Companies ignore API’s till it is too late. I have seen this happen repeatedly and then it is a significant amount of rework to get API’s right. There is, IMO, a very clear way of doing things right. Most companies start out being product companies. This means the focus is…

There is a rule of 3 in writing as well as in speaking. And in my opinion, there is one in scaling too. I believe the following holds true: When some output metric — it could be number of employees, number of customers, number of micro-services you have built —…

In Managing Debt, I shared my opinion on the four traits that leaders to solve for: Cohesiveness, Independence, Ownership and Confidence. I will address Confidence in this post and share how this can be solved for. The first step in measuring confidence is understanding the current state. …

Managing debt is central to the job done by Engineering leaders. Yet, it is often misunderstood or poorly planned for. Here is how I approach thinking about this important topic. It is more than ‘Tech Debt’ One of the companies I led had a stack that was ancient. The Tech was slowing the team down. But…

Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots — Rumi Reducing the Customer-Engineer gap I wrote recently at cio.com about the importance of reducing the customer-engineer gap. In my mind, the best engineers are ‘product engineers’ who deeply understand and care about the customer experience in addition to…

In how to hire I shared the practices I use for hiring. My preference is to ask candidates to work on a take home problem, and then base the interview on how they approached solving the problem. It is similar for leadership positions as well. When the interviews are for…

Inflection moved to being a fully remote company very early into the Pandemic (March 2020). We were already heading in this direction and the pandemic accelerated it. Our decision for remote work predated the pandemic and was based on a simple plan: We go to where the brightest engineers are…

I have found an effective way for managing what I eat. I restrict what I eat and when I eat 6 days of the week. But those rules are off for 24 hours, my ‘cheat day’— Friday evening to Saturday evening I eat what I want to eat, when I…

I like having an on call program. I participate in it. Not all engineers like it. Here are the reasons I think an on call program is important 1. It brings engineers closer to customers If customer centricity is important to you — and it should be, you need to find ways of bringing engineers closer to…