Gergely Orosz’s Post

Excited to share: Google's Addy Osmani's new book "Leading Effective Engineering Teams" is out! 📚 Definitely adding this to my reading list! Gergely Orosz, whom I highly respect in the tech industry, had the privilege of reading it early and even wrote the foreword. Gergely recommends it for tech leads and engineering leaders looking for proven strategies. #TechLeadership #EngineeringManagement #BookRecommendation

Are you facing challenges while scaling your engineering team? 🤔 John Doran explores the challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned in structuring roles and responsibilities in his recent article. Below are key takeaways from this piece 👇 🔶 In early days: ➡️ Titles and hierarchy didn't matter. ➡️ Communication is simple. 🔶 A few challenges when expanding the team rapidly may include: ➡️ Ambiguity 👉 Lack of clarity on expectations for various roles led to daily challenges. 👉 Understanding what constitutes a 'senior engineer' or the role of a 'Director of engineering' became crucial. 👉 Establishing clear criteria for technical and managerial tracks. ➡️ Messy middle 👉 Ambiguity in tech lead, engineering manager, and senior engineer roles. 👉 Another challenge is: Determining the appropriate level of hands-on involvement for engineering managers and technical leads. 👉 Providing a clear path for senior engineers. ➡️ Org gaps 👉 Existing structure didn't address newer business and org challenges. 👉 Clarifying responsibilities for long-term team strategy. 👉 Introducing roles like staff engineer and senior engineering manager. 🔶 Principles for solving ➡️ Tackling day-to-day issues by defining expectations. ➡️ Achieving clarity through consistent naming and expectations. ➡️ Prioritising long-term integrity rather than short-term discomfort. ➡️ Impact over tenure is the key measure for success. ➡️ Teams are healthier and perform better with localized reporting. ➡️ Promotions should align with cultural messages. 🔶 Implementing changes ➡️ Defining maker and management tracks with consistent dimensions and expectations. ➡️ Streamlining roles and eliminating ambiguity by removing technical lead designation. ➡️ Introducing staff engineer and senior engineering manager roles with a broader scope. 🔶 These changes can help in: ➡️ Low impact on individuals due to clear communication. ➡️ Strengthening retention with defined paths for progression. ➡️ Continuous iteration as a management tool, adapting to feedback. Kudos to John Doran for sharing invaluable insights. Extremely helpful! 🙏 To read the full article, click here 👇 #engineeringexcellence #engineeringmanagement #engineeringleadership

This. There shouldn't be a separate "engineering roadmap" to start with. Same as "product roadmap", "marketing roadmap", or "design roadmap". (get your Freddy Mercury karaoke vibe and mentally repeat) One team, one vision - one roadmap, no division 🎸 The capacity of the team should be looked at as a holistic system, and the leaders should align on how to use the capacity across all teams best. What's the point of having a "product roadmap" that leads to invisible technical debt being introduced, that will slow down your team as tangled ropes on your team wheels? Or a technical roadmap that will not deliver any short or long term value to customers. Have the difficult conversations with your peers, and figure what's the most valuable path forward - together.

Let’s talk about the art and emotion of leadership in software development. Imagine creating an environment where conversations flow seamlessly, and data paints a vivid picture of productivity. As a manager, part of that creation involves understanding the unique challenges your software development team faces, from missed deadlines to friction in planning. To better problem solve and become a better engineering leader it may be helpful to shift to thinking like an evidence scientist. Which is someone who tries to implement and then evaluate change in the real world, in situated, specific contexts. Here are some key strategies that might help you get into that mindset. 🚀Create space for real talk. 🚀 Make it easier to access and then use information. 🚀Make your team your most valuable source of evidence. Read more about the strategy it takes to be a evidence scientist and the art of leadership: #DeveloperExperience #EngineeringLeadership #DevOps

I went from PagerDuty’s first engineer to eventually running engineering there. During that time, and now as a startup founder myself, I’ve learned that the success of a tech startup isn't just about the vision, the product, or even the market. It's also about how well your engineering team can turn that vision into reality. If you’re not focusing on your Developer Experience, you are just handicapping your best athletes. If you want to move fast, scale your team, and maintain a competitive edge, DevX should be your focus. Here's why 👉 👉 : 1. DevX improves productivity: A good developer experience focuses on keeping devs in their flow state - and not getting distracted or blocked waiting for information, for access to tooling, for infrastructure, or for other teams to do something for you. We’re not microprocessors - there’s huge costs to context switching! 💡 2. DevX reduces the cost of scaling: Simplify, simplify, simplify. As your team grows, you’ll find HUGE leverage in just simplifying wherever you can. You’ll want to minimize the number of languages, frameworks, tools, tech stacks, etc, that your developers need to know to get their job done - this will keep their cognitive load at reasonable levels, and scaling the team gets much much easier. 📈 3. DevX attracts & retains top talent: The best engineers want an environment that lets them to do their best work. Why hire the best people and then hand them a bunch of toil? Great DevX will help draw top talent to your organization and, more importantly, keep them there. 🌟 If you want to win in today’s ultra-competitive market, you have to cultivate a positive developer experience. DevX needs to be a strategic move eng leadership should make to increase team efficiency, accelerate time-to-market, and ultimately give your product a winning edge.

