A Foundation for Managing Engineering Teams — Reasonable managers have a simple leadership philosophy: Treat others as you would like others to treat you Give everyone an explicit area of ownership that they are responsible for Reward and status should derive from finishing high-quality work Lead from the front: never ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t …

An Approach for Engineering Leaders — Many engineers I know prefer learning in private. Especially if it's something difficult — they say — “leave me alone for a few hours and I can probably figure it out.” This is partly because most people inherently feel pretty uncomfortable making mistakes in public. Too often, this discomfort prevents…

Quick Guide That Will Prepare You For Your Next Presentation The Golden Rule of presenting: Preparation > Practice Communication is company-specific: Every company has different communication styles and patterns. Your associates who are talented presenters may not be able to articulate what they do to succeed, but if you study…

A Calibration Guide — Managers work in several indirect ways, so when we get stuck it isn’t always quite obvious, but all managers absolutely get stuck, both on individual projects and in our careers. Here are some of the ways that happens. You can be subject to any of these under different circumstances in…

And How It Can Help With Cross-Team Coordination — When working with cross-functional teams, it is often the case that different teams have seemingly incompatible ideologies, and in those situations, having a clear understanding of the difference between a strategy and a vision is vital to the success of the product. At a high level, Strategies are grounding documents…

Discovery, Selection, and Validation — Use this article as a framework that you can build on depending on the context of your organization, the state of the product, and your own experience. Let this be a guide for when you need to re-calibrate. Let’s take a deep breath together. At a high level, product management…

History of the Agile Revolution in Software Development, and How We Got It All Wrong. — Agile is a mindset. This is the story of how a new approach to workflow ended up defining an industry. And like all good stories, this story too begins with a few people hanging out at a ski resort. When you are surrounded by pine trees, a fireplace, maybe some…

A Better Take on JavaScript’s Higher Order Functions. Functional Programming is awesome! It makes programming fun. Learning to program “functionally” is going to make you a fantastic programmer and you will feel secure with the quality of your work.

It permeates everything you do. JavaScript is notorious for being the world’s most misunderstood programming language and it also happens to be one of the most popular ones. Virtually every personal computer in the world has JavaScript interpreters installed on it and in active use.