Kard’s Post

Spring was in the #NYC air yesterday! We touched on whats keeping us from succeeding right now and what are concerns are as we get through Q1 into the rest of the year. Topics we covered: hiring/enabling talent, aligning GTM and product teams, staying creative when generating the right pipeline at scale, and of course how will AI affect all of this? People shared the things they love. I've been meaning to try Superhuman, this might just be the catalyst for me to do it. Grammarly was the winner of the day with just about everyone in the room a user. My favorite part was that everyone was willing to help one another: If you need help in any of these areas feel free to reach out. * Hiring/Enablement-related questions → Hamish Stephenson 🦘(Selr.io) * Aligning GTM and product teams - from a #RevOps perspective → Gabe Naviasky (Leadbeam), Lindsey Meyl 💚 & Ayush Khanna 💚 (RevAmp), and - from a product perspective → Aditi Bhargava Tandon (Maroon Oak | Startup Hiring + Tools), Ben Bartolone (Crush & Lovely), Jacqueline-Amadea Pely (loyee.ai) * Building High Quality Pipeline → Cyrus Khalatbari (Loyee.ai) Thanks again to Dr. Desiree-Jessica Pely for leading the way. See you in the next one in April!

Some organizations start a Developer Productivity team at 100 engineers, and some start them at 2000 engineers. There are unique needs and cultural factors that impact the timing of this decision, and there's no copy-and-paste solution that's going to be right for every company. We interviewed leaders from 20 companies, including DoorDash, Yelp, Disney, and Lattice, to learn what their engineering headcount was when they established a Developer Productivity team. This report also distills their insights on the key factors that determined whether their investment was well-timed or too late. https://lnkd.in/g5Bc4BVJ #DX #DevEx #SoftwareEngineering #DeveloperProductivity

Crunch is used by engineering executives that are either too dumb or too lazy (or both) to figure out more innovative ways to make their teams more productive. It's especially insulting in software as software engineering is a field that is naturally full of disproportionate outcomes. Overly bureaucratic and massive organizations of 100+ engineers can work on a product for years, only to have it die in the A/B test. This happens in Big Tech all the time. On the other hand, there are tiny teams of just 1-3 engineers who deliver incredibly innovative features in just a couple months or even a few weeks. This happens often in top-tier startups. If you aren't able to figure out how to do more with less, you don't deserve to be a highly paid engineering leader making hundreds of thousands of $$$. Any idiot can sacrifice their people and throw raw hours at a problem to make things marginally better. Doing more with more isn't special. If you want to learn how to be a true engineering leader, watch our in-depth explainer video on how to creatively empower teams from a Head of Engineering at Airbnb: https://lnkd.in/ggKu_t9r #techcareergrowth #leadership #growthtips #techlead #softwareengineering

Aren't you tired of the everyday? You'll find inspiration, actionable advice, and an awesome new network at Product Operations Summit New York on March 20 & 21.   We're bringing together the boldest talent in the area to share, bond...and steal each other's ideas.   See how product ops works in start-ups, major orgs, and everything in between. Learn from seriously accomplished industry minds. And discover smart ways to thrive in the current macroeconomic climate.   A snapshot from your agenda: Deciding how to decide: Enabling great decision-making for your teams through smart constraints and tough love, Google. Scaling product operations from 1 to many: How to grow your team, Zapier. Building globally, launching locally: getting alignment across regions and teams, Uber.   Find all the details in your brochure: https://bit.ly/469ynK8

Aren't you tired of the everyday? You'll find inspiration, actionable advice, and an awesome new network at Product Operations Summit New York on March 20 & 21.   We're bringing together the boldest talent in the area to share, bond...and steal each other's ideas.   See how product ops works in start-ups, major orgs, and everything in between. Learn from seriously accomplished industry minds. And discover smart ways to thrive in the current macroeconomic climate.   A snapshot from your agenda: Deciding how to decide: Enabling great decision-making for your teams through smart constraints and tough love, Google. Scaling product operations from 1 to many: How to grow your team, Zapier. Building globally, launching locally: getting alignment across regions and teams, Uber.   Find all the details in your brochure: https://bit.ly/469ynK8

"Will Larson is the chief technology officer at Carta. Prior to joining Carta, he was the CTO at Calm and held engineering leadership roles at Stripe, Uber, and Digg. He is the author of two foundational engineering career books, An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer, and The Engineering Executive’s Primer, which will be released in February of next year. In our conversation, we discuss: • Systems thinking: what it is and how to apply it • Advice for product managers on fostering productive relationships with engineering managers • Why companies should treat engineers like adults • How to best measure developer productivity • Writing and its impact on his career • How to balance writing with a demanding job • How to develop your company values" https://lnkd.in/ezUCfZMK

