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How to recover a team that’s gone rogue
“So, if I don’t do this, will I be fired?” retorted the senior engineer. The product manager confessed they’d given up. But the team was critical to the area. How did we get here? How do we get back? Enter: Rogue team I once picked up a team with a bizarre history. The area recognised…
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Nurturing Talent: How to Grow Leaders in Your Engineering Team 🌱
“True leaders don’t create followers; they create more leaders”. – Tom Peters Here are some techniques that I’ve used over the years to develop leadership within my area, and that you can use, too! Identifying potential Many brilliant people will never tell you they are looking for more. The first step is to identify potential.…
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What Makes a Good Engineering Manager?
Here is my opinion as to what is required from an engineering manager in order to be effective. 1. Technical guidance 🤖 While not necessarily the best coder on the team any longer, the Engineering manager has a strong technical background, high-level knowledge of key systems, and expertise in architecture and distributed system design. They…
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Perseverance: My Journey from Engineer to Manager
Engineers often ask me how they can grow into management. Here’s how I did it. Inspiration: Entrepreneurial beginnings I had always been interested in business. My father and grandfather were my role-models. Some of my fondest memories were visiting their offices as small child. I would dream of one day donning a suit and marching…
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Lessons from a Do-Over: How I Built Out my Management Team… Twice
This is a story about how I failed to build my management team, and sank, but then turned things around, and soared. Coronavirus crisis I became a senior manager in 2020, when the pandemic started. And we were not prepared for it. Most of my teams, 4 at the time, had no engineering manager at…
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What to do when a key person is leaving
One of the most difficult transitions for any company / team / organisation is when a key person is leaving. Maybe they were the founder, maybe an influential executive, maybe a charismatic informal leader — or maybe they’re the only one who knows how everything works and where all the bodies are buried. The upshot…
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The great return
I worked at the office on Monday and Tuesday this week. I’m a great proponent of working from the office — I’m that kid who always enjoyed visiting his dad and grandad at work, and one day imagined that I would be working in an important office with a nice suit (then I started worked…
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How to help prevent burnout
Burn-out is an all-too-common affliction, leaving people exhausted, cynical, and unable to work. It strikes as a result of chronic stress. People who are highly-engaged but lacking resources such as support or certain skills are at especially high risk. Pandemic lockdowns have done nothing to help the situation. In my experience, people suffering from burn-out are often…
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How to get your project back on track
This article includes tips that I’ve learned from my experience working at Booking.com and Amazon EC2; all views expressed are my own. Title picture: A train in the Netherlands goes off the tracks, to be saved by decorative whale tail sculpture, much to the surprised relief of the train driver. Courtesty ANP/SplashNews.com Three levers you…
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How to help someone be more independent
In the modern working environment, more responsibility and expectations are on your staff than ever before. Chief among these is the expectation that they should act as an owner of the business: showing initiative, identifying gaps, growing others and driving the change they see fit. It’s all too common to encounter workers who are too…