Learn to build humane, effective engineering organizationsEngineering leadership weekly| www.rubick.com
When you’re trying to optimize the flow of work, be on the lookout for piles. Examples of piles Piles of bugs. Backlogs full of stuff…| Jade Rubick
Work using the campsite rule: “Leave it better than you found it”.| www.rubick.com
What do you do when you don’t have the authority to accomplish your goals? To answer that, I’d like to talk today about a concept I called Reflected Power.| www.rubick.com
I wanted to share some resources for product managers. Especially to highlight communities that product managers can participate in. This list is less complete than other lists you’ll find (such as this example), and something I’ll update periodically.| www.rubick.com
Information flow is how you communicate with the people around you How do the people around you know what they need to know? I am going to…| Jade Rubick
Introduction| www.rubick.com
We talk about some simple techniques to judge the long term trends of a situation.| www.rubick.com
We talk through how to use a task force to cut through thorny cross-functional challenges.| www.rubick.com
I had a great conversation recently with Katie Wilde about the reliability space. (You can see or hear the conversation here). She made a…| Jade Rubick
Why your engineering team may need a hero rotation to combine focus and responsiveness| www.rubick.com
I wanted to share some notes on how I run remote retrospectives. These are not incident retrospectives, which I tend to run differently. But…| Jade Rubick
Let’s talk about the magic of small things: delivering mini-features, fixing bugs. These things are often the difference between a poor…| Jade Rubick
I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned about conducting skip level 1-1s. What is a skip level 1-1? Skip level 1-1s are a way to sense…| Jade Rubick
I share an approach to gradually increasing the reliability of a software development organization, without over or underinvesting in reliability| www.rubick.com
How to remove yourself from being a bottleneck as a leader| www.rubick.com
Organizational work is how to make an organization get better over time, instead of the opposite.| www.rubick.com
We explore macho leadership and bro culture, how to identify and respond to them, the risks they pose, and techniques for navigating these environments.| www.rubick.com
One of the harder situations you might find yourself in is managing a bottleneck team. What is a bottleneck team? When other teams can’t get…| Jade Rubick
Imagine an engineer who decides to make a breaking change to an API. They think it saves a ton of time. What they may not realize is that…| Jade Rubick
I was interviewed on the Level Up podcast. This is a summary of that interview.| www.rubick.com
Evil staging and gauntlet programs are chaos engineering inspired, systemic approaches to improve software reliability.| www.rubick.com
I was interviewed for the SRE Path podcast. This is a summary of that interview.| www.rubick.com
This post explores an archetype that makes teams faster -- the Nowist. They move everything towards the present.| www.rubick.com
This post explores an archetype that makes teams faster -- the Dodger. They dodge obstacles.| www.rubick.com
This post explores an archetype that makes teams faster -- the Mole. They give you intel.| www.rubick.com
This post explores an archetype that makes teams faster -- the Subtractionist. They simplify everything.| www.rubick.com
I'm exploring the use of group leadership coaching sessions. Let me know if you're interested.| www.rubick.com
Organizations have two danger zones they go through as they grow. I describe when they happen, what to watch out for, and how to solve them.| www.rubick.com
I share a wonderful writeup by John Hyland on the best program I've ever seen for hiring junior engineers| www.rubick.com
I was interviewed for the Software Snack Bites podcast. This is a summary of that interview.| www.rubick.com
Comparison of the differences between high trust and low trust organizations.| www.rubick.com
An introduction to FAST agile, describing how it works and what the tradeoffs of adopting it are| www.rubick.com
I share a complete guide to how to hire engineering managers, including a sample interview plan| www.rubick.com
Avoid the typical boring candidate review meeting, where everyone summarizes their feedback. Instead, use this surprisingly effective approach!| www.rubick.com
I share what I've learned about being a leadership consultant| www.rubick.com
An executive advisor can help you grow faster and navigate unfamiliar terrain. This post summarizes how to evaluate advisors and what rates to pay for their services| www.rubick.com
Jade shares an experience report on the use of a Product Council to solve executive alignment on product direction, and cross-team execution challenges.| www.rubick.com
A history of Mini-Ms -- how this innovative practice came to be.| www.rubick.com
