Sprint Cadence

Understanding and Overcoming Procrastination

Senior engineers often struggle to get things done due to frequent interruptions. To be more productive, they should use the Pomodoro technique to block off 25 minutes of focused time for a task, and take short breaks in between. Additionally, they should try to be more curious about the context and push themselves to widen their knowledge base. Lastly, they should allocate at least 2 hours of focus time per day to be productive.

Recognizing the Need for a Temporary Change and Communicating It Well

In order to meet a tight internal launch deadline, I temporarily created a joint force of all the mobile engineers across multiple teams. Strong communication was key to making this work, and I learned that it is important to be flexible in certain scenarios. Additionally, I found that individualizing conversations can help address future concerns.

How to Establish and Manage Expectations with the Business

This article discusses how to manage the pressure of unrealistic requests from the business while maintaining Engineering's own pace and priorities. It suggests reframing requests to suit Engineering's interests, using visual project management tools to give the business visibility, being careful with time-commitments, having planning reviews with different stakeholders, and connecting tech debt with a concrete value that is brought to customers.

Crush Tech Debt with Taxation, not Micromanagement

Merging changes to a codebase was difficult due to flaky tests that caused frequent merge build failures. To solve this, Blend implemented a policy where each pod was taxed proportional to the number of flaky tests they owned, incentivizing them to fix the tests. This approach was successful and the flaky tests were eliminated within a month. This demonstrated that creating incentives is a better approach than micromanaging when dealing with shared resources in a culture of distributed ownership and high autonomy.

Building My Very First Team

The author was hired to help build a team and introduce the Agile methodology to a disorganized startup. He recruited people quickly with the help of a contractor and a hiring agency, and structured internal procedures with a mix of Kanban and Scrum. His efforts to make a positive change were praised and he was eventually appointed Director for Software Engineering. He learned that it is important to consult experts and to listen to team members when making decisions.

How to Balance the Continual Proliferation of Ideas With Limited Resources

This article discusses the problem of an individual who was continually proliferating new ideas, which caused disruption to the team's workflow and goals. The individual took action to abstain from sharing all ideas with the team, prioritize more, and accept that not all ideas can be pursued. This resulted in a new culture of prioritizing ruthlessly and conversations about what it means to be a data scientist or engineer. The lessons learned from this experience are to make peace with yourself, prioritize wisely, and understand that going slow can make you go faster.