I sit down with Beth Long to discuss her extensive experience with reliability engineering from working at companies like New Relic, Jeli, Gruntwork, and Adaptive Capacity Labs. Beth shares her insights on the role of executives in incident management, the balance between product development and reliability, and how different organizations approach incident coordination. We also explore reliability as a product and the importance of organizational culture in effective incident response. I learned a great deal, and thought about some aspects of reliability in completely new ways. I hope you do too!

Describes complete staff work, a management technique that improves local autonomy, prevents going back and forth, and carves out greater responsibilities for yourself.

Understanding how companies go about figuring out compensation. And an exercise to do for your team.

Jade Rubick shares his advice for new directors. All the surprises you may encounter, and tips for navigating the new skills of managing managers.

For managers, viewing your role as a shit shield is one of the most common early mistakes. Learn the dangers of being a shit shield, and what to do instead.

This is a list of patterns you can apply to coordinate the work of teams. The patterns are divided into centralized, role-based, and team coordination models.

Leadership is a race between complexity and leadership. Describes the principles behind creating humane, effective organizations in growing software startups.

OpenAI denies lawyers discouraged disclosing a scheming swarm on a German language wiki.

Notes from my Thoughtworks colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery

How managers can make changes that people will embrace.

Programs are more complicated than projects which are more complicated than milestones. Instead of projects, focus on milestonesMost engineering organizations focus on delivering projects. You can get better results by focusing on milestones instead.

I share a complete guide to how to hire engineering managers, including a sample interview plan

Understand the tradeoffs of team size and span of control for managers

Engineering handbooks can be done in an open-source manner, which allows process to adapt quickly to the needs of an organization.

There are a lot of challenges in the way QA and engineering work together. Many eng leaders think you shouldn

Communication is analogous to sharing state in computer systems. Describes how the same principles apply between both.

Software's hidden cost is learning its grammar. AI lets a founder speak English & use CAD to make a dress once previously unmanufacturable.

Feel like your team is the bottleneck? Learn how to address the challenges of managing a bottleneck team.

An introduction to FaST, describing how it works and what the tradeoffs of adopting it are

Some of the best engineers I know have not touched a coding agent.

Describes a technique you can use to improve information flow with the people around you.

We'll always have Spirit in the data center of our hearts.

Learn the nuts and bolts of project management for software projects, with the things you should do every week: update your project plan, review your risk registry, and send a project update

Commitments trade slower velocity for higher predictability. Is that what you really want?

Why your engineering team may need a hero rotation to combine focus and responsiveness

Evil staging and gauntlet programs are chaos engineering inspired, systemic approaches to improve software reliability.

As meetings grow in size they become less effective. Discover how the rule of eight can help you refactor meetings as they grow.

Describes a novel approach to company holidays which improves company focus, and makes it easier for people to take vacation on less common holidays.

A Mini-M is a group of managers that meet weekly or biweekly. The meeting is a combination support group and working session. I describe variations on the practice.

A Single Threaded Owner (STO), is a single leader that is completely responsible for their area of the product. I share my experiences implementing this model, including the tradeoffs and challenges. And I give the nuts and bolts of how we implemented it and what we learned.

Jade shares example engineering levels, that you can use to craft engineering levels at your company.

A Single Threaded Owner (STO), is a single leader that is completely responsible for their area of the product. I share my experiences implementing this model, including the tradeoffs and challenges. And I give the nuts and bolts of how we implemented it and what we learned.

If you want to see results, make someone accountable to it. Describes how we used OKRs to improve equity.