Distinguished Speaker Series #1

Slack’s Holly Allen at Uncountable

The Director of Engineering shares expertise with our team

In May 2021, Uncountable invited Slack’s Director of Engineering Holly Allen for a virtual Q&A session to share her experiences as an engineer and manager with our team.

At the core of Uncountable’s founding mission is a belief that the way scientists communicate is ready for a change from traditional lab notebooks and spreadsheets. Similarly, Slack has been working tirelessly for years to demonstrate that there is a better way to communicate than traditional email.

Uncountable Engineering has launched the Uncountable Distinguished Speaker Series where innovative leaders within the software industry share their experience and expertise with our engineers. For the inaugural event in May, Uncountable invited Slack’s Holly Allen, a Director of Engineering, to explore the difficulties of changing locked-in systems, offer advice to early-career engineers, and reflect on her decades in the industry.

Holly’s path towards engineering management at Slack includes a diverse array of industries and experiences. She’s worked everywhere from the federal government to Dreamworks Animation and non-profit publishers. Bringing her software expertise to bear on each unique position and industry, Holly has cultivated a holistic understanding of what it takes to successfully run both companies and teams. Those experiences have helped Holly learn how to best improve the quality of life of her team and to build innovative products.

Holly helped Uncountable’s engineers understand how you cannot simply be a “pure” engineer without understanding the effects that your work has on the business as a whole — how the backend features you’re designing actually affect a customer’s life. Holly’s many positions have given her a broad perspective on what it means to lead a team, and the various diverging ways that one can be a leader even while contributing as an engineer.

For example, if an engineer is able to understand the overall business model, they will be able to measure their own success, and contribute to other parts of the business. If you know what features the sales team is having issues selling, you can brainstorm ways to make the product more marketable, and, in the process, become a higher-impact engineer. “No matter how great you are with data structure, if you can’t understand the context of your work, and you can’t make good decisions about what work you should be doing,” Holly said.

As a former engineer who pivoted into a management role, Holly has worked on both sides of the management-coder divide. She knows how important it is to balance the competing priorities of your team against impending customer deadlines. At Slack, Holly tries to ensure a steady and sustainable pace of work. This might look like being explicit when engineers can have more of a break to go and work on the backlog of smaller requests or long term projects, and when they have to launch into full-on productivity mode as a big deadline approaches. At Uncountable, we strive to balance time-sensitive, high-intensity asks with more long-term, creative work, ensuring that no one engineer is shouldering the urgency burden of a small company everyday.

We’re grateful that Holly was able to teach our team more about the best practices she uses to accelerate her own organizations and look forward to adopting many of her suggestions for building a successful team.

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