🥃#4 - Organizing Product Teams, Passing Any First-Round Job Interview, On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Netflix’s “Dream Team” Model, and more
Welcome to this week's edition of 🥃 Whisky on the Blocks, highlighting the latest updates to Product Cards and the best findings for the week.
👋 Hey! My name is Piotr, and welcome to my newsletter on building blocks for successful tech product companies. Subscribe for free step-by-step guides on best practices used by the best companies!
💬 In this week's issue:
How to organize your teams using the Team Topologies framework
How to Pass Any First-Round Interview
On Becoming a VP of Engineering
Lessons from Implementing Netflix’s “Dream Team” Model at 3 Hypergrowth Tech Companies
What to Do When You Don’t Have Enough Traffic To A/B Test
Alignment > Autonomy
Transformation Anti-Patterns: Management Consultancies
20 employee engagement survey questions you should ask
From Prioritization to Accountability (and Autonomy)
♦️Product Card Spotlight: Team Topologies
Have you ever wondered how to organize your teams for fast flow, high collaboration, and increased customer value? If so, try to check out Team Topologies, a straightforward, easy-to-follow approach to modern software delivery emphasizing optimizing team interactions for flow.
Team Topologies proposes four types of teams and three interaction modes to help you design your organization for agility and effectiveness.
Team Types:
Stream-aligned team - Aligned to a single work stream and empowered to deliver value independently and quickly.
Platform team - Enables stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy by providing self-service capabilities and APIs.
Complicated-subsystem team - Deals with complex and specialized system parts that require deep expertise and low cognitive load.
Enabling team - Helps stream-aligned teams overcome obstacles and acquire new skills or technologies. Acts as a temporary coach or mentor.
Interaction Modes:
Collaboration - Two or more teams work together to discover new solutions or deliver a piece of work. Requires high communication and feedback.
X-as-a-service - One team provides something as a service to another team, such as an API, a platform, or a tool. Requires clear boundaries and contracts.
Facilitating - One team helps other teams to overcome a challenge or improve their working methods. Requires active listening and empathy.
Team Topologies can help you achieve business and technical agility by aligning teams with business domains, reducing cognitive load, applying Conway's law, and enabling evolutionary change.
How to take it from there?
I recommend reading a book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - Team Topologies.
I had the pleasure of discussing Team Topologies in more detail on Mariusz Gil's podcast here (🇵🇱 Polish version only)
Last month, I had a chance to present it at the PHPers Summit conference. I've included the slides here.
📕 Interesting reads
How to Pass Any First-Round Interview
by Coach Erika
A fantastic piece by the author of The Career Whispers. Full of practical advice on how to ace your first-round interviews. Super useful for people who are looking for a job in tech.
On Becoming a VP of Engineering
by Emily Nakashima
Emily shares their experience of being promoted to VP of Engineering at Honeycomb. Interesting piece for people who inspire to become VP or CTO, showing some of the role responsibilities and traits that can help you land it.
Lessons from Implementing Netflix’s “Dream Team” Model at 3 Hypergrowth Tech Companies
by Tom Willerer and Kevin Bechtel
A great piece outlining the four critical components of a Dream Team: executive leadership, informed captain, cross-functional team members, and highly aligned, loosely coupled relationships. Inside you’ll also find five steps for creating fast, aligned teams: setting strategy, establishing teams, getting aligned, providing context, and getting out of the way.
What to Do When You Don’t Have Enough Traffic To A/B Test
by Teresa Torres
Some great advice from the author of a great Continous Discovery Habits on a typical problem startups may face - not enough traffic to prove A/B test statistical significance. In the article, you’ll find how to apply other discovery techniques like interviews, paper prototyping, and competitive research.
Alignment > Autonomy
by Jean-Michel Lemieux
This a great piece by the former CTO of Shopify on the importance of alignment. Alignment is the hardest part of building a company. Without it, autonomy is squandered. Companies must focus on alignment and autonomy to ensure that strategy is understood and followed. Every leader must work towards aligning with peers and bosses to make better decisions. It takes active work to build and maintain, which is mandatory in leadership.
Transformation Anti-Patterns: Management Consultancies
by Marty Cagan
Legendary Marty Cagan with a fantastic piece in the transformation series. Transformation efforts often fail due to common anti-patterns, including one associated with big management consultancies. Marty claims that even though these consultancies employ very smart people, effectively supporting transformations stands in the way of their business—a must-read for companies planning significant change.
20 employee engagement survey questions you should ask
Lexi Croswell
Employee engagement is the enthusiasm and connection employees have with their organization. It is a measure of motivation and commitment. In her article, Lexi provides a list of 20 employee engagement survey questions covering topics such as pride, recommendation, commitment, motivation, leadership, enablement, alignment, and development.
TBM 230: From Prioritization to Accountability (and Autonomy)
by John Cutler
John with another thought-provoking piece on product investment and governance frameworks. His post advocates for companies to have a progressive funding model and accountability for how company money is used. This encourages a shift in mindset from merely delivering features to becoming stewards of investment and growth.
🐤 Tweet of the week
🙂 Weekly smile
🎯What am I working on?
What does the future hold? Currently, I am focused on releasing Product Cards, 100+ cards to learn and improve all things product, engineering, agile, and design in a fun and engaging way. More than a hundred people are still waiting to get their hands on Product Cards via early access. Physical cards are coming soon. I hope to bring some good news in the coming weeks and months.
You can learn more here:
Good luck, have fun, and see you in a bit!
Piotr 👋