Jade Rubick shares his advice for new directors. All the surprises you may encounter, and tips for navigating the new skills of managing managers.| www.rubick.com
Engineering handbooks can be done in an open-source manner, which allows process to adapt quickly to the needs of an organization.| www.rubick.com
Reviews the various tools you can use for an engineering handbook and process documentation in general.| www.rubick.com
A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. I describe variations on the practice.| www.rubick.com
A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. I describe implementing Mini-Ms| www.rubick.com
A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. I describe the practice.| www.rubick.com
Jade shares example engineering levels, that you can use to craft engineering levels at your company.| www.rubick.com
One of the key things that makes leaders effective is the ability to orient themselves. Leaders make their own problems. This post shares how to do that.| www.rubick.com
Provides a weekly project plan template geared towards software projects. The simplest possible plan that can work.| www.rubick.com
An overview of common mistakes people make while developing a product strategy, tips for creating a successful strategy, and how to communicate and execute on a product strategy.| www.rubick.com
Describes the process gates, a common management trap. Managers use them to fix situations, but they often have the opposite of intended effect. Describes alternatives to process gates.| www.rubick.com
For managers, viewing your role as a shit shield is one of the most common early mistakes. Learn the dangers of being a shit shield, and what to do instead.| www.rubick.com
Learn the nuts and bolts of project management for software projects, with the things you should do every week: update your project plan, review your risk registry, and send a project update| www.rubick.com
Learn a handy exercise you can use to define boundaries between roles (and teams)| www.rubick.com
Understanding how companies go about figuring out compensation. And an exercise to do for your team.| www.rubick.com
How managers can make changes that people will embrace.| www.rubick.com
Thirteen tips for improving your executive presence.| www.rubick.com
Security, reliability, and design teams can use the objective expert model to get other teams to do work for them, in a scalable way that encourages good relationships with other teams.| www.rubick.com
Programs are more complicated than projects which are more complicated than milestones. Instead of projects, focus on milestonesMost engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. You can get better results by focusing on milestones instead.| www.rubick.com
You can dramatically improve your videoconferencing using a DSLR camera. This guide explains how I set it up and some of the challenges I face.| www.rubick.com
This post outlines the various ways people break up the leadership roles on engineering teams: engineering manager, tech lead, and single-threaded owner. It also outlines how some responsibilities are broken up between engineering leader and other functions.| www.rubick.com
Product engineering teams rely on dependencies heavily. They shouldn't. This post argues that product engineering teams (and all teams really) should instead operate using the 'independent executor model'.| www.rubick.com
Embedded team members report to a central manager, but work on another team full time. This describes the ins and outs of successful embedding, and why it can be such a useful coordination model.| www.rubick.com
Deprecation is a common thing with platform technologies: libraries, APIs, and components. But it causes huge problems. This outlines the hidden costs of deprecation and suggests other ways to handle deprecation.| www.rubick.com
Liaisons are a good coordination model to use when you need people to have better context with other parts of the organization. Learn more about how to apply this pattern.| www.rubick.com
Goal frameworks like OKRs are a popular way to coordinate the work across an organization. One of the most common anti-patterns is to use it to run projects in engineering. This describes why that is a problem and better alternatives.| www.rubick.com
Self-service is one of the most powerful patterns for decoupling engineering teams from each other, and preventing an engineering organizatino from slowing down. This post describes self service and how to move to it.| www.rubick.com
Service provider is the only pattern many platform teams have known. This article describes how this coordination model works and some alternatives to consider.| www.rubick.com
Tenets are a powerful tool to speed up the decision-making of an organization. Stop rehashing the same disucussions and provide better context for decisions with tenets.| www.rubick.com
This is a list of patterns you can apply to coordinate the work of teams. The patterns are divided into centralized, role-based, and team coordination models.| www.rubick.com
