Roles & Titles

Training a developer to fill a management role

When a company grows quickly, it can be difficult to find someone with the right leadership skills to fill a new managerial role. In this case, the team leader hired a senior developer and spent eight months training them for the role before officially promoting them. This allowed the team to get used to the new manager and accept them as a legitimate leader. The lesson learned is that it is important to take the time to delegate properly and understand the impact that a new layer of management can have.

Less is More: How to Introduce OKR’s

This article discusses the importance of having simple, strategic OKR goals and the lessons learned from a failed attempt at improving customer satisfaction. It emphasizes the need for clear objectives and key responses, rallying around the OKR's, and evaluating if the plan is working without help. It also advises against merging OKR models and going back and forth between OKR and KPI.

Defining What A Project Is and Is Not

When working on a project, it is important to understand what it is and what it is not in order to prevent scope creep and wasted time and energy. Recently, a presentation was given to a bank to explain the scope of a fintech project and what it did and did not cover. This helped to engage people's curiosity and prevent frustration due to limited creativity.

Solving a conflict between a team of back-end engineers and a team of ops engineers

The VP of Engineering at Happn faced a conflict between the ops and back-end engineering teams. To resolve the conflict, the VP gathered an equal number of engineers from each team and had them use the "Six Thinking Hats Method" to identify action plans. The teams were able to resolve the conflict with the help of action plans and follow-up meetings. The VP learned three lessons from the experience: it's better to gather both teams in the same room, they must have a common objective, and action plans and follow-up meetings are key.

Pivoting From a Utility to Entertainment App

A PM at a startup was tasked with increasing customer engagement and activation. They proposed a new strategy of using push notifications to increase engagement, but faced skepticism from influential stakeholders. After gathering data and presenting it to the stakeholders, they were able to increase activation from 20 to 60 percent. The PM learned the importance of understanding what motivates and influences people, as well as the importance of looking at data and being open-minded when proposing new strategies.

Establishing the Goals for an Acquired Organization

A year ago, the author joined the office of a startup bought by their current company with the intent to expand their product across the US and globally. Through conversations with stakeholders and user research, the author proposed a flywheel structure and identified critical narratives and key metrics to measure performance. They also identified four future value streams and personas, and set goals for each vertical with key metrics. The team grew from two to ten members, and the business increased 8x in the next year according to the current plan. The author learned to build trust, think about users when building the team, not rush to hire people, and go deep to add value.