/Leadership

Principal Engineer Roles Framework

- Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec tl;dr: AWS VP shares a framework for Principal Engineer roles developed at Amazon. The framework defines six key roles: Sponsor (project lead), Guide (technical expert), Catalyst (idea launcher), Tie Breaker (decision maker), Catcher (project rescuer), and Participant (contributor). This helps organizations optimize senior engineers' impact and develop talent effectively.

featured in #613

The Valley Of Engineering Despair

- Sean Goedecke tl;dr: “I have delivered a lot of successful engineering projects. When I start on a project, I’m now very (perhaps unreasonably) confident that I will ship it successfully. Even so, in every single one of these projects there is a period - perhaps a day, or even a week - where it feels like everything has gone wrong and the project will be a disaster. I call this the valley of engineering despair. A huge part of becoming good at running projects is anticipating and enduring this period.” Sean discusses how he tackles this phase. 

featured in #613

A Weekly Mind Meld

- James Stanier tl;dr: “Since starting my new CTO role, I've been sharing a weekly update with my team. It's how I continually open up my thoughts to the team with a long-term goal to reduce any mental alignment gap between us. I like to think that the more I share, the more they can understand what I believe is important and why, and the more that my style of working and thinking can propagate through the team.” James shares how he executes this mind meld. 

featured in #612

Mastering The Human Side Of Engineering: Lessons From Apple, Palantir And Slack

- Michael Lopp tl;dr: “Lopp begins by offering tactical advice on creating durable, effective engineering orgs and discusses the pivotal relationship between product and engineering. He then charges leaders to ask themselves if they possess some of the people-centered skills he’s seen of successful leaders over his career.”

featured in #612

The Staff Meeting Ritual

- Allen Cheung tl;dr: “I started this ritual about 7–8 years ago when I first started managing managers and wanted a better format for bringing together the more senior, busier, more expensive people on my teams. Across teams and companies, I’ve iterated on the meeting, modifying the format to accommodate my team’s suggestions and what I saw were the gaps in our organization.”

featured in #612

The Staff Meeting Ritual

- Allen Cheung tl;dr: “I started this ritual about 7–8 years ago when I first started managing managers and wanted a better format for bringing together the more senior, busier, more expensive people on my teams. Across teams and companies, I’ve iterated on the meeting, modifying the format to accommodate my team’s suggestions and what I saw were the gaps in our organization.”

featured in #611

How To Get Good At Strategy

- Claire Lew tl;dr: “The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”Strategy is: (1) Identifying the most critical challenge in a situation. (2) Addressing this challenge with some kind of coherent approach. (3) Having coordinating actions focused on overcoming this challenge."

featured in #611

What Async Communication Behaviors Lead To Better Outcomes For Software Engineers?

- Lizzie Matusov tl;dr: “Researchers conducted a 10-day field experiment with 260 elite software engineers. Participants were randomly assigned to 52 globally distributed five-person teams on a crowdsourcing platform. Each team collaborated asynchronously to solve a real-world software problem — designing an algorithm to optimize medical kits for spaceflight. The researchers analyzed communication patterns and outcomes to identify which behaviors predicted the most success outcomes.”

featured in #610

Hiring Great People

- Mike Fisher tl;dr: “So if you too believe that curiosity is important in great individuals and leaders, how do you identify that trait? One way, as my coach friend did, is to see what questions someone asks. If during an interview if the person asks no questions, are they really curious? I’m not even interviewing for your role and I’m curious about how you find the culture of your company, what techniques have you found to be successful, what excited you about joining your company? I could go on and on.”

featured in #610

Managing Underperformers

- Jack Danger tl;dr: “There are two fully unrelated causes of underperformance: Refusal to Align and Failure to Execute. Underperformance is when a person or a team is not bearing their share of the organization’s load. Their colleagues are either relying on them and getting let down, or they’ve learned not to rely on them at all.”

featured in #610