What makes a good remote team?

December 21, 2020

#16 – December 21, 2020

this week's favorite

As a consultancy, our team is literally our product, and it’s the part of this company that I’m most proud of. Our business is not perfect. I certainly have room to grow as a leader, our internal processes can mature further, etc. But I cannot imagine having a better team in place to support each other and deliver for our clients.

Advice from leaders at Shopify, G2, Procurify, Venngage, CreditKarma (and more!) on the most common mistakes you should avoid as a manager.

I once thought I had traveled a unique career path. Graduating from college with a degree in computer engineering and electrical engineering I was on fire to be a manager. My dad had worked for the same electrical contractor for 30-something years and I knew everyone from the Chairman of the Board down to the woman who worked the front desk. I had a major “in” and was quickly shuffled into a management training program, with my sights set on one day becoming CEO of the $600 million firm.

There is a lot written about the importance of scaling as a founder in a fast-growing startup. Most of it focused on the CEO role. The generic advice on leadership also applies to other non-CEO roles, but I could not find a lot of content targeted to technical founders. In fact, after reading a bunch of S-1 forms, it was hard to find first-time CTOs going all the way from MVP to IPO (as opposed to founding CEOs).

Defining and measuring programmer productivity is one of the most difficult parts of an engineering manager or CTO’s job description. When everything you do is intangible, how should you measure it? Can it be measured at all?

newsletters