dballona

Engineering Management

People development, hiring, planning, delivery, technical strategy, and much more.

Navigating the engineer to engineering manager transition

Article originally written for The Pragmatic Engineer, where I talk about what can feel like 'a fork in the road' – how to go about moving from a software engineer role to a software engineering manager role.
Continue reading→

Consolidation into a platform team

Engineering teams frequently duplicate each other's work. When there are no good reasons and it becomes a pain point, a commonly used pattern is building a platform team, to consolidate scattered capabilities.
Continue reading→

Out of bounds: managing teams without technical expertise

While good software engineering is universal across disciplines, managing teams where you lack technical depth can be challenging. In this article I talk a bit about what has worked for me before.
Continue reading→

Performance enablement

Performance management is the means to plan, review, and reward people for their contributions. My take is that achieveng strong performance and results is more about enablement rather than control.
Continue reading→

Three simple principles for delegation

Delegation is a cornerstone in leadership, and fundamental to scale yourself as a leader. I've tried to synthesise what I believe to be good delegation into three simple principles.
Continue reading→

Composition for teams

Similarly to software, teams can benefit from composition. A common org design pattern is defining a platform team and leveraging it through many application teams.
Continue reading→

Reorganising teams through experimentation

Engineering teams can grow in unexpected ways like systems do. Utilising experimentation concepts can help find the right design before you fully commit to longer-term change.
Continue reading→

Calibrations for software engineering interviews

Assessing who is the best candidate for a role is not a straightforward task. Many parties play a role, and sometimes there are conflicting interests. Here's a take on how to make calibrations more consistent.
Continue reading→