The remote work landscape presents unique challenges and opportunities for onboarding in leadership or C-level positions. The process of integrating into an organization from a distance requires an adaptive approach, focusing not only on understanding the company’s structure and culture but also on establishing strong remote work practices. Understanding People and Culture Leaders must…

Skip level meetings, a notable practice in contemporary management, involve senior leaders engaging directly with employees who are not their immediate reports, typically one or more levels down in the organizational hierarchy. This management strategy is pivotal in promoting transparency, acquiring unfiltered insights, and reinforcing organizational alignment. The Essence and Advantages of Skip Level Meetings

Decentralized command, inspired by military strategies, has significant applicability in technology companies, particularly within engineering teams. The approach blends structure with flexibility, creating a hierarchy that fosters initiative and rapid decision-making. Central to this is the principle of Mission Command, which includes: Purpose Over Process: Articulating strategic goals (military analogy…

Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans with the subtitle “Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software” introduces several mental models that help manage complexity in software development, particularly in service-oriented architecture. In this article we will touch on these concepts through the lens of Go services. We find that Go actually…

Architecture often emerges as an anchor of maintainable services and thereby successful projects. It’s tempting to seek “the way” to achieve this, but in reality there are myriad ways to structure a system, each with its own trade-offs. Best practices, principles, and design patterns serve software engineering as guideposts. They…

The architecture of software organizations can either act as a catalyst for growth or a bottleneck for progress. Decentralization has increasingly become the go-to model for agile and dynamic software development. Sometimes this path comes with challenges: from visibility and accountability to the very structures that hold projects together. This…

Visibility in a software organization can be a double-edged sword. On one side, the more transparency there is, the better the flow of information, which ideally promotes a culture of trust and facilitates decentralized decision-making. On the flip side, visibility can easily be mistaken for micromanagement, especially when higher-ups feel…

In the tech sphere, a myriad of tools, from 7Geese to BetterWorks, sing praises of enhanced productivity and streamlined operations. But let’s cut through the noise. Engineers, the heart of any tech organization, have always championed lean to nonexistent processes. …

In business generally, timing is almost everything. Through most of the history of the software industry until today, many teams rely on release dates as the drumbeat that sets the pace for coding, testing, and deploying applications. These are ostensibly milestones that guide developers and stakeholders — from marketing, sales…