Contents
Forming a Plan
In my career, I've led diverse teams across various sizes, disciplines, and organizations. My leadership style is flexible, adaptive, and deeply rooted in trust and collaboration. Below is a generic plan for the first 120 days within a new organization, structured to align with the needs of the business, a high-performing engineering function and its people.
30 Days: Building Foundations
People
Connection & Trust:
I begin by getting to know my team members, both professionally and personally, sharing my own journey to create a foundation of trust and authenticity. I don't hesitate to show vulnerability by sharing my own strengths and weaknesses. This fosters an environment of openness and mutual respect.
Understanding Ambitions:
Through 1:1 conversations, I uncover each team member's ambitions and motivations, and how their current roles align with those goals. This helps me identify opportunities for growth and ensure their efforts contribute to the team's and company's success.
Feedback & Actionable Goals:
I ask team members to share 2–3 things they would like to see improved, started, or stopped. From this, I collaborate with them to set actionable, short-term goals that are achievable within the first 90 days, helping them build momentum and confidence.
Product/Service
Business Core Understanding:
I immerse myself in understanding the product or service at the heart of the business—what drives revenue, what opportunities exist, and where the pain points lie.
Process Review:
I evaluate key processes, such as how customer feedback is collected, how issues are resolved, and how SLAs and KPIs are managed.
Quality & Delivery:
I assess software delivery cycles, quality standards, and how updates are perceived by end users. This provides a baseline to prioritize improvements in reliability and user satisfaction.
Business Structure & Communication
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: I attend cross-functional meetings to grasp the pulse of the organization, map stakeholders, and understand team structures and leadership dynamics.
- Stakeholder Engagement: I create a stakeholder map to ensure I know who to engage with and when, enabling effective communication and alignment across departments.
- Communication Practices: I review how the business communicates, collaborates, and documents decisions, identifying gaps and opportunities for smoother workflows.
Technology
- Technical Evaluation: I review the technology stack, past architectural decisions, and technical debt through documentation, ADRs, and changelogs.
- Effort Distribution: I analyze the distribution of engineering effort across new features, maintenance, support, learning, and innovation to identify opportunities for rebalancing.
- Risk Identification: I evaluate existing risk management processes, prioritization of distinct risks and how they feed into the roadmap and budget.
Growth Plan
I evaluate the growth trajectory, whether it's organic, sales-driven, or product-led, ensuring the team is structured and resourced to meet future opportunities and challenges. This includes assessing the team's current capacity, skill set, and potential for growth.
Hand-over Plan
I meet with stakeholders to discuss the hand-over plan, ensuring a smooth transition of responsibilities from them to me. This includes identifying key hand-over documents, setup of knowledge transfer sessions, and any additional support needed with a target date for completion. This is key for ensuring that existing members of the team feel supported and that the team is able to continue to function effectively during the transition.
90 Days: Empowerment & Reflection
Coach with Empowerment and Trust
I work with my direct reports to resolve at least one of their identified pain points, empowering them to take ownership while I am on hand to provide guidance and support as needed.
Reflection & Ownership
- Team Reflection: I facilitate retrospectives to reflect on progress and identify actionable improvements. Actions are assigned to individuals—not teams—to drive accountability.
- Personal KPIs: I establish 1–2 personal KPIs based on observations, focused on measurable improvements that align with broader team and business goals.
Introduce Low-Effort Improvements
I adapt or introduce processes, tools, or techniques that require minimal effort but deliver high impact—e.g., a new collaboration tool, a refined retrospective format, or an improved incident management process.
Share Observations & Plans
- Transparency: I share my observations with the team, including successes, areas for improvement, and my proposed action plan.
- Celebrate Wins: I highlight and celebrate team successes to build momentum and morale.
120 Days: Alignment & Impact
Review & Reflect
I evaluate the impact of my leadership on the team, the business, and myself. This includes gathering feedback from my peers, direct reports, and stakeholders.
Strategic Alignment
By this time, I will have developed a clear strategy for aligning the technology roadmap with the company's business goals. This includes agreeing on departmental goals with senior management.
People Development
- Performance Management: I evaluate team performance, recognizing high achievers through rewards or promotions, and addressing underperformance constructively.
- Career Growth Plans: I formalize growth and development plans for team members to support long-term retention and satisfaction.
Technology Roadmap
I build a technology roadmap, balancing innovation, scalability, and maintenance, ensuring alignment with business goals.
Ongoing Leadership Commitments
Trust & Accountability
I lead by example, balancing approachability with decisiveness, ensuring trust and autonomy flourish within the team.
Growth Mindset
I promote a culture of continuous learning and improvement, emphasizing reflection and iterative progress.
Customer-First Mindset
I ensure all engineering efforts prioritize quality, reliability, and a superior user experience.
Team Well-Being
I remain vigilant about workload and stress levels, creating an open environment for feedback and proactive intervention.
Delivery Framework
A robust delivery framework is essential to ensure teams can consistently deliver high-quality, impactful work. I focus on fostering an environment where agility and predictability coexist, ensuring alignment between engineering efforts and business priorities. Key aspects include:
- Clear Objectives and Priorities: Ensuring every initiative is tied to business or customer value, with clear deliverables, owners, and timelines.
- Incremental and Iterative Delivery: Promoting small, incremental releases to gather feedback quickly, mitigate risk, and maintain momentum.
- Empowered Teams: Encouraging autonomous, cross-functional teams to take ownership of their delivery pipelines while providing necessary guidance and support.
- Feedback Loops: Leveraging retrospectives, sprint reviews, and customer insights to continuously refine processes and outcomes.
By instilling a culture of ownership and collaboration, the delivery framework remains flexible enough to adapt to changing demands without compromising quality or speed.
Performance Measurements
To ensure continuous improvement, I advocate for tracking both outward-facing metrics (customer satisfaction) and inward-facing metrics (team performance and operational efficiency). These metrics provide actionable insights into how well the engineering function is operating.
Outward-Facing: Customer Satisfaction
- Customer Feedback: Regularly monitor feedback from NPS scores, product reviews, and support tickets to gauge customer sentiment.
- Service Reliability: Measure uptime, system availability, and SLA adherence to ensure customers experience a reliable product.
Inward-Facing: Team Performance and Operational Efficiency
- Release Cadence: Track the frequency and size of deployments to maintain a consistent, predictable flow of value delivery.
- Cycle Time: Measure the time from idea to production to identify and eliminate bottlenecks.
- Incident Rate and Recovery Time: Monitor the frequency of production issues and how quickly they are resolved to ensure operational resilience.
- Lead Time for Changes: Assess the time it takes for code to move from development to production, ensuring the pipeline is optimized and not overburdened.
By consistently evaluating these metrics, I ensure that teams not only deliver value but also operate in a sustainable, efficient manner that aligns with business and customer expectations.