Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership

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.