A while back I posted “9 Books All Engineering Managers Should Read,” and it seemed to be helpful for folks. Two years removed, there are many more books that can help you succeed in your engineering management career. You can also get this post in podcast form on Hartley’s Handbook. …

Not long at all. — To answer this question, it’s important to know that every situation is different. Every company is different. Every individual is different. What’s not different is how long you should wait to deliver feedback, especially if it’s critical and difficult. Give the feedback as soon as you can. Rip That Band-Aid Off Giving feedback is…

Role-play. That’s it. That’s the entire post. Thanks for reading, see ya later. — “I’ve learned that if you plan for every variable, a happy outcome doesn’t need to be left to chance.” This quote is the premise behind Nathan Fielder’s HBO show “The Rehearsal,” where he helps individuals through difficult conversations or situations by having them rehearse over and over in settings that…

This is the key for regaining control of your schedule, so I'm glad you touched on it. So many of us (myself included) measure everything else in a business, but we don't take a moment to measure our meeting effectiveness. It's pretty easy to see which ones are a waste…

To improve or implement an incident response, look no further — Unless you’re in a company that never releases software, you will deal with an incident at some point in the future. No one knows the day or the hour, but an incident lurks around the corner. Are you prepared? If you don’t have a plan already, have no fear. I’ve…

This week I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the future. Roadmapping for the second half of the year, trying to determine where to make big bets, and thinking about where Curology will be in three years. It’s a very different mode than project management or performance management because…

No, this isn’t an ad for Home Depot (Less Talking, More Doing), it’s the lesson that I’m finally learning in my career. Not learning per say, but learning to better articulate. It’s taken a while, but “more teaching, less doing” sums up every step of my career and, I imagine…

Exploring this quick way to understand what you do and don’t know and how priorities stack based on that information — Got a big ol’ list of projects, but not sure how to prioritize them? Similar to the four quadrants template for goal creation, RICE scoring can give you a quick gut check on which projects to do first. Get the template here: RICE Scoring Example [Make a Copy] Is this…

The key thing in any interview process is that it is not a crockpot. You cannot set it and forget it — No two interviewing pipelines are the same, but with this straightforward template, you can at least have a jumping-off point Keep in mind, the questions within each of these chunks will be the key factor to making your interviewing process successful. This is merely a starting point, and I’ll dive…