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, in May 2022, about how to navigate this very common career lateral movement.
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Trust is antifragile

A note on how trustworthy relationships can get better through unavoidable volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors.
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Platform patterns #1: Consolidation

Platform patterns is a series about how to use patterns for building platforms. The consolidation pattern consists of merging scattered capabilities into a platform team.
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Managing engineering teams outside your technical expertise

Managing teams which you lack technical understanding can be challenging. In this article I talk a bit about what has worked for me before.
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Performance enablement

Performance management is the means to plan, review, and reward people for their contributions. In this article I explain why my take is it's more about enablement rather than control.
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Alignment across organisations

Finding alignment across organisations is an invaluable skill. Here are a few ways to get to a shared understanding, and frame disagreement to find alignment.
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Three simple principles for delegation

Delegation is a cornerstone in leadership. I've tried to synthesise what I believe to be good delegation into three simple principles.
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Composition for teams, platform and application pattern

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.
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Reorganising teams through experimentation

Engineering teams can grow in unexpected ways like systems do. Utilising experimentation concepts can help on such scenarios.
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Calibrations for software engineering interviews

Assessing who is the best candidate for a role is not in any means a straightforward task. Here are some of my takes on this subject.
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Posture in system design interviews

Some ideas on how to perform better in the behavioural and subjective bits of my favourite technical interview type: system design.
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Language as a tool for engineering teams

A take on how to overcome problems engineering and product development teams face with stakeholders, goals and metrics through language.
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Review: Radical Candor

Three reflections after reading Kim Scott's book "Radical Candor" around caring personally and challenging directly.
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