Level-up Engineering podcast #34
Interview with Balázs Balázs, former Engineering Manager at Facebook about the knowledge sharing strategies he's used over the years with his engineering teams. You'll get tips, tricks and real stories from behind the scenes about how knowledge sharing works with real people, rather than how it should work in an ideal situation.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #33
Panel discussion interview with Sarah Milstein, Sr. Director of Engineering at Mailchimp, and Tanisha Barnett, Director of Engineering at Mailchimp. They get into the details of holding skip level meetings, let them be one-on-ones or group meetings.
Here's everything you'll ever need to know about why you want to have your own skip level meetings, what they look like, what questions to ask, how to break the ice, keep track of them all, and much more. Master skip level meetings to become a great engineering leader yourself!
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #32
Interview with Jurgen Appelo, leadership speaker, writer and entrepreneur. He is an expert on the topic of managing teams to maximize happiness, which heavily bolsters productivity. Learn his tips, tricks and strategies in making it happen, and make your own team happier so you all win.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #31
Interview with Gergely Orosz, self-employed author of 'The Tech Resume Inside Out', former Engineering Manager at Uber.
He shares unique insight into the process of hiring for a big tech company. We also look at tips to stand out from the crowd with your software engineer resume, and what companies should do differently to find talent more effectively.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #30
Interview with Jonathan Rasmusson, ex-Spotify employee and author of 'Competing with Unicorns' about the key elements of making the Spotify model work.
Squads, tribes and guilds are the essential elements of the Spotify model, but there is a lot more to it. Leadership is the force that drives all the elements, makes the model come alive and deliver a great product. You get all the answers here about how that works.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #29
Interview with Tim Olshansky, EVP of Product & Engineering at Zenput on creating a software engineer career ladder for your own team.
This isn't a template you can just copy and paste, then forget it ever even existed. This is a guide to creating a meaningful engineering career ladder from Tim, who has been through it more than once.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #28
Interview with Ola Sitarska, Engineering Lead at Onfido about address diversity and inclusivity at the base level: integrating these values into the recruitment process.
Why do you want to put up the effort? How do you balance it with hiring the most competent developers? What goals are realistic? You get these answers and more right here!
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #27
Software engineers, like any other person can get stuck. Their personal development slows down, their career may not move in the direction they want to go to.
Great engineering managers and leaders can do a lot to stop that from happening, facilitate growth for their developers and advancement from junior engineer to the senior level and beyond that. Get the know-how from Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, Shopify!
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #26
GitHub versus Facebook feedback culture comparison with a breakdown of their key elements and cultural differences. Learn the secrets of a healthy feedback culture both on an organizational and personal level from Ryan Nystrom, Director of Engineering at GitHub.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #25
Avoid the rookie mistakes engineering managers and engineering leaders make at running one-on-one meetings. James Stanier, SVP of Engineering at Brandwatch, and author of "Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager" will teach you how to handle one on ones with both introverts, and people who complain all the time, along with many more tips and tricks.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #24
Building trust across the board and becoming familiar with the whole context of a company is a common challenge for engineering leaders and managers as they transition to a new workplace. Nadia Alramli explains HubSpot's process to set up newly hired managers for their role.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #23
Learn how to build an engineering team that not only survives under pressure, but consistently gets better. Adam Wolff explains the key ideas you need to know to make your team antifragile, and shows you how they've worked out through his personal experience from Robinhood and Facebook.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #22
Learn the basics of engineering leadership from seasoned veteran and praised writer of the leadership world: Michael Lopp a. k. a. "Rands". Everything you need to know is in this interview, so you won't have to learn the hard way, like Michael did.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #21
Do you want access to the best talent out there in the tech world? Obviously. This is why you need to build your engineering employer brand. You aren't Google or Netflix, you may not even become them, but you can make yourself visible in the right way to the right people, and you can get them into your organization. Learn pro tips from Sarah Wells, Technical Director at Financial Times!
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #20
Learn the top time management and productivity tips, tricks, hacks and practices engineering managers use to get on top of their endless mountain of work. Profit from the hard earned experience of Matt Martin, CEO of Clockwise to become the best manager you can be!
