagine that you are just taking on an engineering organization. Maybe it is new to you or maybe it is completely new. What should you do to set yourself up for success? What are some of the important, or critical, aspects to think through, write down, nail down, or get agreement on?

In a five-part series, Mon-Chaio and Andy look back over the long, and sometimes rambling, episodes of The TTL Podcast and try to condense them down to something more digestible. This episode will guide you to laying the foundation on which everything else will rest: culture, values, long-lived KPIs, and long-lived boundaries.

References:

What is safe about psychological safety? Do you really want everyone to feel comfortable all the time? Research tells us that psychological safety is a key component of effective teams and organisations. This week Mon-Chaio and Andy dig into the whats and wherefores of psychological safety. They dive into how it is measured, how it fits together with other concepts researched, tell some stories of their own about psychological safety, and debate how it interacts with accountability.

Opening quote from "Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct"

If you have any requests, questions, or comments send them to [email protected].

References

What has Andy been reading recently? Where is Mon-Chaio? In this quick vacationcast you'll find out the answer to both of those questions.

Andy studied kendo for several years at the University of Washington and at the Highline Kendo Kai in Seattle under Marsten Sensei. He hasn't practiced for many years, but hopes to get his life setup so that he can get back to kendo at some point and is always happy to talk to people about it.

If you have questions about these books, kendo, or anything, send an email to [email protected].

References

You are a hiring manager and your organization has given you the green light to hire more people. What do you do next? Many people might feel the answer is obvious but for a surprisingly large number of companies, their hiring processes actively impede them from building great teams. Andy and Mon-Chaio pull apart conventional hiring practices to separate the wheat from the chaff and provide tactics to help guide the creation of a truly impactful hiring process.

 Opening quote from Job interviews are a nightmare — and only getting worse.

References:

What is the right way to have dev and ops work together? Is that different for data science? We look into ways these different specialities can be organised to foster collaboration. Development and operations has a lot of literature from the DevOps movement that gives us guidance for how to structure teams but data science has less written about it. Still, we have found some articles that shed light on things, and those articles appear to be based on reality, which we discover as we talk about our experience of working with data science and operations.

Opening quote from "The Uncanny Valley of a Functional Organization" by Ben Thompson.

References

A new project comes down the pike and Engineering asks for more heads to ship said project. Is this a reasonable request or are there other tactics we can use to "do more with less"? Mon-Chaio and Andy explore this common situation from both sides and offer specific diagnostic techniques to move the business forward, whether that's with additional headcount or without.

Opening music from Flight of the Conchords - Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros

References

Can you measure developer productivity? Prompted by an article by McKinsey and already reacted to by many, we ask if McKinsey is telling us to measure something that is at all useful, how to think about the problem McKinsey raises, and what you, as a technical leader, can do to address that problem better than what McKinsey suggests.

Opening quote from The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald M. Weinberg.

References:

Mon-Chaio gives a rundown of leadership books he's read in the past few months and pulls out interesting nuggets from each selection.

References: