How to measure and improve success in your engineering team

December 07, 2020

#14 – December 07, 2020

this week's favorite

Moving the needle begins with setting the right goals. As an engineering leader, senior developer, or founder of a new startup, I want you to take a minute and think – really think – about a project you are currently working on.

We don’t have a perfect answer — whoever figures out how to solve this challenge will be a hero to the developer community. But we think some of the lessons our team learned about this can help other developers. We think there’s a secret weapon for scoping that many teams haven’t even considered.

Many leaders I know get mired in an endless stream of transactions and never learn to see or harness the power of connections. We are at our best when we creating connections. In fact, as noted in the title of this post, I think it is one of the key attributes of an effective leader. Connecting beats controlling any day of the week.

I've done dozens of performance reviews while I was an engineering manager at Uber. One thing I learned early on is just how many unconscious biases I had. This revelation came when I attended my first unconscious bias training at the company. As we went through biases, I caught myself thinking, "wow, I did that. Yep, that as well. Yes, that's me."

In other years, this season is chock full of age-old traditions. While there’s often opportunities to make new choices and refresh old routines, we are typically still surrounded by the hallmarks of end-of-year traditions at home, and at work. Family gatherings, roadmapping meetings, budgeting and performance reviews and celebrations with gift-giving abound.

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