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  • The Journey from Underrepresented IC to CTO: How Open Source Helped

    This article tells the story of a minority woman's journey from DBA to co-founder & CTO, using open source to overcome gender disparity. It provides insights on career shifting, open-source monetization, and the distinction between IC and CTO. The author shares advice and insights that may be helpful for others.

  • Assessing Organizational Culture to Drive SRE Adoption 

    SRE adoption is greatly influenced by the organizational culture at hand. This article describes how to assess the organizational culture in terms of production operations at the beginning of the SRE transformation. It provides a roadmap of small culture changes accumulating over time, and shows how the leadership facilitated the necessary culture changes

  • How to Rebuild Tech Culture for Those Who Survived the Layoffs

    A wave of layoffs hit the software industry and changed the definition of tech culture. This article explores the situation across multiple tech companies, and the diverse choices made to support employees who survived, and those they had to say good-bye to. It provides suggestions for those of us who have stayed behind, and how to rebuild culture in our tech teams.

  • Group Coaching - Extending Growth Opportunity beyond Individual Coaching

    This article provides an introduction to group coaching and explains how it is different from individual coaching. It sheds light on the benefits of using group coaching, skills that coaches would need and the challenges they would face, with an example scenario using one of the group coaching techniques, and describes the context in which such a technique can be used.

  • Great Leaders Manage Complexity with Self-Awareness and Context Awareness

    People's perception and expectations on leadership requires a leader to understand their own contextual significance which makes it difficult to become an appreciated leader. Also trivialisation many times unknowingly stands in the way of progress in complex situations. This article explores specific traits that distinguish people who repeatedly provide appreciated and appropriate leadership.

  • Craftleadership: Craft Your Leadership as Developers Craft Code

    Learning software craftership made me reconsider how I wrote code. Being an experienced software team manager, I try to reevaluate my management practices in the same way: what could test-driven management or pair-management be? Here I propose different insights on how software craftership tools and mindset are transposable to the management domain.

  • How We Built Testability with Psychological Safety

    Testability can enable teams to make changes to their code bases without requiring extensive regression testing. To build testability, team members must collaborate and leverage each other's unique skills. Unfortunately, effective collaboration does not come naturally to people and therefore needs leadership to nurture people's ability to speak up and share their knowledge.

  • The Four P's of Pragmatically Scaling Your Engineering Organization

    Scaling your organization during a period of hyper-growth is a challenge every founder wants to face. For engineering leaders, the concept of "scale" can quickly spiral out of control. There are four key areas of focus when pragmatically scaling an organization through hyper-growth: people, process, product, and platform.

  • Transitioning into the Staff+ Engineer Role - from Player to Coach

    This article describes how staff+ engineers transition to supporters, enablers and force multipliers of others and what technical leadership looks like away from the management track. It explains the benefits organisations get by having leadership roles that are focused on technical enablement and support.

  • What Kind of Coach Does Your Team Need?

    Coaching is primarily client-driven; the client chooses the right coach for a particular need at a particular time. However, the team may first need to understand what coaching is before deciding what kind of coach they need, and why they need it. This article examines the role that a coach can play in establishing, maintaining and nurturing a safe space for teams to grow and achieve their goals.

  • How to Run Your Product Department Like a Coach

    Having found what I thought was my calling as an agile coach, I took the tough decision to move sideways into Product Management in the hopes of using what I’d learned to one day run my own department. I believed that coming from coaching would allow me to see things others could not and create something special. Time will tell if I have succeeded. This is the story of where I am so far.

  • Adaptability by Agreement: Valuing Outcomes over Imposed Solutions

    In the pursuit of agile at scale, the landscape is dominated by process-driven approaches which are broken. This article explores a solution-driven rollout approach, one that puts authentic agreement on outcomes before solutions. The principles on which it is based are also effective as leadership strategies, where frameworks are resources to draw upon as people find fitting solutions.

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