Although counter-intuitive, it can be beneficial to build silos and decrease collaboration between teams. Balance the need for collaboration, coordionation, and communication with these tips.| www.rubick.com
Bundled hiring is where you take multiple, similar positions, and you merge the hiring queue and use a unified process to respond to all of them. It is one of the best approachs I've seen to speed up hiring, and increase the diversity of people you hire.| www.rubick.com
Most job descriptions are boring. Write job descriptions that engage your candidates and design them to be more useful and inclusive with this guide. Includes links ot helpful tools.| www.rubick.com
Improve your hiring by using a candidate packet. Help candidates understand the company, position, and hiring process.| www.rubick.com
Practical questions to guide you to a strong answer to the question: 'why should anybody want to work at your company?'| www.rubick.com
The easiest way to improve your hiring is to speed it up. Here's how: use an SLA, reduce steps, use schedule blocks, present instant offers, and use a modified rolling approach.| www.rubick.com
Distills everything I've learned from decades of hiring, from the nuts and bolts of how to run a good hiring process, to some novel techniques for standing out and go faster than your competition.| www.rubick.com
Standards are a contentious topic for engineering organizations. Describes how to put in place the right amount of standards, but have a process that allows for useful exploration outside of standards.| www.rubick.com
Power can delude those of us that rise to leadership. Our environment starts to lie to us, and we start getting bad information. Describes how this happens and how to combat it.| www.rubick.com
Describes a novel approach to company holidays which improves company focus, and makes it easier for people to take vacation on less common holidays.| www.rubick.com
Use the tips to improve your org's use of Slack: answers to questions should take longer than the time to look it up, notifications should go to a few people, the more people in a room, the more structured it should be. Plus a few more.| www.rubick.com
As meetings grow in size they become less effective. Discover how the rule of eight can help you refactor meetings as they grow.| www.rubick.com
Communication is analogous to sharing state in computer systems. Describes how the same principles apply between both.| www.rubick.com
If you want to see results, make someone accountable to it. Describes how we used OKRs to improve equity.| www.rubick.com
Demo-driven development is a practice where you use regular demos, a standard week-by-week project plan, and value based user stories to plan the team's work.| www.rubick.com
Three anti-patterns are ubiquitous: task treadmill, million-meeting agile, and Gantt-aholic project management. Describes them and links to better alternatives.| www.rubick.com
Upstream thinking helps you prevent future problems. Describes the patterns behind this style of thinking and how to identify what blocks it.| www.rubick.com
Template and approach you can use to dramatically improve your interviewing results.| www.rubick.com
One of the most bias-prone activities in companies is promotions. Describes some techniques to give you real-time feedback on bias to help you make better promotion decisions.| www.rubick.com
Describes the impact of OODA loops and feedback cycles on engineering organizations.| www.rubick.com
Review of tools to make startups more effective| www.rubick.com
Leadership is a race between complexity and leadership. Describes the principles behind creating humane, effective organizations in growing software startups.| www.rubick.com
Describes the nuts and bolts of how to implement equitable pay (and equitable stock equity) within organizations (engineering focused).| www.rubick.com
Under-represented minority groups are the best leading indicator of company culture. Describes why this is the case, and links to posts on how to improve.| www.rubick.com
When I was introduced to the concept of Completed Staff Work, I felt like I had been handed a secret management technique. I had been a manager for several years and never heard of it, so it felt like a big secret when I did. And the idea simply exploded how I thought of my work as a leader.| www.rubick.com
Steel Threads are a powerful but obscure software design approach. Learning about Steel Threads will make you a better engineer. You can use them to avoid common problems like integration pain. And you can use them to cut through the complexity of system design.| www.rubick.com
I’d like to share the results of one of the most interesting management experiments I’ve been a part of. At a company I worked at recently, we implemented the Single Threaded Owner (STO) model from Amazon, where you have everyone on the team report to a single leader, including product, design, and engineering. You can think of the STO model as a more extreme form of cross-functional teams, where the team has everything it needs to deliver on its mission.| www.rubick.com
