Level-up Engineering

Handling conflicts and giving feedback are two of the most important things a manager needs to do. It has to be a given to lead a productive developer team. So we interviewed Tom Bartel, Engineering Team Leader at Trivago to share some of the tips he picked up over the years he spent as a manager.

In software development when capacity is the problem, most managers think they need to hire more developers. But you can push engineering productivity higher by creating the right context for your existing developers. We interviewed Camille Fournier on the topic of productivity, to learn what she's been doing as a tech leader to keep it high in her developer teams.

Scaling is a massive challenge for an engineering manager to overcome, let alone scaling in a distributed environment. Juan Pablo Buriticá had done it, and in this interview he shares how he managed to pull it off. You'll get his insights and actionable tips to overcome all the issues a tech leader will face when scaling distributed engineering teams.

In software development it's more likely now than ever, that as a manager, you'll face the challenge of leading a fully or at least partially distributed developer team. It's a brand new thing for everyone, but Tim Olshansky, current VP of Engineering at Zenput has faced this already. In this interview he shares what he learned on managing distributed developer teams over the years, and gives you actionable tips on making it work as well as possible.

Training engineering managers doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's extremely valuable to keep and grow your own talent, rather than get all your tech leaders from a competitive workforce market. We interviewed Matt Greenberg, who has gained years of experience training new engineering managers.

Dan Rummel is the Senior Director of Engineering at One Medical, and has gained tons of experience as a manager over the last one and a half decades on building psychological safety for his teams. Now you get to learn the ins and outs of his thinking and how he managed to pull it off with different teams over the years.

Rich Archbold worked for Amazon and Facebook in the past, currently, he’s a Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. He gained loads of experience by working for huge companies with developer teams scaling constantly whether it’s growth, a split or forming into a completely new one. He’s the man to go to for scaling advice.

Gergely Orosz spent many years working for great companies both as a software engineer and a manager, and got a boatload of experience on being mentored and mentoring others. Even today the software development industry isn’t strong on doing explicit mentoring programs, so his insight is extremely valuable.

Katie Womerlsey has been with the fully remote Buffer since the early days. Started as a software engineer, then moved on to engineering manager, and today she is VP of Engineering. She has faced all the challenges remote developer teams have to offer, and she’ll explain how she overcame them.