companies
case studies
- Mews: leaders growth: 1 new team per month
- Mews: 80% delivery, transparent efficiency metrics
- Mews: OKRs alignment
- Mews: hiring funnel: 6 devs hired per mo
- Mews: tech to prod-oriented reorg
- Ataccama: mentoring more senior leaders
- Ataccama: performance reviews people ❤️
- Kosik: engineering efficiency metrics
- Deepnote: Engineering budgeting, payroll/non-payroll costs
- Apify: transition to Kanban
THE WAY I UNDERSTAND
AN ENGINEERING ORG ECOSYSTEM
AN ENGINEERING ORG ECOSYSTEM
Leaderhip.
We’ll survive the growth only if we create the right foundation based on leaders worth following. Processes will not save the world.
Strategy.
Ensure there is a live product and technical strategy people refer to. Connect the dots between the vision, mission, strategy, initiatives, and epics, up to developers’ tasks.
Cooperation.
Work in trios: product lead & engineering lead & design lead. Close the gap between product and engineering discovery and delivery. Build trust and assign autonomy.
Principles.
We have people compatible with our principles: be it company principles, technical or product principles. Build an environment where people are safe if they follow the principles.
Brand awareness.
Talent attracts talent. Build your brand and the hiring pipeline. Work with community management. Engage people to blog posting, meetups, speaking, hackatons, conferences, and more. Cooperate with your talent acquisition team.
Delivery.
Guarantee the contract of delivering 80+% of the roadmap. Average companies deliver ~ 50-60% of their goals. Gain a competitive advantage by having efficient teams.
Marian helped me to stabilize and mature our engineering in Apify after a period of growth. In mentoring, we focused on many areas across product-engineering cooperation, career framework, team alignment, and agility. But mainly, he changed how I view my role and the role of the engineering department in the organization.
4.5/5
Marek Trunkát
CTO at Apify
Specific engineering leadership topics
Transparency: teams success and quality metrics
Established company-wide engineering dashboards, providing info about OKRs/Roadmap completion, teams health board, contracts, planning, and ongoing sprints.
Product development life cycle
Product delivery doesn’t consist solely of the development phase. To maximise gains, we have to pay extra attention to the continuous discovery of opportunities. That means on the other side of the spectrum (post-release), we’ll cover the activation, adoption, and feature success phases to reflect real customer outcomes.
New team lead growth programme
The sole purpose of the programme is to prepare the new team lead for success by providing a strong foundation in various fields. My aim is to ensure the team lead is well-adapted within 3-6 months, rather than letting them sink or swim for two years.
Engineering managers and team leaders mentoring
Cooperation with the product
If you encounter a disconnect between your product managers and software engineers, we can remedy this by applying a set of improvements. This could include establishing product trios, engaging the developer with the product, adjusting the software delivery process, and outlining clear responsibility and coordination guidelines.
Connecting OKRs and developer tasks
Compared to the old-fashioned yearly SMART goals, the quarterly-based objectives of OKRs are more likely to result in strategic initiative completion due to their shorter feedback loop and regular monthly updates. Only a limited number of companies have adopted the OKR system end-to-end, from leadership down to individual contributors.
Alignment: Cooperation with the product
If you encounter a disconnect between your product managers and software engineers, we can remedy this by applying a set of improvements. This could include establishing product trios, engaging the developer with the product, adjusting the software delivery process, and outlining clear responsibility and coordination guidelines.
Growth: Structure and reorg
If your team doubles in size, we can minimise growing pains by tackling the most critical points: how to grow your new team leaders, how to onboard a new team to set them up for success, how to restructure teams to streamline expected outcomes, and what new operational roles are needed to support our ambitions (data teams, product ops, agile coach, etc.).
Strategy: Connecting OKRs and developer tasks
Compared to the old-fashioned yearly SMART goals, the quarterly-based objectives of OKRs are more likely to result in strategic initiative completion due to their shorter feedback loop and regular monthly updates. Only a limited number of companies have adopted the OKR system end-to-end, from leadership down to individual contributors.
Learning: New team lead growth programme
My motivation is to ensure the team lead is well-adapted within 3-6 months, instead of letting them sink or swim for two years. If you have an engineering leader who is effective but inexperienced, I can help. I’ve worked with many promising but less experienced leaders who I’ve helped make the impact their company requires of them.
Delivery: Efficiency
Do your teams only deliver half their plans? I can help boost their efficiency by up to 80% in sprint and goal delivery. Together, we’ll identify and enhance all the right domains: roadmap contribution, time to value flow, unplanned issues ratio, and more.
Transparency: teams success and quality metrics
How do you define and measure success? By implementing fully transparent and real-time quality and success metrics, we can ensure the team focuses on what matters most: roadmap delivery with predefined quality standards.
Growth: Hiring
Why should anyone want to work for your company? I can help you work out your strategy for getting the best talent you can in the door. Some companies distinguish themselves by their work culture. Other companies attract candidates by the problem space they are in. Others may offer their employees freedoms, such as working on open source, or short work weeks. To hire in this competitive environment, you need a good hiring strategy. And you need a good retention strategy. Your hiring process also needs to be competitive.
Boost your career or land the job
Helping people land a new job in engineering management, director and VP roles. We discuss the preparation, interview questions, various situations, and follow-ups after each round. We design an onboarding transition plan, including the definition of success.
Teams efficiency
Think of Cost of missed opportunities. Will I outrun the competition?
Delivery: Product development life cycle
Product delivery doesn’t consist solely of the development phase. To maximise gains, we have to pay extra attention to the continuous discovery of opportunities. That means on the other side of the spectrum (post-release), we’ll cover the activation, adoption, and feature success phases to reflect real customer outcomes.
Agility: How to hire and cooperate with agile coaches. Continuous releases.
How do you navigate from artificial agility to a stage where continuous improvement and a fast feedback loop are part of your mindset? What roles can help you achieve this? How do you define your agility strategy, processes, and tools? How do you hire and onboard agile coaches? How can you change people’s perspectives and measure agility adoption? I can guide you through all of this using my own success stories.
- You are a product company.
- You are between series A-D or self-funded.
- Your leadership id a group of diverse talent woking in synergy.
