Andy N.

🌟 Attention Engineering Managers and Technical Leaders! 🌟 In just two weeks, on June 28th at 10 AM PDT, I’m excited to host an interactive roundtable on Feature Flags and Delivery in conjunction with ELC! 🚀 Why Attend? This is a collaborative discussion where your expertise and curiosity are key! Whether you're experienced or eager to learn, your contributions are invaluable. 🔍 Discussion Points: - Decoupling Processes - Boosting Team Efficiency - Optimizing Feature Delivery - Tracking Platform Usage Expect rich conversations on best practices, unique implementations, methodologies, and the latest tools enhancing feature flagging and delivery. Who Should Join? - Engineering Managers - Technical Leads - DevOps Engineers - Software Developers This roundtable is your chance to: - Share your experiences - Gain new insights - Network with peers - Discover practical recommendations RSVP Now and mark your calendars for June 28th at 10 AM PDT! Let’s collaborate and elevate our skills together! #EngineeringManagement #TechLeaders #FeatureFlags #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamEfficiency #TechRoundtable

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My favorite topic. I’ll be covering strategies for learning from past incidents, and honestly any situation (it doesn’t have to be an “incident”!). Developing a learning culture is so paramount to resilience and safety in operations. You’ll leave with changes you can start implementing today, techniques for getting better ROI out of past events, and ways to instill collaboration in learning across your organization. Come join!

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It’s hard to believe that 100 days have already passed since I joined Sisense as the SVP of Engineering. I’ve met great people, and already did some great things. The care and inclusivity I’ve seen within our teams have been remarkable. Together, we've navigated the complexities of stabilizing and scaling our engineering while focusing on quality and innovation. Here are a few highlights from my journey so far: - Team alignment and growth: We’ve prioritized aligning our teams with Sisense's strategic goals, ensuring every member focused on their specific domain, while still sees and feels connected to our larger mission. - Enhanced collaboration: effective communication between our engineering, product, and other cross-functional teams is a key for success. Focusing on creating close connections between the teams helped us breakdown silos, allowing us to collaborate more effectively and push the boundaries of innovation together. - Process improvements: With a focus on continuous improvement, we’ve streamlined key processes–particularly our planning process. The impact has been immediate, and it amazing to see the results already. - Innovation focus: We’ve doubled down on innovation, focusing on AI, data modeling, and embedded analytics, all while keeping a close eye on emerging opportunities that can deliver even greater value for our customers. - Quality and stability: One of our vales is being customer-centric. By keeping our customers front and center, we’ve ensured that our dev standards remain uncompromising and our product remains robust and reliable. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved together already, and I can’t wait to see what the next 100 days–and beyond–will bring.

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It should come as no surprise that the most amorphous role in all of software development is that of the engineering manager. Being accountable for their team’s success, EMs tend to adapt to what is lacking on their team, whether that’s a novice tech lead or absent product manager. This variability can make it difficult for leadership to both support and hold managers accountable. It also leads to circumstances where a team’s deficiencies are difficult to discern because the EM has (over) compensated for missing core functions. In my last essay, I wrote about the responsibilities which I believe should be directly attributable to the engineering manager role, and there’s plenty! Can EMs also take on some of the tech lead and PM responsibilities? Sure, but in my experience this is a disservice to the team and organization in the long run and also really unfair to the engineering manager. My goal is to wrap up the tech lead, EM, PM trifecta with a post on how great PMs are truly indispensable especially in the circumstances where they seem most absent (internal product, e.g. platform development). Beyond that, I’m curious what folks would be interested in reading about? Some ideas I’ve been percolating on: 1. Why you shouldn’t wait to ship a service catalog for your organization 2. The specific challenges associated with building internal products 3. 10X Engineer or 10X Liability? How some ICs create the dangerous illusion of unsustainable capacity. 4. Essential “off the shelf” capabilities and management technologies that every engineering organizations needs on Day One (focusing on the rapid evolution that’s occurred here in the past 5 years or so). 5. Next level scrum - what does agile actually look and feel like when it’s done exceptionally well. And if you disagree with my assessment of what engineering managers should focus on, I’d love to hear from you.

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The feature we've been waiting for is finally here! No more endless scrolling to find timely news with Threads recent update. Learn all about it here! 👇 https://ow.ly/ZLM630sCUjZ

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You know there's some momentum happening if Marty Cagan decides to write about a product topic you've been at work trying to enable for years. Love to see it, and BIG shout out to Stacey Langer for providing her expertise in this article! 🧘‍♀️ Here are a few other pros that came to mind for the product model: 1. The government product model makes product (public) value and risk management possible. Product risks—such as value, desirability, viability, and feasibility—are not risks that traditional project management models can effectively manage. Government agencies interact with the public through the services they offer, but government digital experiences are not always inherently valuable. It’s what these digital services do for users that create individual and public value. Building tech alone ≠ value. 2. Evidence-driven decision-making uses discovery, iterative delivery, and testing with actual end users, where you continuously learn. This enables many things, mainly building with your users while validating the solution direction. It can also enable an incremental funding option specifically for products/services (traditionally called ‘projects’) that are especially complex, high priority, and/or contain many unknowns. 3. Driving technology from a place of vision and strategy measured in outcomes that can align and even influence policy changes. 🤸‍♀️ Some realities in trying to adopt a product model in gov: 1. The word ‘product’ often can be confusing, especially when it doesn’t fully represent what is being built and managed. A lot, if not most, of the technology work happening in government often involves solving service design challenges. So, in gov products, you focus on solving for the end-to-end experience, which can mean processes and non-tech things. 2. Conway’s Law and government systems replicate the organizational structures in agencies, which are often siloed and isolated. This is often represented as 'legacy tech.' Much of the work in 'product' in government is modernizing legacy systems, which requires the same principles as the product model but often a different emphasis on its varied approaches. Not all products or digital services start from the same place; many are not greenfield. 3. Traditional ATO structures can stop the product operating model in its tracks. To overcome this, it is important to integrate the ATO into the product model, utilizing a ‘continuous ATO’ operating model. But see point 2 above. At the end of the day, the product model isn’t a process you learn to implement and then just implement. It’s not just ‘Agile’ or Scrum or DevOps. Those methods can (or sometimes can’t) enable the product model. It's a mentality and discipline for continuously using new inputs to deliver value throughout a product's LIFE. It's a cultural change as much as an operating change, and there is no 'single way' to do it. However, operating from product thinking principles can help us start from the right place.

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Struggling with consistency? Can’t seem to finish what you’ve started? Join me in the latest in my series “Musings of an IT Director” in 10 tried and tested tips to improve your consistency.

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