The PIRATE Way

Learnings, successes, and failures while scaling up engineering teams.

Picture: @rawpixel/Burst

In 2009, I joined ExperienceOn Ventures to work on bliquo, a mobile leisure aggregator, even before Android was a thing. This was my first experience as a member of a product company, and it shaped the rest of my career. From that moment on, I developed an intense curiosity and obsession with creating products.

Over the years, I have read books by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, Brandt Cooper, and many others. I have also tried building different businesses and joined a couple of early-stage startups. I was one of those nerds talking about customer segments, customer discovery, and value proposition early on.

As a data-driven individual, I particularly appreciated Dave McClure’s Startup Metrics for Pirates (AARRR) framework. It is a widely-used customer lifecycle framework for startups to monitor and optimize their business growth.

Later in my career, I discovered how powerful this framework can be for supporting the scalability of not only your business but also your entire organization.

So, I decided to create this series of blog posts to share how I adapted that business growth framework into a scaling-up team framework. Many times we, the engineers, overthink the architecture and infrastructure and underestimate the organization we are deploying and how intrinsically is connected with the outcome we are generating.

I will share my approach, learning, and mistakes in the following areas:

1. Awareness (Brand-building): The activities to build your brand for talent acquisition.
2. Acquisition (Hiring): How to build an effective and scalable hiring process.
3. Activation (Onboarding): How to speed up new employees’ contributions and support them to succeed.
4. Revenue (Team’s Contribution): We translated “revenue” from the classic customer lifecycle framework to team delivery or contribution because it’s the outcome we generate.
5. Retention: How to manage the health of the team.
6. Growth (Development): Team members’ progression and development.

And more importantly, how to measure and continually take actions to enhance our operations and identify where to focus next.

Index of content

I will update this section as an index of the future content I will share in the following weeks/months. Feel free to reach me if you are interested in a topic in particular.

The basics

Delve into foundational concepts crucial for every engineering leader.

• Pirates Metrics — Introduction to Dave McClure’s “AARRR” metrics framework that acts as a backbone for startup growth: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.
• Motivation Theory — Understand what drives individuals. A look into popular motivational theories and their application in the workplace.
• Your Employee Value Proposition — Define the core benefits employees gain in return for their skills, capabilities, and experience. A deep dive into what makes your organization unique for prospective and current team members.

Awareness / Brand-Building

The initial phase of making your team or product known to the wider audience.

• Brand-Building Principles — Laying down the foundation. What does it mean to build a brand, and what core principles drive brand recognition and trust?
• Brand-Building Metrics — Measurement tools to evaluate brand visibility, reputation, and reach. Understand metrics like brand recall, net promoter score, and more.

Acquisition / Hiring

The journey of searching, attracting, and recruiting the right talent.

• Hiring Principles — Core tenets and values that guide the recruitment process, ensuring both technical alignment and cultural fit.
• The Hiring Process — Step-by-step breakdown of the hiring pipeline, from sourcing candidates to making the final offer.
• How to scale up your recruiting pool — Strategies and insights into expanding the candidate pool, ensuring diversity and skill set match.
• Hiring Metrics — Key indicators to gauge the effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of the hiring process. Delve into metrics like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and offer acceptance rate.

Activation / Onboarding

The process of assimilating new hires into the organization, setting them up for success.

• Onboarding Principles — Foundational ideas that ensure smooth, effective, and comprehensive integration of new team members.
• Onboarding Metrics — Tools to measure the success of the onboarding process. Understand metrics related to new hire productivity, time to full proficiency, and initial employee feedback.

Revenue / Contribution

Understand the pivotal role of the engineering team in generating value, right from ideation to post-deployment operations. We’ll dissect this journey into two phases: Building and Operating.

Introduction:

• Contribution Principles — Laying the groundwork by understanding the core principles guiding efficient and effective software delivery and monitoring.
• Essential Tooling for Ensuring Quality and Effective Delivery — A glance into the toolkit required to execute those principles, ensuring quality and efficiency at every step.

Building Phase:

This phase is all about creation — how teams come together, use tools, and deploy practices to transform ideas into functional software.

• Organizational Metrics — Gaining insights into team structures, responsibilities, and dynamics. Understand how they can impact the software development lifecycle.
• Software Development Metrics — Dive into the interaction with the codebase, exploring metrics like commit rates, code review practices, and more.
• Software Delivery Metrics — Assessing the maturity of the delivery process, from code commit to deployment. Understand cycle times, deployment frequencies, and other relevant metrics.

Operating Phase:

Once the software is live, the challenges shift from building to ensuring stability, reliability, and quality.

• Quality Metrics — Delve deep into monitoring, from alarm frequencies to critical incident rates, ensuring what’s been built remains robust and reliable.

Final Notes:

• Other Efficiency Metrics — Manual tasks and operational work that hint at potential automation opportunities.
• Compound Metrics — An exploration of how combining individual metrics can offer a more nuanced view of overall performance and health.
• Adoption of Service Level Agreement (SLA) — Understanding the importance of SLAs in setting and meeting operational expectations.

Retention

• Retention Principles — Concise guide for leaders in the tech industry, offering strategies to enhance employee retention.
• The HR Business Partner — Unraveling the HRBP’s role as a strategic ally in aligning people and business strategies, fostering a harmonious organizational and employee growth environment.
• Engineering Management Guild — Dive into the Engineering Management Guild’s journey, structure, and impact, revealing it as a critical pillar for fostering alignment, continuous learning, and managerial excellence.
• Team Building and Social — A Comprehensive Guide to Cultivating Connected, Engaged, and Resilient Teams in the Evolving Work Landscape.
• Retention Metrics — A Comprehensive Dive into Metrics, Insights, and Strategies for Nurturing a Sustainable, Engaged Workforce.

Talent Development

• Talent Development Principles — Nurturing Potential: A Comprehensive Blueprint for Talent Flourishing.
• Learning and Development Strategy — Knowledge Unbound: Crafting Pathways for Ever-Evolving Expertise.
• Raising Managers — Unleashing Leadership: A Journey from Talented Teams to Empowered Managers.
• Raising Technical Leaders — Unraveling the Tapestry of Technical Leadership: A Comprehensive Guide to Navigating the Complex Interplay of Skills, Roles, and Organizational Dynamics.
• Competency Framework —Empowering Growth: Mastering the Art of Tailoring and Implementing Competency Frameworks (and now enhanced by Gen-AI)
• Performance Review Cycle —Navigating the Intricacies of Performance Reviews, Salary Bands, and Transparent Compensation Strategies.
• Graduates and Diversity Programs — Unleashing the Potential of Graduate Programs for Diverse and Sustainable Talent Acquisition.
• Talent Development Metrics — Unveiling the Silent Symphony of Metrics Orchestrating Talent Development.

Engineering Operations Insights

In this section, rather than topics more aligned with Organization Design and Talent Management, we delve into the pivotal elements that shape the backbone of efficient and robust software development practices.

• Master Your Time, Master Your Destiny: A Guide to Structured Productivity
• Adopting a Prioritization Framework for Technical Work
• Building a Knowledge Base for Your Tech Team
• Unlocking Productivity in Tech: Mastering Focus Time for Optimal Efficiency
• Mastering the Art of Communication: Building Effective Guidelines for Growing Teams
• More to come