More than a decade of experience as a Chief of Staff — This story was collected as part of an interview series in my upcoming book, Hail to the Chief: A Playbook to Thriving as a Chief of Staff. Christine has 9+ years experience as a Chief of Staff, and 30+ years of sales and incubation business leadership experience working at ExxonMobil…

An interview with the Chief of Staff to the CTO at Red Hat — This story was collected as part of an interview series in my upcoming book, Hail to the Chief: A Playbook to Thriving as a Chief of Staff. Alexis is the Chief of Staff to the CTO at the Enterprise Open Source Software company Red Hat. He has been a Chief…

Exploring archetypes of the Chief of Staff role — There is no single career ladder or universal set of job responsibilities for a Chief of Staff (CoS). The role, and its expectations, vary widely. But there are patterns found across corporate CoS roles. These patterns are highlighted in the… Current state and scale of an organization, executive team, and…

What exactly makes a great engineering manager? A few months ago I was discussing what makes a great engineering manager with Jakub Oleksy, VP of Engineering at GitHub. Jakub summarized his own perspective by stating “A great manager is a great steward.” …

Why Developer Managers Should Be Technical — And What Happens When We Aren’t — Should an Engineering Manager be technical? I manage 16 developers — and in my current role I am responsible for enterprise data warehouses for analytics. That said: I have never written code in any meaningful way My background is agile Technical Project/Program Management But am I technical? …

Begin your journey to becoming a great Engineering Manager — So you have just become an Engineering Manager — congrats! That said — being a new Engineering Manager can be overwhelming. You have a lot of things to immediately start making progress on: Letting those around you get to know you and acclimate to your style Getting to know your…

Personas will connect your data execution to your data strategy — What is a User Persona? User personas are fictional characters developed to help empathize, easily understand, and connect with users. They are often segmented in some way, by role for example, to illustrate different types/categories of users. At the bottom of this article are links to the actual personas used by two organizations. …

Reflections on my first two years as a Manager — Your first day as a manager is exciting — meeting your team, fellow managers, and the leadership above you. But — leaving an individual contributor role can be terrifying since many managers were promoted because they excelled as an individual performer. Now you are responsible for an entire team’s performance…

The Great Resignation gives an opportunity for employers to reflect on their hiring practices and diversity — Over 65 percent of employees are looking for a new job per a recent survey by PwC. The United States is near an all-time record high for open jobs — with over 10 million jobs currently open.