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #19
Learn the steps of creating a culture document for an engineering company! In this interview Rob Volk reveals why Foxbox Digital needed a culture deck, and what impact it had on their day-to-day work.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #18
Master the 3 basic leadership styles to build an amazing engineering team and maximize your own potential as well. In this interview with Shawn Fair, you'll learn how, when and why to use the democratic, autocratic, and free rein leadership styles.
Level-up Engineering Podcast #17
Utilize social engineering tactics to make your developer team more effective and productive than ever before. In this interview, Olivia Liddell from Amazon Web Services shows you how to use social engineering for the greater good.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #16
Leading vs managing comparison, true stories of failures, shortcomings, struggles and solutions that lead to success in an executive leadership position. András Fincza, VP of Engineering, Emarsys shares his invaluable experience to tell you what you've never heard about leadership before.
Level-up Engineering Podcast #15
Clean code is the most essential part of building great software with your team. In this interview Uncle Bob shares half a century worth of experience and practical tips about measuring code quality, leading your team, having them write clean code, and selling clean code standards to impatient clients.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #14
You've just become a manager, and don't know where to start? You're close to a promotion, and want to be ready? It's unclear what you should focus on, how to get accepted, and how to streamline your ocean of tasks?
Jeff Perry has faced all these problems, and he'll help you find the way to success in this new role.
ManagementThe COVID-19 is everywhere, and you should be asking yourself what to do to protect your team and your company. I'll show you how we, as a software development agency handled the outbreak, the quarantine, and the started working remotely from one day to the next. I'll give you tips that'll keep your team safe and productive.
[Podcast + Blog post]
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #12
You're moving to a new company as an engineering leader?
You're just assuming the role for the first time?
You've been at it for a while and wondering if you're doing all right?
Check out this interview with Steven McCord, Senior Vice President of Technology at WhyHotel, where he shares his best tips and tricks on how to get started as an engineering leader, and become successful at it over your first 100 days.
State of Software Development 2020 report
Level-up Engineering Podcast #13
Software development trends come and go rapidly. A tool or framework used today might be obsolete tomorrow. We take a snapshot of the industry every year, to see how it has evolved, and make an educated guess as to where it’s headed.
The 2020 report gives you the data you need to benchmark your activities against other survey participants, get insight from others walking in your shoes to improve your developer team and keep up with the industry.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #11
Building your engineering culture is a delicate process with little proven know-how going around on it. In this interview we're giving you an insight into Monzo's engineering culture to show you how it can work if all is going right, and get you tips to make it so for your own people.
We collect the best blog posts and other content for software engineering managers from the last weeks. Here is the roundup of the top resources for March 2020 to make you the sharpest tech leader you can be.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #10
We interviewed Greg Sabo, from Asana on recruiting engineers, to learn how one of the top companies in the industry faces this challenge. Check it out for actionable tips that can take your recruitment process to the next level as well!
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #9
Handling conflicts and giving feedback are two of the most important things a manager needs to do. It has to be a given to lead a productive developer team.
So we interviewed Tom Bartel, Engineering Team Leader at Trivago to share some of the tips he picked up over the years he spent as a manager.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #8
Engineering productivity is the key to unlock real treasure in the software development industry. So we interviewed Camille Fournier, well-known and successful engineering leader on engineering productivity and for real-life, actionable insights on how to maximize it.
Level-up Engineering Podcast #7
How do you scale a distributed engineering team?
It doesn’t involve just hiring more people, but also scaling communication, defining processes, making the culture strong enough and defining the vision, so you can build the new team on a solid foundation. It’s layers upon layers of work with no end. Juan Pablo Buritica, ex-VP of Engineering at Splice has managed it more than once, and explains how he pulled it off in this interview.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #6
In software development it's more likely now than ever, that as a manager, you'll face the challenge of leading a fully or at least partially distributed developer team. It's a brand new thing for everyone, but Tim Olshansky, current VP of Engineering at Zenput has faced this already. In this interview he shares what he learned on managing distributed developer teams over the years, and gives you actionable tips on making it work as well as possible.
ManagementSpecifications are well-loved by managers, because they detail every tiny step up-front. A specification builds a nice hierarchy, and it makes you think that once you hand it over to the developers, they follow it to the letter. This isn't how it works though. You need more flexibility, and a Backlog provides you exactly that.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #5
Recruiting experienced software engineering managers is a tough job, and you can't possibly keep up the pace during rapid growth. You should start training engineering managers on top of hiring, homegrown talent often works out better in the long run. But training software developers to become engineering managers is far from trivial.
