Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership

Here’s a simple exercise you can run. It is a helpful exercise that most leaders should run periodically. After a while, it may become a sort of “second-nature” skill. It is the trend test. Leadership is… trendy Leadership is often about trends. Your job is to look at the horizon and identify how things are going to trend: What things are getting better over time? What is getting worse over time? How can you make sure that your organization is getting better in every dimension? Producing better…

The job of an executive follows a very simple algorithm: Figure out what needs to happen. Figure out how to make it happen. Make it happen. This is simple, but it's not easy. In fact, it’s so simple it seems dumb to lay it out. But it’s surprisingly … well, not something people take to automatically. Figure out what needs to happen When an executive enters a new situation, they have to situate themselves. I ask myself: “What does the situation require?” “What needs to happen?” “What am I here…

I'd like to share my favorite way of measuring the value delivery of engineering organizations. It's something I've used at a lot of companies. I call it the ValueSum metric. Why the ValueSum metric? I like this metric because it has a number of advantages over anything else I've seen: It is a cross-functional measurement, meaning it measures engineering, product, and design. The measurement incorporates how each of the functions are working separately, but also shows how well you’re working…

I’m seeing a renewed interest in the topic of team size and the span of control of managers. Most of this is coming from a questioning of how we do everything now that agentic software development is disrupting our existing patterns of work. I think this is a topic where a lot of people don’t understand the tradeoffs, and I’d like to share some perspective on span of control and team size. Span of control and team size Span of control is how many direct reports your managers have. Team size is…

Organizations that write things down have a larger advantage than they used to. Let’s take two companies: Speakeasy Corp WriteItDownCorp At Speakeasy, leaders share information verbally. They have spoken updates, status meetings, and get everone on the same page verbally. At WriteItDownCorp, the company has a written culture. Everything is documented and organized. It's not official until it's written down in the wiki™. There are tradeoffs to both types of companies. But I believe that over the…

Teams often don’t handle reliability risks well. Reliability is tough to reason about. To have a reasonable response to reliability, we share an approach called a risk matrix, with a process to create plans to manage your reliability risks. A risk matrix is an approach teams and groups can use to help them reason about risk. They develop a list of the things they own, the dependencies they rely on, and a list of who relies on them. Then they systematically evaluate the amount of risk and impact…

There are a lot of challenges in the way QA and engineering work together. Many eng leaders think you shouldn't have QA. I dig in.

Covers advice for setting up innovation labs in companies, pointing out a lot of the dangers and opportunities.