Level-up Engineering

Transforming teams doesn’t go without its challenges.

Let’s look at Tinder’s example. 

In this episode, Chris O'Brien, Director of Engineering at Tinder, shares his insights on building and leading engineering teams, particularly focusing on turning around existing teams. He discusses transforming teams, transitioning into a leadership role, Tinder’s culture and hiring process and a lot more.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Building a new team by turning another one around
• Transitioning into a leadership role
• Tinder’s culture
• Keeping business, customer and team needs aligned
• Tinder’s hiring process

Excerpt from the interview:

“Change isn't easy for anyone, especially in the workplace where stability and predictability matter. Switching teams suddenly can be unsettling, and it takes time for people to adapt and build trust with their new colleagues. That's why I've always believed in prioritizing relationship-building. It's something my mentor taught me early on, and it's proven to be invaluable. When there's already a foundation of trust and camaraderie, transitions become smoother, and teams become stronger.”

Scaling engineering teams can happen in a lot of different ways. Let’s take a look at a real-life example, how Fleetio scaled their product and team over the years.

Their Principal Software Engineer, Richard Young shares what challenges they faced, the strategies they implemented and gives valuable tips to those who consider joining or scaling a startup. 

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In this interview we're covering:

• Fleetio’s approach to scaling
• Fleetio’s approach to hiring
• Mentorship programs
• Scaling as a startup
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Bonus advice for scaling engineering teams
• Advice for engineers joining startups

Excerpt from the interview:

“Unlike many startups driven by external investor pressure to rapidly expand, Fleetio charted its own course, prioritizing autonomy and organic growth. This autonomy allowed us to make decisions aligned with our vision and pace of development, a significant draw for me when I joined the company.

Navigating the demands of a small engineering team posed its own set of challenges. With just a handful of us, balancing the delivery of customer features with support across various departments like sales, marketing, and product marketing became crucial. Our engineering efforts weren't limited to coding; we had to be nimble in assisting other teams to ensure customer satisfaction and sustained growth.”

Liam Martin, Co-Founder of Time Doctor, debunks myths around remote work and shares valuable tips on managing remote engineering teams so they remain well-aligned in an asynchronous environment.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Finding unbiased information
• Social implications
• State of remote working
• Asynchronous team management
• Remote work is here to stay

Excerpt from the interview:

"If you try to force employees back to the office, you'll likely end up with a team of B players, as the top talent will have the freedom to choose how they want to work. Right now, it's a seller's market, especially for engineers.

For managers uncomfortable with leading a remote engineering team, I don't have any comforting solutions. The reality is, if you insist on running your engineering team from the office, it's likely to fail. It's a tough truth, but there's no way around it."

Ian Tien, CEO and Co-Founder of Mattermost, talks about these core principles and their impact on his company. He highlights the importance of customer obsession, self-awareness, transparency and earning trust, just to name a few.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Customer-centric approach and its impact
• Engineering principles
• Following the engineering principles in day-to-day processes
• Stories of the engineering principles in real life 
• The role of managers
• Finding the right engineering principles for Mattermost
• Are engineering principles set in stone?

Excerpt from the interview:

“Great companies are always changing and improving. We never reach a point where we say, "That's it, we've learned everything we need to know." Our values and principles are always evolving as we learn more and as our needs change. For example, we used to have a principle called high standards. It was important when we were struggling with quality issues early on. But as we improved our quality and introduced other principles like earned trust, having high standards started to cause confusion.

High standards were sometimes in conflict with our other values. For instance, it clashed with customer obsession when we needed to release features quickly. It also conflicted with high impact when we focused too much on polishing things instead of delivering important changes. So, we decided to remove high standards from our principles. We realized that its role could be filled by other values and that it was causing more confusion than clarity.

This shows that our values aren't set in stone. We're always willing to reassess and make changes when needed. Our goal is to create a culture that meets the needs of our team and our customers both now and in the future.”

Gil Broza, Value Delivery & Agile Leadership Expert, gives actionable advice for leaders who want truly great product development. He emphasizes the importance of putting people first, creating a culture of continuous improvement and a lot more.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Why isn’t product development great yet?
• Improving your software delivery system step by step
• Putting people first in practice
• The right mindset for better product delivery
• Value delivery system - Next steps
• Fitness for purpose
• Revising your value delivery system
• Real-life examples of the strategies

Excerpt from the interview:

"Success in software development requires continuous improvement, yet many companies seem to plateau after adopting certain methodologies. Few actively strive to enhance their practices throughout the development lifecycle. New methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps emerge, but their adoption is often partial and not fully effective. Implementing changes can create unintended consequences, leading to stalled progress. (...)