We interviewed Matt Greenberg to learn how he handles this challenge.
ManagementScaling developer teams is a massive challenge in the industry, just as scaling companies in general. The key to it is scaling your culture the right way as your team grows. Here we'll show you how to do it through real life examples.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #4
Sometimes, teamwork gets tiring, communication gets weird, fresh ideas are rare and far between, and people are more likely to jump down each other’s throats. Sound familiar? Building psychological safety could help you fix all that. We interviewed Dan Rummel, Senior Director of Engineering at One Medical on this topic.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #3
Software companies often grow quickly, which means developer teams often suffer to manage scaling at the pace of growth and necessary workload. We sat down with Rich Archbold to pick his brain on how they scaled developer teams at Amazon, Facebook and Intercom.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #2
Senior developers are in high demand, so mentoring developers to get there as quickly as possible is extremely valuable, yet mentoring is highly underutilized in software development. We sat down with Gergely Orosz, Engineering Manager at Uber to learn from his experience on mentoring developers.
ManagementDeveloper burnout is real killer problem. It kills projects, companies and careers. So we put together a list of the signs you can catch, the reasons you should be looking at, and the things you can do to counter developer burnout. All actionable tips based on real-life experience.
ManagementEven today, there aren’t many companies with their own platform teams. Usually only the big ones have them, so there's little know-how going around in the industry. Wix.com is one such company with a great platform team and hundreds of developers. We interviewed Karen Cohen, Wix.com’s engineering manager in the platform team. She has loads of experience, and it’s not as good as gold; it’s a lot better.
ManagementRecruiting developers is a key to success in software development right now, so we checked in with successful industry experts, looked at our own experience and put together a comprehensive guide of actionable tips on the recruitment process.
ManagementLevel-up Engineering Podcast #1
Learn the best practices of running a remote developer team from one of the best in the industry: Katie Womersley VP of Engineering at Buffer. She went into details on all the challenges and being successful with remote teams, as one of the pioneers of remote development.
Learn the best practices for outsourcing software development: the invaluable experience of a CEO running a development agency will save you a tremendous amount of time and extra work.
ManagementYou think you hit the jackpot with your new IT talents? Be prepared: keeping developers around and motivated will be harder than the search process was. Developer motivation is key, so here are a few tips to keep them attached (hint: high fluctuation is likely on you).
ManagementIn our series, we do interviews with tech leaders covering a broad set of topics from hiring, retaining developers, measuring performance, sharing knowledge and forming a great team culture.
Our intention is to provide detailed, actionable case studies on how other tech leaders manage teams so the rest of us can learn from them.
In this post we did an interview with Gregory Larson. Greg is the head of technology at Divvy, and we have compressed an insane amount of knowledge into this post.
ManagementState of Software Development 2019 report
Software development evolves super-fast. A tool or framework used today might be obsolete tomorrow. Our intention is to take a snapshot of the industry, track how it evolved in the past and make an educated guess as to where it’s heading. This year’s report will give you the data you need to benchmark your activities against other survey participants, get some insights to further improve your developer team and keep up with the rapidly changing industry.
ManagementInconsistent UI components, bugginess, lack of clarity and costly time lost through miscommunicated requirements all pile up to leave the project in disarray. It’s a horrible place to be and a horrible place to get out of. But what has this got to do with prototyping?
Prototyping forces your team to think before it acts. It creates a shared vision for the eventual success your project will become. Let’s dive a little deeper into the advantages and disadvantages of building a prototype.
ManagementIn this post, I show you how a modern software outsourcing company like Coding Sans works to increase trust and deliver on the promise. This post also provides some actionable tips you can apply anytime when you outsource software development.
ManagementYou know how agile works. You understand why it’s so successful. But, how does it work in real life? How do real-world businesses go from a completely different method—or no clear method at all—to agile without losing excessive time, money, and patience? In this post, we examine 3 distinct, real-life case studies of agile integration in agile app development to see the trials and tribulations play out for themselves. There’s something you can learn from their difficulties as well as their dedication to the method.
