Elevate 2019 by Plato — Afternoon Key Takeaways
This article wraps up the main takeaways of the talks of the afternoon at Elevate 2019, a one-day conference for engineering and product leaders.
1. Brian Zotter, VP of Product & Engineering, at Medium: “Building high-performing Engineering & product teams”
What is high-performance? — Output
- A good way of thinking about high performing teams is maximizing the average velocity over time: the team should move at the maximal sustainable pace.
- The Engineering Manager is responsible for the output of the team
- Read High Output Management (by Andy Grove). Now.
Love your people, use principles, and be passionate.
Love your team
If you love and care for your team, the rest is easy.
80% of success is determined by EQ.
If you truly love your team you will never have to focus on retaining your superstars.
Outline principles… and stick to them
A principle is a simple yet well defined fundamental truth that serves as the foundations for behavior that get you what you want in your life (Ray Dalio, Principles)
Publish your principles! The first principle to stick with: create and publish your principles. Let go through the principles that drive the teams at Medium.
- Clearly define a team: a cross-functional group that produces a working and tested increment of product or service.
- Teams should have a clear mission and objectives.
- Clearly define the roles on a team.
- Clearly define a responsibility framework: at Medium, Brian uses RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed).
- A team is empowered by the organization to organize and manage their own work.
- Strive for visible progress every sprint.
- Conduct retrospectives with the goal of getting better next time.
Be passionate
It is easier to recruit if you believe that you are onboarding your people on a world-changing adventure.
Passion is powering commitment in loving your team and sticking to your principles.
2. Asanka Jayasuriya, SVP of Engineering at InVision: “Managing Distributed Teams”
InVision is a 1,000+ people company with no physical presence
Asanka works at InVision, the largest fully distributed company in the world, with 1,000+ employees, all working from home.
Access to talent is worth the offset, and being able to provide people with the ability to do great and fulfilling work wherever they choose to live will have a distinct advantage over those that don’t.
InVision secret recipes
We have to be really thoughtful about how we use our time together.
Value in-person time. The office is Zoom and Slack, for meetings but also for sharing personal experiences and starting relationships — but this is not enough: yearly ‘onsite’ and budget for an in-person time across teams. This expensive time together is not only for work because teams should not wait for onsite to tackle critical and hard problems.
Document everything and have a single source of truth! Slack is a communication tool, but not a collaborative wiki. Choose a single documentation platform and put all the content in this single place. InVision has chosen Confluence.
Tribal knowledge is an excuse. Essential in distributed teams (no overhearing) but avoiding tribal knowledge also speeds up on-boarding.
Write down decisions and set up a framework for this; at InVision the DACI framework helps to create transparency and collaboration but critically hard recording.
Blog post over emails. Especially if you expect the information in the mail to be useful for more than a day
Transitioning to a fully distributed team
There is no such thing as over-communication. Communicate with everyone, every time, and not only about work topics.
Be intentional about all your communication. As a manager, you always think that communication is one of your strengths, but if your team has never seen you in person, they cannot know how approachable you are:
- Write more blog posts.
- Use 1:1 to trigger chat about unrelated topics.
- Set up a recurrent time where your team can talk with you about whatever they want.
The most important is to have a true communication strategy and to not just rely on your past experiences.
3. Rachel Obstler, VP of Product at PagerDuty: Effective Engineering & Product Teaming
Teams who click and work well together deliver outsized benefits and results.
Most of today’s companies work in agile teams: they own both developments as well as operations of their services.
- The team is the unit — give them names, seating, and charters so members can identify them as team members in the organization.
- Well-formed teams rely on size and composition (perfect blend of skills needed), are independent.
- All team members share common goals.
An effective agile team makes engineers and PM interchangeable, things can move faster, members feel full-service ownership.
Alignment is fundamental. Alignment within the team enables maintaining velocity when members leave and flexible problem-solving. Executive alignment is the way to deliver consistent messages, handle tough conversations & feedback, and stay creative in finding new growth solutions.
4. Panel: Employee Growth and Career Development
This panel includes Optimizely’s VP of Engineering (Sonesh Surana), Netflix’s Director of Engineering (Chris Saint-Amant), VMware’s Engineering Manager (Prafulla Arvind) and HackerRank’s SVP of Product (Oded Shekel).
Leverage your strengths as much as you can, and just don’t let your weaknesses limit you.
Know what your employees value. Around the world, Professional Growth and Learning is what 58% of new devs want the most in a job — this is 5x more than perks. 65% of them fully or partially self-taught coding!
Success is proportional to success you enable for others. Know what your direct reports want by asking questions, then enable their wishes.
Keeping hard skills across a career can be tricky. Every 5 years a new exciting technology appears, but the career of an Engineering Leader lasts 30 years. Always thrive for giving challenging problems to solve so you understand your skills gaps — but critically strengthen your strengths.
5. Rukmini Reddy, VP of Engineering at Abstract: How to become a badass engineering leader
Five Tried & Tested Lessons to Elevate Your Career
Fear & courage go together. Don’t let fear stops you. Courage isn’t about lacking fear. Fear is exactly what makes courage, well, courageous. It’s saying, “Yes, I can” as leaders when you’re in uncharted territory. That’s the vulnerability that makes courage so remarkable.
Leadership is all about making choices in uncharted waters
Build your squad. A good leader takes risks, but not alone. As a leader, it is your job to build a team that has each other’s back and gives each other the time and space to fail and learn and do it again.
Candor is not criticism. If you’re going to make it in any industry, you have to learn the difference between feedback that is meant to keep you in your place (criticism) and feedback that is meant to help you grow (candor). Adopt radical candor, it helps providing clarity and clarity is kindness. That’s how you build trust in your team! Once you have the clarity and trust in place providing feedback using candor feels organic and natural.
Know who you are; Live full out. Get rid of the imposter syndrome. If you are a woman, that doesn’t mean you are the caretaker of the team — don’t do what others expect from you, do what you expect from you. Failure is a completely acceptable intermediate step for me so leave yourself room for failure.
As a woman, the realization that we don’t owe anyone anything is hugely powerful because it shifted us from being seen as a caretaker to being an equal member of the team. This helps us focus on our own growth and excel the way we should.
Dream & work really hard. Working hard brings opportunities, and since companies are becoming data-driven organizations, there is less bias now than ever. Hard work will be recognized.
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