New Job?

Action Plan Series for New Technology Leaders - I put this together over 10 years ago when I was joining a startup as CTO. I wanted checklist and plan I could reuse in the future. Here are the sections if you want to skip the intro:

1. Understanding the strategy

2. Conversations with the team

3. Understand and assess technical risks (Technical Risk Assessment)

4. Focus on early wins

More on Leadership

Being the Best Manager You Can Be

• Employee Goal Setting - lightweight goal setting as a part of day-to-day management

• One Secret of Success: Delegating

• Dealing with people who are smart and capable, but have bad attitudes

• Employee Reviews - Tips to use them as motivation

• Giving Feedback - learning to criticize in a way that actually works

• The Importance of an Explanation - why good managers are also good teachers.

• What to do when an employee misses their deadline - my tips on recommitting

• Delivering Bad News – one downside of leadership

Managing Up (& Around)

• Peer relationships: How to stop being competitive with your peers and be a better leader

• A Networking Roadmap for Engineers and Other Introverts

• One Secret of Success: Delegating

• Ten Essentials for Presenting to Executives

Core Soft Skills

• How to Run an Effective Meeting

• One Technique to Being Awesome You Aren’t Using Enough: Questions

• Improve Your Communication Skills

 Tactical Advice

• Lean Software Development - build v1s and v2s

• Planning an Offsite

• Selecting Vendors - is a startup or established company better?

• Vendor Research - Understanding the team working on your project

Career and Culture

• Manage Your Career

• Engineer Whispering – insights into the technical side of the table (slides from my talk on this topic)

• How to Manage Your Manager

• Work Life and Finding a Balance, a letter to the hard workers

• Netflix Culture Presentation

• Tips from the Ritz - customer service

Leveling Up

Choosing your path and working it with finesse

• Finding your Path - do you know the success criteria for your career?

• Find your Motivation - how to get into the flow and beat procrastination

• Becoming Indispensable

• Using What You Have to Get What You Want

• Rocking your role - doing the best you can at your current role

Inner work

• The Power of Positive - master your insecurity and build confidence at work

• Reframing: Put On Those Rose-Colored Glasses

• How to Make Your Own Luck

• Overcoming Self-Doubt

• Authenticity on the Path to Success

Improving your soft skills

• Tips and exercises to become a better listener

• Feedback: How to Take It and Make The Most of It

Being an awesome part of any team

• You should care about how others perceive you, and here is why

• Your boss has no clue what you do all day - the importance of trust at work

• Managing Meetings with Your Manager

• Helping People Help Themselves

Being more effective, productive, and awesome

• Do *this* in your next meeting….(hint: it involves a pen and paper)

• One Technique to Being Awesome You Aren’t Using Enough: Questions

Are you awesome?  Yes!

This was a series of posts written for a presentation on how to be awesome at your engineering or operations job.

• Manage Your Career – Being Awesome Part 1

• Being a great teammate – Being Awesome Part 2

• Improve Your Communication Skills – Being Awesome Part 3b

• Keep Improving! – Being Awesome Part 4

You can also view a webcast of the talk here. 

Advice for technologists

• Engineers On Engineers: What’s Your Best Career Advice?

• Handling Technical Disagreements with Finesse

Want More?

Then here some more of my articles you may also enjoy:

• Engineer Whispering – insights into the technical side of the table

• The Importance of Doing

• Leadership 101: Taking Responsibility

• Leveraging Mentors (including questions!)

Technical Articles

Many of these were written for other sites, and some are a bit dated (given I haven’t been working as closely to the technical details) but I am still proud of these publications.

ASOA Open Source Textbook

• Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems

ACM

• Making the mobile web faster

• Data Mining Product Reviews

• Data Mining the Web Via Crawling

• Here are a few posts I wrote on the Moz Developer blog (when I was the VP Engineering there a very long time ago):

  • Scaling a Rails App

  • Startup Developers – Make sure you think about the business too…

  • Big Data for Less

  • Email Tips for Developers (or other wordy people)

  • Operations: Diagnosing a Load Problem of Cascading Failures