Last month, I watched a senior engineer spend three hours debugging what should have been a fifteen-minute problem. The issue wasn’t complexity—it was context switching between four different monitoring tools, correlating timestamps manually, and losing their train of thought every time they had to log into yet another dashboard. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. This is the hidden tax most engineering teams pay without realizing there’s a better way.| 🏡
the·a·tre (also the·a·ter) /ˈθiːətər/ noun : the performance of actions or behaviors for appearance rather than substance; an elaborate pretense that simulates real activity while lacking its essential purpose or outcomes Example: “The company’s security theatre gave the illusion of protection without addressing actual vulnerabilities.” Your organization has invested millions in observability tools. You have dashboards for everything. Your teams dutifully instrument their servi...| 🏡
A PoD structure enables cross functional teams, that is, teams that comprise of different specialisations like engineer, product manager, data scientist etc to work independently and execute on a business goal without dependencies on other teams. This type of structure increases the execution speed but is not without risks. Some of these that I have encountered are -| 🏡
Staffing is relative to expectations. In the growth mood, you may want to build a lot of features and stretch, you may feel understaffed. If you are in the mood for conservation, you would want to maximise on efforts that make you money in the next 3-6 months period, so a lot of work being done may feel redundant and you feel you are overstaffed. Since this is a complex problem, we need to look at the levers.| 🏡
Oct 7th, 2022| 🏡
OKRs are theoretically quite good for planning and communicating organisational goals and checking progress. The ideas are very simple and draw on empirical wisdom from successful companies like intel and google, thus in absence of a pre-existing system and for new companies its very easy to start using the methodology. OKRs also resonate well with teams that have driven progress iteratively. However, there’s a distinct lack of literature around failures and learnings to get into a good rhy...| 🏡
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Postel’s law ~19811,| 🏡
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