Management

Gossip, Rumors, and Lies

Everyone is just… sitting there. Six of you. All managers who report up to Evan, your boss, who decided two weeks ago that “it’s probably a good idea for this leadership team to get together on a regular basis and talk about what is up.” He dropped an agenda-less, sixty-minute recurring meeting on everyone’s calendar… more

November 7, 2016 10 Comments

How to Recruit

From a recruiting perspective, the best engineering manager I’ve worked with established her reputation with two hires. It went like this: ME: “We need to build an iOS team, and while we have talented engineers, we don’t have time to train the current team on iOS, it’ll be faster to hire.” HER: “Great, who should… more

September 6, 2016 15 Comments

The Situation

Pressure’s on. I can tell from the silence in the meeting that something is up. There is no how’s-your-weekend chat-chit and everyone slowly looks at each other wondering about the source of the suspense. I write the agenda on the whiteboard knowing that we’re likely not doing anything on this agenda because…. … there’s a… more

July 24, 2016 5 Comments

Stimulus Driven Creatures

My favorite VC and I were talking about motivating humans over drinks at Mars Bar. She explained, “Rands, each person needs to hear the same message in a different way. Did you read the language of love piece that stormed around the Internet? It describes the five different ways we might like to receive love:… more

January 17, 2016 5 Comments

Shields Down

Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a good friend who asked, “I know you’re really happy with your current gig because you’ve been raving about it for a year, but would you like to… more

January 1, 2016 128 Comments

Be Unfailingly Kind

DJ and I play Destiny. I’ve never met DJ, but each week he and I and a dozen or so other regulars are sitting on our respective couches, chairs, and bean bags tackling the various parts of this gorgeous first-person shooter. You can play much of Destiny by yourself. There are daily missions on various… more

August 3, 2015 14 Comments

Seven Plus or Minus Three

A common question I am asked, “How big should the team be?” My immediate response: Seven plus or minus three. There is a not a lot of hard theory behind this guideline, just common sense. To understand my reasoning, let’s do a little math. Let’s first assume you have seven folks on your team and… more

April 12, 2015 15 Comments

I Have a Hunch

Zach looked tired, he looked weary. “I used to code. I’d get to work a little after 10am high on caffeine, I’d sit down at my desk, glance at my email, and then start coding. Sure, there would be a meeting here and there, but we’d be talking about code or things that lead to… more

January 1, 2015 3 Comments

The Old Guard

Dunbar’s Number is a favorite blunt diagnosis for the pains that affect rapidly growing teams. The number, which is somewhere between 100 and 250 describes a point at which a group of people can no longer effectively maintain social connections in their respective heads. What was simple from a communication perspective becomes costly. What was… more

October 15, 2014 14 Comments

The Wolf

You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics: They appear to exist outside the well-defined process we’ve defined to get things done, but they appear to suffer no consequences for not following these rules. Everyone knows… more

September 1, 2014 27 Comments