Biggest challenges while building early RevOps team? Dependency and Resistance to Change. Let me explain. You are coming to a company that “works just fine” into a role no one really understands. The role is extremely collaborative - you essentially touch every department. And you are coming in to show the inefficiencies and fix them. In processes that were owned by someone else, who usually takes it personally. You have to bring together and align a lot of stakeholders, you need to push them to the edge and drive them to deliver, so you can deliver.  If something works - someone else will claim the credit. If it doesn’t - you are typically the first one to blame. I have seen data teams blaming RevOps for bad data quality - while consolidation was leading to its improvement. I have seen dev and product teams delaying and doubting every step - just because they were loosing the control and ownership. And this could continue into any department - the more technical, the more resistant. After all - someone coming from commercial won’t tell the techies how to do things! It often feels like people forget they should have the same goal as you - long term company success, not only hitting this quarters OKRs. The only way out is persistence - persistence and well built tech stack (thanks all the low/no-code and AI tooling! What is your experience with cracking hard stakeholders? #revops #revenueoperations #gtmacademy #changemanagement

Each week our team puts together some of the top resources to help engineering leaders and developers level up their skills and stay up to date with breaking stories in the industry 🔎 Here’s what we covered in this week’s Download 👇 🎙️ Wiring The Winning Organization Dr. Steve Spear, renowned MIT senior lecturer, founder, and author, discusses the core principles of his new book with Gene Kim, Wiring The Winning Organization. 👀 Turmoil at OpenAI The news late Friday of Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI sent shockwaves through the tech industry. The still-evolving story changed almost by the minute over the weekend, with many left wondering what the future will look like for a company that has become a culture zeitgeist. 📑 Six templates every engineer needs Ryan Peterman created a set of templates from postmortems to design docs to help engineers save time and energy. ✅ How to hire a great SVP Andreessen Horowitz is famous for backing some of the most recognizable names in tech. So it’s fair to say they know a thing or two about what to look for in your next Senior Vice President of Engineering hire. 💪 Even in a down market, software engineers aren't downgrading It’s been a tough year for many in tech, with one layoff tracker showing a quarter million layoffs in 2023, but the job market for software engineers has been surprisingly resilient. Why? As LeadDev’s Editor-in-Chief Scott Carey puts it: “They know their value.” #Newsletter #Management #Leadership

With this shoutout, I'd like to celebrate Sanjay Patel year long journey with Coles Digital platform engineering squad and wish all the best with new endeavours - sadly, Sanjay is finishing with us to start new chapter in his career. With Sanjay joining our team we elevated our Kubernetes and microservices - optimized onboarding, sustained x4 growth of microservices with the same amount of platform engineers, provided expertise and trainings to 150+ engineers across dozen application and feature delivery squads, adopted smarter scaling strategies, optimized right-sizing, improved reliability, and absolutely smashed cost optimization and security. And more importantly - had absolutely GREAT TIME working together! We also joined forces with Olly Oliver Kubernetes experts to improve Kube clusters' operational excellence and observability across whole Coles working on multiple cross-departments initiatives and paving the path for better collaboration and inner-sourcing. Finally, I wish I had Sanjay's patience and dedication to pass Kubernetes Security exam and become Kubernetes trifecta certified. Sanjay was the first to get Kube trifecta - demonstrating his dedication, leading by example and inspiring other engineers and me to dream big! With one journey finishing, another begins - and if the above resonates with you, please reach out to Rade Manojlovic - our team is looking for likeminded engineers to share our journey at Coles Digital. Also, don't hesitate to reach out to people you'll be working with - Vikas Kaushik Trent Vendy Lakmal Liyanage Sharath Surya Soma Hariharasudhan Jayabalan and many others. #engineering #leadership #culture #cloud #security #devops #devsecops #azure #Kubernetes #containers #cloudnative #culture #engineeringleadership #engineeringculture #platformengineering #microsoft #terraform #coles #colesdigital #microservices #digital #opportunities #ecommerce

Lately, I’ve heard a lot of skepticism around the need for Product Ops, mainly from those yet to work with someone in this role. It reminds me of a past debate that went on and on (and sometimes still comes up): “do we need product managers?” This sentiment always comes from people with negative experiences working with ineffective product managers, or no product managers at all. Let’s not dismiss an entire role just because you haven’t worked with someone who was good at their job. If you have only worked at one or two companies, remember that your view of the entire landscape may be limited. Product Ops is gaining traction because it’s helped a lot of companies excel. You can find it at OpenAI, Stripe, Uber, and GitHub to name a few companies. For the naysayers, I hope you get to feel the benefit of working with these great people one day.