Building Generative Cultures

Toxic workplaces kill performance…but it doesn’t have to be that way. You're sick of the complaints about your culture’s “low morale,” “being too siloed,” “too nice,” “risk averse,” “cutthroat,” “highly politicized.

7 Components of an Actionable Team Charter

Creating a team charter is a great first activity for your newly-forming team. It helps build team cohesion and trust, gets you off to a quick start, and is a great activity to get everyone — team members and management — onto the same page.

Take 5: How to Keep Your High Performers Happy

We’ll send you one email a week with content you actually want to read, curated by the Insight team. At the same time, don’t ignore the drag that prob­lem employ­ees can have on a firm.

Bridging the Gap Between Junior and Senior Engineers

It focused less on the technical aspects of the job, and more on the soft skills that I feel don’t get talked about enough.

How Self-Managed Teams Can Resolve Conflict

In a traditional team structure, conflicts can be escalated to the boss to resolve. Can’t agree on how to prioritize projects, or on which deadlines need to shift? Ask the team leader to step in and make a call.

How Not to Be Stupid

After a four-hour conversation on The Knowledge Project (Part 1, Part 2), Adam Robinson (@IAmAdamRobinson) and I shared another 10-minutes that shouldn’t be missed on how not to be stupid. Shane Parrish: Adam, you did a presentation once on how not to be stupid.

The Codeless CTO

My definitive answer is yes, you can be a successful technology leader without ever writing a line of code. It’s definitely the harder path in the beginning, but long-term success as a CTO requires a balanced view of people, product, and technology.

Becoming a Manager of Managers

Everyone first steps into management by leading a small team of 3–5 people. Making that transition is really hard and there are a plenty of interesting articles out there about how to do it, but it is still very hard work.

What is an Engineering Manager?

I have held many titles in the tech industry: Engineer, Lead Engineer, Head of Engineering, VP of Engineering, and CTO.

How we fixed our on call process to avoid engineer burnout

Intercom’s mission is to make internet business personal. But it’s impossible to be personal when your product is broken. Uptime is critical to the success of our business, and not just because our customers are paying us, but also because we heavily dogfood our own product.

Creating a Data road map

As the new year rolls around, many Data leaders are thinking about (or have already created) 2019 road maps for their team and function. Since Data often works cross functionally with other teams, it’s key that you consider other team’s priorities and objectives in developing your road map.

Applying the Prime Directive beyond the retrospective

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Team Building Mental Models

Team building has always been a challenge, not just since the advent of agile frameworks and the resulting emphasis on self-organization, engagement, and achieving a valuable objective.

Contemporary Views on Serverless and Implications

We want near-instantaneous elasticity of resources and never have to pre-allocate resources or pay for more resources than needed.