As organizations grow more complex, the folks running them interface with reality through increasingly incorporeal abstractions. On the smallest teams, leadership might be deep in the code on a daily basis. A bit larger, and you’re talking about tasks in sprints. Larger still, and you’re talking about collections of tasks, and adopting fancy terminology like ’epics.’ At a hundred plus engineers, you’re likely talking primarily in themes of work with focus on several key initiatives....| lethain.com
There are many important meetings in your first ninety days as a new engineering leader, but one that’s both easy to forget and surprisingly important is your first meeting with the finance team. There’s a lot to learn from the finance team, particularly drilling into your profit and loss statement, but there’s one narrow topic that causes a surprising amount of frustration between engineering and finance teams: how do you capitalize software engineering costs?| lethain.com
For context on this template, read Measuring An Engineering Organization @ Irrational Exuberance Text like this are usage hints; remove before finalizing If you have objective data, use that. If you don’t, find subjective data (e.g. survey) Remove sections that don’t make sense If populating thi...| Google Docs
For a long time, the path to engineering manager began with a prolonged stint of technical leadership. Then you’d transition into an initial management role that balanced people and technical responsibilities. Some companies call this a tech lead manager role. Folks entering those sorts of managerial roles were often the senior-most technical contributor on their team. If they struggled with the transition, many of them would fall back into the familiar habit of technical leadership instead...| lethain.com
To be successful at digital transformation you need to optimize the key feedback loops in your software engineering organization| martinfowler.com
Example survey, Example analysis While you should rely on your organizational metrics to measure developer productivity, quantitative measurement will sometimes miss important context. For example, you might be proud of how the backend developers are having a great time with their CI/CD, only to realize that the iOS engineers hate their release process that isn’t instrumented in any of your dashboards. A Developer Productivity Survey is an effective tool to bring qualitative feedback into y...| Infrastructure Engineering