@rowasc

  • Engineering Management feels slow sometimes.

    The rewards come slowly compared to individual contributor work, but they tend to be more interesting to me because I can see the impact of my work on people and projects in a more global way. It can be someone finally getting that promotion they have been working hard to get, features shipping with a…

  • Pragmatic engineering management.

    I tend to approach engineering management decisions as I do software development: small adjustments most of the time, big refactors only when the potential long term rewards are worth the risks and there’s no other viable solution. Like in software engineering, the context in which we make decisions matters. The strategies that make sense in…

  • Technical debt – where the value hides.

    [this is a short, not fully developed blog post – consider it “in development”] I’m getting into the habit of learning in the open, and I think part of letting go of the idea that I need to do everything right is allowing my incomplete ideas to be in the wild. I think a lot…

  • The brilliant jerk.

    Early days The signals were there from day one. One of your direct reports asked a question, and Adrian answered with a mocking tone. You told yourself you’d have a chat with him before the day was over, but by the time your meeting is over, they are all cracking jokes together. You shrug it…

  • Some newbie thoughts about Roadmaps

    TLDR: from my perspective as a CTO-doing-product-manager-stuff, the key part of building a roadmap is not what the document says, but what I learn and the connections I make through building it and maintaining it. If I just throw a bunch of features in a planner with no clear alignment to the org’s goals and…

  • Remote work is not a catch-all excuse for bad team communications.

    When you have offices, a lot of your communication happens face to face, and most of those interactions aren’t documented anywhere. Jeff said “paint the walls red”, and Anna’s team did exactly that. If this happened in a hallway chat, there is no documentation of why they decided to do it, or when. If there…

  • Building product development processes.

    Early in my career, I used to think process was something people introduced because they were bored and had nothing better to do apart from bothering us, the productive,  bread winning devs that built the thing. Years later I found myself working with a team that had all the elements of a process and none…

  • Engineering Management is like Debugging

    Engineering management is a lot like debugging and bug-fixing at times. Sometimes you don’t know much about a failure except that it happened. Sometimes the solution is clear but risky in some way, and sometimes you just know what needs to be done and wonder why you didn’t do it earlier. More often than not,…

  • Challenges of remote work

    I’m a huge fan of remote work. It’d be hard to convince me to take a role where I need to go to an office every day. Even as a remote work believer, there are still days when I wish we could get everyone in the same room for an hour without it being a…

  • Open offices are not for everyone.

    “Remote isn’t for everyone.” is something I heard many times over the years. While I believe that’s absolutely true, I also believe that shared offices are not for everyone. Even offices with doors that close aren’t for everyone. Open offices are considered the “one size fits all” of work environments. They’re advertised as a good…