Your Work Introduces You
Years ago, when I first joined Tripadvisor, we had a tool that moved data to Amazon Redshift. One of the engineers went on holiday, the tool had a few bugs, and people were bloc...
#Meetings
Posts on making meetings useful, reducing waste, and choosing the right forum.
How to Work with Me
In 1935, Boeing had a new bomber prototype, the Model 299, which later became the B17. It was impressive, and it was also easy to mess up because it had more switches and steps...
The Janus Protocol
In the Roman Forum, there was a small shrine with double doors. When Rome was at war, the doors were left open. When Rome was at peace, the doors were closed. It is an oddly mod...
Multi-Horizon Delivery Framework
If you’ve been in leadership for a while, you know the drill: a line manager reports team progress along with the PM, anyone above reviews it in cadence and sees how things are...
Stop Wasting Brainpower
How many times have you found yourself saying: “I worked all day, but I didn’t get anything done.” I know, we have all been there. We feel bad about it, too. On the surface, it...
Work-Life Balance as a Manager
As an IC, you close your laptop at 6 PM, log off, and forget about the work unless you are oncall. As a manager, you check Slack at 10 PM because someone might need you. Your ca...
Building Trust in Engineering Teams
We all know that transparency builds trust. The lack of it? Well, that can lead to major issues. Engineers sometimes join teams and, from the start, struggle with trust. It’s as...
Ideal Number of Direct Reports
Amazon’s likely comes from a closer look at ratios. Were there too many managers with only 23 direct reports? That’s entirely possible. From my time at AWS, I didn’t see this mu...
Perception vs Perspective
Have you ever found yourself questioning someone's decision, only to realize later that you didn't have the full picture? You know it's really easy to get caught up in our own w...
Working with Dependencies
If you are part of a large organization, the term "dependencies” probably means more than . In a big organization, when we talk about "dependencies," we're diving into more than...
Achieve More by Meeting Less
Meetings are part of leadership. We need them to align and understand. Yet, we often do it at the expense of action. The success lies in the milestones achieved. In essence, "Fe...
Minimum Viable Agile
In , I criticized agile frameworks for bringing too much complexity with too little impact. What was meant to make teams more adaptive often ends up doing the opposite. They slo...
What's wrong with Agile Frameworks
Some time ago, I attended a course and became . It wasn’t a huge deal. I was already doing the job. But as time went on and I gained more experience, my view of agile frameworks...
Scrum, Kanban, or just Agile
Before going deep in the subject, I would like to emphasize that this post is completely personal. You miBefore going deep into the subject, I would like to emphasize that this...
Buggy Code on Production, Survived
Areca is the name of the billing engine I am working on for Turk Telekom. Funny enough, it is also the name of the flowers we bought to freshen the office. We wanted the office...