ManagementThe best way to direct and manage tasks across your software delivery system is to keep a close eye on workflow via a designated, centralized release management system. However, it often seems that regardless of the methodology you choose, or how carefully you monitor workflows, it is hard to predict the duration of individual tasks. Neglecting to properly steer resources can lead to bottlenecks, causing delays to downstream tasks and impacting delivery schedule. In this blogpost, we introduce you to Kanbanflow for effective, Kanban-based portfolio and project management.
ManagementHave you ever felt at a loss about which features to include in your minimum viable product (MVP)? Have you ever wanted to build a strategy to help you choose the perfect features for your minimal viable product? The lean startup methodology can help you figure out what minimum viable product development should look like. If you can find and hire good software developers, they can help you figure out what features to include even faster.
ManagementA microservice architecture can help developers build, manage, and scale services more efficiently. It’s an architecture that’s ideal in a world where new devices, touchpoints, and consumer trends are emerging faster than ever before, which is why big brands like Netflix and Amazon are all leveraging microservices.
But adopting microservices brings about a cultural shift that can deeply impact the developer experience, either positively or negatively.
ManagementHiring an offshore software development agency to build your idea, trusting them with tens of thousands of dollars and putting your reputation on the line seems like a hard decision to make.
Picking a good outsourcing company can be really tricky. I've heard fifty different stories about how people got burned. Communication that is not set properly, unclear project expectations and bad guidelines make it difficult for both sides.
You assume the company you found has good intentions to build your product or service, but what if they are just there to take your money and pretend to do something? It's crucial that we do our homework and ask proper questions when choosing the right partner to create a win-win situation for both sides.
ManagementWhen it comes to software development, we talk a lot about the “hard” skills. Raw talent, individual intelligence, knowledge of frameworks and libraries. We all know these are important. But we often forget about the role of “soft” skills. At the end of the day, every software developer is human. (At least, for now.) As humans, we are driven and affected by more than just our abilities and IQ. Psychological and human elements play a huge role in the ability of a developer to do their job. One of the biggest factors is how individuals on a team feel about the work they’re doing. Do they feel invested and energized? Or are they just there to punch the clock and collect their paycheck?
ManagementProcesses help us determine the best ways to do things and then make sure we repeat that approach again and again and again. This makes it easier to achieve success, find problems in current approaches, and to add new people to your teams.
Having clearly defined and well documented processes means the training and onboarding of new developers don’t need to be so micromanaged and can bring fresh developers up to the point of creating value for the business even faster.
But when is a team ready to add new members? When and how do we add people into this process in a way they can contribute?
ManagementIt’s a huge challenge keeping and growing an engineering team. You need to take care of hiring, figure out how to retain developers as long as possible in the team and also figure out the work process and making sure the new developer managers are ready to take responsibility for their teams. In pursuit of uncovering good practices, we started a blog post series, featuring cool tech companies. Our intention wasn’t to find the ultimate silver bullet for every kind of organizational problems but to provide small case studies you can learn from. This case study is about a fast growing medium-sized tech company called Alpha.
ManagementWhat makes a high-performing developer team different from a low-performing one?
In this post, we extracted actionable insights from the State of Software Development 2018 report to reveal some cool stats about high-performing teams.
You will see how top teams attract, hire and retain talents and by what standards they measure performance. In some cases, the difference between high- and low-performing teams is also highlighted.
There is huge competition for talented developers. As a developer or tech lead, you have probably experienced this by receiving countless offers through LinkedIn or personal recommendations. Hiring new developers is hard. There aren’t enough developers on the market, and you’re competing for talent with big tech companies such as Facebook and Google who have much bigger resources.
ManagementState of Software Development 2018 report
Software development evolves super-fast. A tool or framework used today might be obsolete tomorrow. Our intention is to take a snapshot of the industry, track how it evolved in the past and make an educated guess as to where it’s heading. This year’s report will give you the data you need to benchmark your activities against other survey participants, get some insights to further improve your developer team and keep up with the rapidly changing industry.
ManagementThere are many different things that could slow down your team and eventually lead to missed deadlines and expectations.
It happens quite often.
But this shouldn't happen.
In this post, we will uncover the main things that can slow down your team and provide some hands-on tips to address these issues.
Our intention is to help you structure the problem and uncover different internal and external factors that could impact your team’s productivity.
