Ankeet Maini’s Post

Here’s one pretty educated guess from my side about some of the challenges that leaders in most companies deal with: 💻 If you’re a CTO: you have too many projects to handle, so the focus of teams is eroding 📊 If you’re a CEO: it’s hard to find a concrete outcome of the technology investments OR you don’t have the resources to fulfill VCs expectations There’s a piece I wrote a while back about one way of evaluating and managing these problems: https://buff.ly/4esZwNw But what’s more interesting: do these problems reflect your day-to-day?

𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗽 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 and who have gone through the costly & painful process heavily 𝗿𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 their software. My goal is to help early founders identify early warning signs and prevent these scenarios so they don’t have to go through that same process. I want to better understand patterns & behaviours that lead up to this. I believe I can succeed much better at this when I can complement my own engineering experience and perspectives with those from other (non-technical) founders. As an exchange I’m open to spend some time with your CTO or lead engineer and explore if I can provide some fresh new ideas or insights to technical or process improvement challenges at hand. I believe there’s always room for improvement and fresh perspectives. Drop a comment with the word ‘exchange’ if you’re open to helping me help other founders succeed in their early construction journey.

❓ How should engineering managers balance roadmap work with unexpected opportunities/ issues? Decoding the four work dimensions 👩💻 I recently read an insightful piece by 🌀 Luca Rossi Rossi where he explained how engineering activities can be divided into 4 categories based on the two axes: Business vs. Maintenance, and Planned vs. Unplanned and gain clarity to maintain a balance between roadmap work with unexpected opportunities/ issues? The four types of work are: 👉 Business planned: The strategic cycle - Quarter OKR These are business-planned activities that are important to match company KPIs and are meant for quarter planning. 👉 Business unplanned: The tactical cycle - Two-week sprint A regular, two-week sprint cycle that gets things done. It addresses both business-planned and business-unplanned activities (opportunities that aren't anticipated in the OKR but are worth doing anyway) 👉 Maintenance planned: The operational cycle - Weekly maintenance A short, weekly cycle that has a fixed time allocation to address bug fixes and small changes requested by anyone on the team. 👉 Maintenance unplanned: ASAP It includes incidents, hot-fixes, and emergencies that cannot wait for weekly operations and have to be addressed immediately. This is a quick overview of the four types of work. If you want to delve deeper into it further as well as how to allocate time to these activities, you can check the newsletter below 👇 Kudos to Luca Rossi for writing about such a simple yet crucial topic. Your newsletters have always been helpful! 🙏 #engineeringleadership #engineeringmanager #engineeringmanagement

Really welcomed this post that collects together lessons and advice from leaders at New Relic, Credit Karma, Reforge, Hubspot, Trulia, Intercom, VSCO, etc on how the culture in your engineering team finds a balance between debating everything vs just tell me what to do! > “On the “debate vs. do” spectrum, neither one of the extremes are a good or healthy place to be. Cultures that debate and challenge everything, even the smallest of considerations, without ever reaching resolution never manage to ship anything. Cultures that absolve themselves of debate entirely end up disempowered from the end outcome (and also don’t ship anything meaningful, even if they ship a lot from a volume perspective)” Those from School Of Code will recognise elements in this piece as I discussed some of the points with teams during the final project especially around how you make the final decision and commit to it as an individual and a team. Many companies go through a phase where roles like product managers, program managers, engineers, engineering managers, and stakeholders proliferate to the extent that pinpointing the decision-maker becomes challenging. In such instances, a lack of clear leadership often leads to an approach of "let's all collaborate to find a solution," which unfortunately does little to bring clarity and instead transforms tasks into a protracted consensus-building exercise. As a result, progress grinds to a slow pace. You could argue that this is a misapplication of consensus building. To establish a robust consensus, it's crucial that everyone interested has a chance to express their opinions and defend them, ensuring all viable options are considered. The essence of this "consensus" lies not in unanimous agreement on the "right" option but rather in mutual agreement that the person in charge (or the decision making process you’ve agreed to), having evaluated the options, will make the final decision. It entails a collective commitment to move forward with the chosen plan without harboring personal disagreements or becoming upset if your preferred option is not selected: Disagree and Commit! There’s lot of useful perspectives in this piece! It’s well worth reading.

