Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership

I'd like to share my favorite way of measuring the value delivery of engineering organizations. It's something I've used at a lot of companies. I call it the ValueSum metric . Why the ValueSum metric? I like this metric because it has a number of advantag

I'm seeing a renewed interest in the topic of team size and the span of control of managers. Most of this is coming from a questioning of how we do everything now that agentic software development is disrupting our existing patterns of work. I think this

Organizations that write things down have a larger advantage than they used to. Let's take two companies: Speakeasy Corp WriteItDownCorp At Speakeasy, leaders share information verbally. They have spoken updates, status meetings, and get everone on the sa

Teams often don't handle reliability risks well. Reliability is tough to reason about. To have a reasonable response to reliability, we share an approach called a risk matrix , with a process to create plans to manage your reliability risks. A risk matrix

Should engineering organizations have quality assurance (QA)? A lot of engineering leaders say they should not. I review the topic, and provide some suggestions for QA leaders, and some nuance on the problems with the way QA and engineering work together.

Today we cover the topic of creating an Innovation Lab. Companies suck at risky long term planning Engineering organizations struggle to focus on anything that isn't a project. Yes, you can and should work to change this. But there is a lot of inertia beh

People disagree. It's something that you expect. Disagreements can be beneficial . They can help bring up areas that people aren't considering. Disagreements can be destructive . People can get set in different directions, and the friction can prevent for

I once asked an executive assistant to help me be better at calendaring. Of course, she was a complete expert and pro at this, and I learned a lot. I'd like to share some of the things she taught me. Calendar rules I learned from an EA Note this whole art

Things are changing pretty rapidly, so I have hesitated to write down observations that I know will get out of date quickly. But I have observed a few things I haven't seen widely discussed, so I'll risk it. Slack could be your new data lake We use data l

If you're in a growing organization, you will experience thrash mode . Thrash mode is when you are underwater. When you are too busy to do anything. This post is not about prioritization . It's about how to get unstuck when you don't have the capacity to