Oftentimes, there's no unified approach to developing successful products, which is concerning for the industry's future success."

Magda Miu, Senior Engineering Manager at Adobe, discusses the importance of mentoring and shares her experiences as both a mentor and mentee. She highlights the benefits of mentoring, explains how she created a program at Adobe, and offers tips for others looking to organize something similar in their organization.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Magda’s personal experience with mentoring
• How to seek mentors
• Magda’s mentoring program at Adobe
• Key takeaways from the program

Excerpt from the interview:

"Many people view mentoring as a one-way street, and understanding that it’s actually a two-way street only comes after you’ve been on both sides: being a mentee and a mentor later on. As a mentee, you may think your mentors won’t gain anything from helping you, but the reality is different. Being a mentor improves your communication skills, so that you can resonate with all sorts of people. You also gain knowledge, because your mentee will share stories and challenges from their industry. If there’s an age gap between the mentor and mentee, it’s also a chance to get new perspectives from a different age group. Last but not least, the feeling of helping others and giving back is just extremely rewarding. It’s an amazing feeling to see your mentee improve in their career."

Dave Yeager, Director of Data Infrastructure at Recurve, shares aspects of healthy organizations, lists some signs of unhealthy ones and gives you actionable tips that you can implement today to make your company a better place to work at.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Creating healthy work environments in bigger vs. smaller organizations
• Some aspects of a healthy culture
• Spotting an unhealthy culture
• The impact of managers
• Advice for managers

Excerpt from the interview:

“One thing I find very interesting about continuous integration is that it only works if the tests are successful. However, there are endless stories about engineers not understanding why the release failed on the test, so they change the test itself. 

It’s a good example of a broken company culture - instead of being vulnerable and admitting there’s an unsolved problem that the team needs to address, we just twist the tests around to meet a deadline. This way, nobody’s going to learn anything. Pull requests should be an opportunity for engineers to walk each other through the task, discuss solutions and overcome potential hurdles.”

Mayakrishnan Chakkarapani, Senior Director of Software Engineering at Salesforce, shares interesting insights on how his organization uses Agile to meet business goals and empower developers while doing so.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Agile in Salesforce
• Some benefits of implementing Agile 
• What to keep in mind when implementing Agile
• How to empower developers when following Agile
• Setting up and managing virtual teams

Excerpt from the interview:

"View your organization as a doctor and your customers as patients; getting your customers’ desired business outcomes means you treated a patient. If one of your patients needs surgery, you need to focus on ensuring they recover as quickly as possible. Agile is nothing but an operational procedure ensuring you’re doing the operation methodically and iteratively.  It means you’re running a diagnosis first, then you come up with various techniques, and finally, you perform the operation the best way possible.  

But just because you have a thorough pre-surgery process, it doesn’t mean you can neglect postoperative care. You still have to monitor the patient, and if something seems off, you have to do the process all over again. 

A lot of times, I’ve seen people taking Agile for granted, thinking it’ll solve everything on its own without thinking about the culture or empowering their teams. It leads them to just force people to do more, causing lots of engineers to burn out eventually. What happens with these dysfunctional organizations is that the operation may succeed because they followed Agile, but the patient still died."

Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity, discusses various important aspects of open source software development. He talks about the decisions every company should make before embarking on an open source journey, the unresolved issues within the community, some interesting predictions about the future of OSS, and a lot more. 

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In this interview we're covering:

• Robert’s open source journey
• Early vs. current principles
• The benefits of open source
• Current trends in the open source community
• Open source concerns & advice
• Main challenges in the future of open source

Excerpt from the interview:

"Releasing your software openly and letting people do anything they want to do with it definitely scares some people. Maybe it’s less of an issue for developers who are just writing a piece of code - as an individual, if someone finds my work useful, I’m pretty happy about it. However, when businesses make their software open source, they might worry about others using it to build a competing product.

The problem is, open source software is typically licensed in a way that you can do anything you want with it. You can build a new business out of it, competing against the people who wrote the code in the first place. This can cause real tension, and it’s not fully resolved at this point within the community. 

To grasp this issue from a philosophical standpoint, Cicero claims that there’s never a conflict between your own interests and doing the right thing. If you shape the problem the correct way, you can do the right thing, and that can also serve you at the same time."