Trial By Fire
Teams spend months hiring a strong candidate. Sourcing, interviews, debriefs, approvals, compensation, notice period. Everyone treats the hire like a serious investment. Then th...
#Organizational Design
Writing on team structure, ownership boundaries, and scaling coordination.
The Roadmap Is Not the System
A few years ago, my father decided to build a house in the . On the surface, it was easy to like the idea. A quiet place. A porch. A garden. Somewhere to disappear for a while....
Incentives Drive Everything
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New...
Scaling Culture Without Dilution
As organizations grow across geographies, one thing becomes disproportionately important. Culture. We, engineers, often dismiss culture as soft and cushy. This is until you see...
Climbing No More
Engineers have been reaching a common ceiling in their careers for decades. The pattern goes like this: an individual contributor gets promoted to a senior software engineer, an...
Building Remote Teams
You've probably heard stories of big tech companies in US and hiring double that number in India, blaming AI for the shift. Everyone's first thought is likely cheap labor. While...
Engineering Manager Interview Preparation
Layoffs seem to be everywhere these days. You scroll through feeds, and it’s another round of cuts, another company restructuring. If you're a seasoned manager, losing your role...
Subteam Tenets
Over the years, working across multiple organizations, I developed the concept of subteam tenets. I’ve tweaked it along the way to fit each company's unique quirks, but I still...
Losing a Top Performer
Over time, I had to manage and help to manage many times when a top performer quits. It sucks but we need to be reasonable. Imagine you’re on a winning streak, your top striker,...
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...
Hiring Harmony
Building an allstar team is a bit like cooking a nice dish. It's less about throwing in a lot of ingredients. It’s more about using just the right ones to create something truly...
Engineering Roles and Responsibilities
Engineering organizations have roles and responsibilities either explicitly or implicitly. When it’s explicit, one or more people exercise the engineering role, and the responsi...
Risk Comes First
You probably saw many cliché stuff about risking everything. Not risking is the biggest risk and all. While there is a truth to that, risk needs to be an appetite. Remember what...