Top 5 books every CTO should read. You might find it surprising, but they're not strictly tech-focused. 1️⃣ "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek explores the concept of the "Golden Circle," a model that emphasizes starting any endeavor or leadership task by asking "Why?" — the purpose, cause, or belief that inspires us to do what we do. Sinek argues that organizations and leaders who prioritize their 'why' are more successful and able to inspire others more effectively than those who focus on 'what' or 'how' they do things. 2️⃣ "Ideaflow" by Janelle Arty Starr tells about how to measure the pain in software development. It focuses on assessing the "friction" experienced by developers to pinpoint critical issues, comprehend their origins, and conduct targeted experiments for empirical learning and solutions. This approach champions a data-centric mastery of software development. 3️⃣ "Managing Humans" by Michael Lopp offers insightful tales and practical advice on the art of engineering leadership, drawing from his own experiences in Silicon Valley. The book shows the nuances of managing tech teams and fostering effective communication. 4️⃣ "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen explores the challenging concept of disruptive innovation, illustrating how established companies can do everything "right" yet still lose their market leadership when confronted with technological innovations. Christensen analyzes patterns of success and failure across industries to show how and why disruption happens and what companies can do to avoid it. 5️⃣ "The Principles of Product Development Flow" by Donald G. Reinertsen breaks down the complex product development processes into manageable principles, focusing on achieving efficient flow. Reinertsen employs an in-depth analysis of queue theory, economics, and systems thinking to offer innovative strategies for overcoming the inherent inefficiencies in traditional product development methodologies. Would you suggest any books to add to this list?

Laura is spot on - I’ve never seen any engineering roadmap detached from tangible business results being successful. Being an engineer for a good part of my career (I still consider myself one, even if I don’t write production code on a regular basis anymore), I understand the frustration of feeling unable to do my job efficiently. Legacy technologies - some of them which might be end of life, leaky abstractions, loose cohesiveness and high coupling: we’ve all been there. But what as I lead I learnt is that to bring other people to understand the real benefits of these activities and get onboard, it’s essential to be clear about what would be achieved if successful. It’s not a simple “demodularise” or “re architect” the moonlight, platform etc. It’s enabling our organisation to deliver our core product more effectively, maybe by enabling products to be launched faster or by supporting the increasing load of customers without having to go down on Black Friday week as it happened for the past 3 years. Having a vision of why certain work is needed also helps us engineers in making the most appropriate choices. Do you *really* need that NoSQL database to support compound 50% customers growth over the next 3 years? As I work more years of building products and teams, I find myself often coaching on this topic to new leads. They are so excited about being able to work on something that could be so impactful for the team performance, but often need guidance in discovering the real key outcomes that will make those initiatives a success. If you are lucky enough to work on a product where you can afford spending time on building the thing right, my advice would be always to ask yourself: who/what am I making it right for?

We are all judged by what we ship and how that impacts our business. ❌Success is not completion of a project or feature nor a set of tickets or branches of code, wireframes... none of that. ✅Success is shipping something that users love and benefits the business and achieves short, medium and long term ROI (which is another way of saying benefits the business, but worth highlighting). This point made my short list of fallacies that I recently posted. https://lnkd.in/eArsgkHJ

Repeat after me: engineering goals are not separate from product or business goals. Laura Tacho's post captures why engineering roadmaps fail, and more so because product and engineering don't collaborate on "one roadmap". Product work, engineering work, documentation work, customer calls, design - all kinds of work lead to business impact. If product leaders bring their "requirements" in the form of a product roadmap and engineering leaders bring their "requirements" in the form of an engineering roadmap, which roadmap should the team work on? The other side of this is where teams often also fail to deliver the product roadmap, may be not as often as they fail to deliver the engineering roadmap. Ironically, that also happens because of the same problem - two separate roadmaps. It's just that there is more attention from the organization on the success of product roadmaps. So, the pressure to deliver product roadmaps is significantly high. I like Laura's suggestion. Here is another one. Establish that the product and engineer lead are jointly leading their team and are partners in prioritizing what needs to be done and how it will be done. Collaborate to create "One Roadmap" for the team which has all the work that needs to be done. Use collaboration and One Roadmap as a way to constantly talk about what problems need to be solved and why, both from product and engineering perspectives. Understanding the why behind product initiatives will help the engineering leader become more customer-centric, and understanding the why behind engineering initiatives will help the product leader become more technical. Such collaboration to own outcomes together will lead to opportunities for both leaders to learn from each other about how to decide which problems to solve for customers (product), how to ship high quality iteratively and faster (engineering and design), and how it moves the business forward.

Great post!! Reduce toil for your developer so they can ship code faster and innovate. A majority of the enterprise customers I work with are either spinning up entire teams to support DevEx or building portals Here is great article from Gartner on Developer Portals/Experience https://lnkd.in/gsf49ExZ