In a previous blog post I talked about the dangers of using ‘velocity’ as a KPI for Engineering, but what are good alternatives? I propose that the following perennial KPIs measure a lot of what matter about Engineering success (in a SaaS/web app environment): Uptime Mean Time To Discover Mean…

While I will always bucket myself as someone who embraces servant leadership, I often see people neglect the ‘leadership’ part. This article does a great job of summarizing the pitfalls, and gives an excellent re-framing of servant leadership that I think is the sweet spot for us servant leaders. “You…

Some of the most excruciating and wasteful time I’ve spent in my career is listening to presentations. Here are my Golden Rules for effective presenting Assume no-one will ever look at the deck again (very likely true) — what 2 or 3 key things do you want people to remember…

Here are my ‘must do’ steps to be on a solid path towards a promotion Understand — understand what the next level requires in your company — refer to your company’s career ladder definitions. Every company is different, so don’t make assumptions based on a title what the expectations are…

I have met 4 engineers in my 25-year career whose estimates I would trust. This is not a mark of how bad we are at estimating, but how hard estimating engineering work is. Early in my career, I was taught that the ‘accurate’ way to estimate was to spend a…

For many students, looking for an internship or graduate employment may be their first time experiencing the interview process and creating resumes, and I’d like to offer some advice for those of you in this position. …

I’ve been asked a couple of times in the last week for advice on OKRs. I don’t consider myself to have mastered them but have seen some common problems over the years. OKRs should bring focus and alignment about what really matters — don’t specify too many Os or KRs…

A great articulation of what I’ve experienced with “stretch goals” — they even call out the exact company (Yahoo) where I saw them have a negative effect When organizations pursue stretch goals as a way of overcoming recent failure (“going for broke”) while ignoring their tight resource constraints, they’re asking for trouble. They should resist the temptation to “fly to the sun,” because their patched-together efforts are most likely doomed.

I’ve looked at tens of thousands of engineering resumes over my career, and am still reviewing 10’s a week. …