Managment

With engineering focus on reducing incidents and improving operational reliability, I frequently come back to the realization that humans are fallible and we should be learning ways to nudge people toward success rather than failure.

I’ve had cause to looked into research and ideas about the ways information flows within organizations. Discussions about transparency, decision making, empowering teams, and trust seem to intersect at organizational communication and information flows.

Practice makes perfect — Anonymous Parent

I often wonder if I’m being effective at my job. Might be related to my impostor syndrome, but in engineering management, the signals of effectiveness aren’t always clear. I have some basic, high level criteria I try to think about monthly, or so, to provide some insight.

There is a lot of information about engineering productivity out there. No one says it’s easy, but it can be downright difficult to turn the practices you hear about into plans you can put into action. What follows is an example of how we can create an actionable plan to increase our productivity.

We recently held our Summer Hackday at Tumblr and the results were impressive. I started to think about the mentality of a Hackday and how it differs from a more traditional product feature workflow.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why it seems so hard to effect change in organizations. The change I’m referring to could be related to product strategy, processes, or improving engineering / operational excellence.