ManagementIt’s really challenging to stay productive individually in today’s environment, and the same applies to team productivity. How do you help your team get more things done while team productivity is constantly challenged? You not only need tools but rather a complex system that allows your developers to get the most out of their days and eventually, as a team, to reach their goals. This post is here to help you significantly improve your developers’ productivity.
ManagementPerformance management is broken.
Today’s widespread ranking- and ratings-based performance management is damaging employee engagement, alienating high performers, and costing managers valuable time.
But, this post will show you how to fix it.
ManagementWe all know knowledge transfer is key to building a kickass software developer team, but among many pressing issues, knowledge transfer is one of the first things that will be put aside when a burning deadline is approaching. But, the problem still stays here: knowledge is unevenly available in your team. In this blog post, we show you the most effective knowledge transfer methods for software teams.
ManagementHiring great software developers is a huge challenge. Actually, this is the biggest challenge (tech) companies are facing, according to the State of Software Development 2017 report. The report also uncovered the most efficient ways tech leaders are using to overcome the hiring challenge. This post features the most popular 4, offering some tips you can use to get developers on board.
ManagementRequirement prioritization is one of the biggest challenges a software team faces. Actually, 25% of tech leaders said prioritizing software development is their biggest challenge. It turns out there are many different ways a software development team can do it. Each requirement prioritization decision should be influenced by customer needs, always following the business’s needs. From this post you will learn a hypothesis-driven way to prioritize software development.
ManagementOne of the biggest challenges startup tech leaders are facing is prioritising software development. In fact, 25% of the respondents said this is their biggest challenge, according to the State of Software Development report. We decided to ask more than 10 tech leaders (mostly CTOs) about the practices they use to prioritise software development. The goal of this post isn’t to select one best way but rather to show different approaches you can select from or gain inspiration from as you come up with your own method. If prioritising software development is a challenge you’re facing then this post is for you.
ManagementBuilding an app is a pretty exciting thing. It’s tempting to just jump on it and start creating it. Well, no matter how tempting it is, slow down a bit. You need to be clear about these basic things before you start building your app. You don’t want to build something no one wants to use, right? Which is why it requires some planning, validation and prioritisation before you even start coding. In this post, we put together 7 things that you should do before coding your app.
ManagementWe all want to create an app people love to use, and it’s really heartbreaking when you build something and no one cares about it. The biggest challenge is not building your app and getting new users. The challenge is to keep them engaged and coming back. App engagement is the key.
This is why we should start with user engagement and retention. In this post, we created a guide that will help you increase app engagement no matter if it’s mobile or web app.
ManagementWe all have heard horror stories about software outsourcing involving stealing ideas, delivering crappy quality, misdelivering product and broken dreams. Some horror stories usually distort the picture, but indeed, there is a level of truth to them. The good thing is most of these horror stories could have been avoided by careful outsourcing partner selection, better work and collaboration coordination. We identified potential risks you can face when planning to outsource software development and actionable tips on how to handle them.
ManagementWhen you’re creating any kind of application, you need to clearly define who the users are and what they can actually do with your app.The reason is quite simple: project stakeholders need to understand the project from the user point of view. User stories are pretty great for that. In this post, we put together the most important things you need to know about user stories.
ManagementIt seems weird but from some aspects, there are similarities between footballers and software developers. These aren’t external similarities (that would be a different topic) but there are similarities in the way each profession needs to approach their work and team management. It doesn’t matter if you’re someone who needs to build a software developer team or if you are a one-man-army software developer. This article provides some tips on how to take care of yourself or your team.
ManagementContinuous communication and transparency are the keys to make offshore software development work for you. These determine the quality of the work and make sure that the product will be delivered according to the expectations. In this post we collected 10 essential tools that will make the difference when you start working with a remote or offshore team.
ManagementI’m sure you agree with me that when we are about to work with an offshore software development company, code quality is something we typically worry about. When working with an external software development company you need to use similar methods to ensure code quality when working with an in-house team. Keep reading and you will see how to avoid misdelivery and ensure code quality.
ManagementWe’re bringing a fresh, transparent approach to software outsourcing. With this guide, you will see the whole process of offshore software development and learn how to use best practices to filter out frauds, reduce potential risks and eventually make it work for you. If you’re looking for an offshore software development team, this guide is for you.
Management