Debate Everything vs. Just Tell Me What To Build Striking the right balance is where the game is. As Jeff says, “Good engineers have to have an extreme pedantry streak. We spend a lot of our day with systems that punish us brutally if we aren't exactingly specific. We can spend hours crying and tearing our hair out because of a small misspelling. If you push a task or a feature (or even worse a ‘requirement’) down to engineering then we're going to analyze and argue about the intricacies of it. If you push down a proper goal and give us flexibility about how to get there, we'll argue about the fastest way to get there and we'll disagree and commit because our eyes are on the real prize.” And Matt, “What you measure is what you get. The biggest challenges come when the different orgs measure different things; e.g. if product leadership gives credit for shipping and engineering gives credit for complexity. If you only get to staff software engineer by working on things of necessary complexity then you are incentivized to find complexity. Many times in engineering orgs, engineers are siloed in what counts. If you think back through the teams you are on, some eng managers are more focused on tech debt, developer experience, platform challenges, but most of the time that's because there isn't a clear incentive tied to a business outcome for them.”

Measuring team performance has become a popular topic recently, especially as many software companies aim to get more value from their employees. Market conditions are forcing management teams to stop hiring or even reduce the size of tech teams to meet expectations. That’s why the efficiency of a smaller team makes the difference. Why High-Velocity Teams Win: - Focus and Clarity: Smaller teams can maintain a laser-sharp focus on key objectives without getting bogged down by layers of communication. - Agility: With fewer people, decision-making is faster, enabling quick pivots when needed. - Cost Efficiency: Lean teams reduce overhead costs, freeing up resources for other critical areas like marketing and sales. At Appunite, we've seen firsthand how small, high-velocity teams can achieve remarkable results. In our recent projects, we've helped startups: - Boost Login Success Rates: By focusing on user experience improvements, a small team delivered a 30% increase in successful logins in just a few weeks. - Fix Mobile App Crashes: A dedicated team tackled critical issues for power users, improving app stability and user satisfaction significantly. Learn more about how to build and maintain high-velocity teams in our latest blog post.

Scaling an Engineering Org: A Journey Through Roles and Responsibilities https://buff.ly/48ATGWx 1. Roles and Responsibilities: Learn about the journey of scaling an engineering org and how different roles and responsibilities play a crucial role. #EngineeringOrg #Scaling 2. Challenges and Solutions: Discover the challenges faced while scaling an engineering org and explore effective solutions to overcome them. #Challenges #Solutions 3. Best Practices: Gain insights into the best practices for scaling an engineering org and ensure a smooth and successful transition. #BestPractices #ScalingSuccess

🎯 For each "STARTED" and "FINISHED" point in your definition of workflow, there are four measures: 1. Work-in-progress; 2. Throughput; 3. Work item age; and 4. Cycle time. What else should you have on your definition of workflow? The full article is available here: https://lnkd.in/eAg5if7X

"A lot of us put undo pressure on ourselves to get something to work immediately. Because of that, when we encounter obstacles, we make value judgements about our abilities. We tell ourselves that we should have the perfect solution or perfect architecture immediately, leaving no room for growth and learning. The same holds true for teams. Teams that seek to lay blame and point the finger cultivate a culture of fear, uncertainty and doubt. If people are afraid of taking a risk, code-bases stagnate and languish as innovation takes a backseat to safety. Nobody wants to be seen as the person that caused a failure so everybody plays it safe, not doing anything until they are 100% sure of the outcome." EQengineered Author: Jennifer Parker, Principal Technical Consultant/Architect #softwarearchitecture #softwaredevelopment #innovation #experimentation #digitaltransformation #digitalbusiness #EQengineered

Does your IT team embrace experimentation in its #digitaltransformation pursuits? Does your culture encourage experimentation? Read EQengineered's Principal Technical Consultant/Architect Jennifer Parker's article about helping teams embrace experimentation to achieve real change. #techBoston #techinsights #EQengineered