Ronen Agranat

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Introduction Stepping up to the leadership plate can be daunting. A common challenge new leaders face is balancing their existing duties with the additional responsibilities of management. I’m often asked: How do I balance managing a team with my responsibilities as an individual contributor? When I was getting started, my boss advised me sagely that…

No two teams are the same. However, high-performing teams have many common traits. Through examining these, we as leaders may discover insights that allow us to help more teams become high-performing. 1. The team uses merge requests High-performing teams use merge requests. They are standard practice since the advent of GitHub, and for good reason.…

When mentoring newer managers, one of the questions I am most often asked is about how to hold effective one-on-ones. Here are 10 tips to help you make your one-on-ones more effective. 1. Open the channels of communication Holding regular one-on-ones with your employees is all about creating open lines of communication. An established, trusting…

In this article, I’ll discuss some of the approaches and technologies we used at Jumo to turn our legacy, monolithic mobile money loan system into an ecosystem of micro-services. Developers cautiously approach a monolithic application (2001: A Space Odyssey) What makes a micro-service? Micro-services is an approach to system architecture arising from the convergence of several technologies:…