“Your team is genuinely self-sufficient when it can solve problems without you present”
from “Leading Effective Engineering Teams”
“You have coached your team to self-sufficiency, and you can safely let go of the reins to move on to the next challenge”
from “Leading Effective Engineering Teams”
You will often have to make trade-offs between different goals. For example, you may have to choose between a quick and easy solution to implement and one that is more effective but takes more time and effort
Mentoring and developing leaders Recognizing the potential in her team, Cathy started investing time in mentoring her direct reports, preparing them to take on more leadership responsibilities
Fostering a culture of autonomy Cathy started to cultivate a culture where her team members felt empowered to make decisions within their domain. This shift not only reduced her workload but also boosted her team’s confidence and sense of ownership.
“20-minute rule to his team: “If you are blocked, use the first 20 minutes to do research to unblock yourself; after that, either ask our team chat or a person and let them know of the results/findings of the prior research.””
from “Leading Effective Engineering Teams”
Many software companies have switched to an open office environment to promote collaboration between engineers. But the constant noise from phone calls, impromptu meetings, and general office chatter may not always result in productive collaboration. Therefore, it is also important to create designated quiet zones where engineers can focus in isolation for some time without any distractions.
Diversity Having diverse skills on a software engineering team can improve its effectiveness and productivity. Team members with different backgrounds and expertise can approach problems from multiple angles and develop more creative solutions. However, too much diversity can also lead to communication difficulties and misunderstandings, especially when team members bring different values rather than different ideas to a discussion
Many researchers have identified smaller teams containing less than 10 members as more likely to achieve success than larger teams.
Software engineers have a clear high-level purpose: to build software that solves problems that customers would pay to have solved. Engineers must think about what matters most and the impact their software will have.
Build a culture of adaptability Foster a culture that values adaptability and embraces change. Encourage experimentation and risk-taking, and reward teams for being responsive to changing circumstances and customer needs.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. Mark Twain
Data Enrichment: Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing data with additional information to make it more valuable, insightful, and actionable. This typically involves adding more context, details, or insights to the dataset. Data enrichment can include various activities like appending geographic coordinates to customer addresses, enriching customer profiles with demographic data, or enhancing transactional data with sentiment analysis results.
Data Fabric: Data fabric is an emerging data management design that aims to streamline an organization’s data integration infrastructure, creating a scalable architecture to reduce technical debt and enhance data utilization. It is a concept that focuses on flexible, reusable, and augmented data pipelines and services to support various operational and analytics use cases. Data fabrics leverage different data integration styles, active metadata, knowledge graphs, semantics, and machine learning to enhance data integration design and delivery efficiently.
“Conversational Al is expected to reduce contact center agent labor costs by $80 billion by 2026.”
- Gartner
“Finish the work you’re assigned, and deliver it with high-enough quality and at a decent pace. Over-deliver when you can, shipping more and better than expected.”
— The Software Engineer’s Guidebook: Navigating senior, tech lead, and staff engineer positions at tech companies and startups by Gergely Orosz a.co/cxpgjyM