Fork the org growth template and the org design template. Having been involved in quite a few budget and headcount processes over the years, one thing that continues to surprise me is how often folks make major headcount requests without having done any organzational design of those those requested heads will compose into an organization. The good news is that the high-level sort of organizational design required for headcount planning is abstract, low granularity, and it’ll likely only tak...| Infrastructure Engineering
Fork this template on Google Sheets At some point in your planning process, you’re going to get a headcount target. It’s tempting to immediately jump into allocating that headcount–we’re going to do so much this year–but it’s helpful to take an hour to model out recruiting capacity to understand whether your headcount target is realistic. Once you’ve gone through the exercise, you’ll finish with a simple chart that shows your progress over the year towards that headcount targe...| Infrastructure Engineering
TODO: Find better vocabulary to distinguish between “leadership team” in your org (that you manage) and “leadership team” that you’re a member of or report to I once walked into an annual headcount planning session to learn that the other engineering managers in the room had already decided together how they would reallocate the senior members from the infrastructure organization that I supported to the teams that they ran. This was, they assured me, optimal for their roadmaps.| Infrastructure Engineering