How to make a hiring decision

Hiring is one of the most (if not THE most) important things that a manager does to build a team and an organization. At the end of a hiring process a decision has to be made and how that decision is being made can make or break the whole process. There are several well-known…

Creating a career path

Your engineering team grows and grows. You hire a lot of engineers, the salary you give them is a mix out of what the candidates asked for and your gut feeling. From time to time you increase salaries to equal out the increase in cost of living and sometimes you have to promote someone to…

Peer Feedback

Introducing Peer Feedback/Review

Does this sound familiar? You take over an engineering team in a fast growing startup and before you even know what is happening 30 people report to you. You try to do regular 1on1s (even though the scheduling is very tough) and then in those…

Pragmatic advice on 1on1s

You read that 1on1s are a very important meeting for managers, so you schedule them from time to time. Unfortunately there are sometimes big gaps between meetings as you are travelling or busy and you forget to schedule those meetings. When having them you do have a nice talk with…

Scaling a start-up

Feature or component teams?

The first team in a startup is a feature team by default. But as the
company grows and you hire more developers, a common question pops up: How
do you structure your engineering department when you have more than one
team? Two common…

Scrum — Quo Vadis?

Ten years after the Agile Manifesto, Scrum is a mainstream software development approach. However, where has Scrum really proven to be successful? Many implementations are process- driven and neglect the core values of the Agile Manifesto and good software engineering by focusing purely on…