152 articles in Management
An overview of SRE principles from Google, including error budgets, service level objectives, toil reduction, and the philosophy of treating operations as a software problem.
How to build platform teams that accelerate product teams instead of slowing them down, with guidance on APIs, self-service, documentation, and measuring platform success.
How investing in internal developer tools — build systems, deployment pipelines, testing frameworks — accelerates delivery and improves engineering quality of life.
How Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) capture the context, options, and rationale behind technical decisions, creating institutional memory that survives team changes.
How to apply open source development practices within an organization to improve collaboration, code reuse, and knowledge sharing across team boundaries.
The cultural principles behind DevOps — shared ownership, breaking silos, and blameless collaboration — and how they transform software delivery performance.
Why traditional whiteboard coding interviews fail to predict job performance, and alternative approaches that better assess engineering ability and team fit.
How to build on-call rotations that are sustainable, fair, and effective — covering compensation, escalation policies, alert quality, and preventing burnout.
How to start contributing to open source projects as a professional developer, including finding projects, making meaningful contributions, and building your reputation.
How to measure engineering team performance without destroying morale — focusing on system-level metrics, delivery performance, and developer satisfaction rather than individual output.
Seneca's essay On Anger, written nearly two thousand years ago, contains remarkably modern insights about emotional regulation in professional settings. This article explores Seneca's three-stage model for managing anger — delay, reframe, and release — and applies it to common workplace triggers such as unfair feedback, political maneuvering, and project failures. It also examines the Stoic concept of the 'view from above' as a technique for maintaining perspective during heated moments.
Understanding when scale creates advantage — and when it creates bureaucratic drag — is essential for strategic decision-making. This article explains the economic foundations of scale economies (spreading fixed costs, learning curves, bargaining power) and scope economies (shared resources, cross-selling, brand leverage). It also examines diseconomies of scale: coordination costs, cultural dilution, and the innovator's dilemma. The framework helps leaders determine the optimal size for their organization and when to pursue growth versus focus.
Not all stress is created equal. This article distinguishes between chronic distress (which degrades performance) and eustress (which fuels growth), drawing on the Yerkes-Dodson law and modern resilience research. It presents a toolkit for high-performers including box breathing, cognitive reappraisal, progressive muscle relaxation, and time-blocking for recovery. The article also covers organizational approaches to stress — psychological safety, workload management, and the importance of micro-recoveries throughout the workday.
The shift to remote work exposed a hidden assumption: that most communication needs to happen in real time. Asynchronous communication — messages that do not expect an immediate response — protects deep work, respects timezone differences, creates documentation by default, and produces more thoughtful responses. This article provides a framework for deciding what should be synchronous versus asynchronous, tools and practices for effective async work (long-form writing, Loom videos, structured RFC processes), and guidance for managing the cultural shift from always-on to async-first.
A guide to the RFC (Request for Comments) process for engineering teams, including when to write one, what to include, how to get useful feedback, and how to make decisions.
How Amazon's organizational philosophy of small, autonomous teams led by single-threaded leaders enables speed and ownership at massive scale.
How to build and sustain a thriving open source community, covering governance, contributor experience, documentation, and the social dynamics that make or break projects.
A deep dive into Spotify's organizational model of squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds, and how this structure enables autonomous teams to move fast while staying aligned.
An analysis of Netflix's famous culture document that redefined how companies think about talent density, context over control, and radical transparency.
Burnout is a systemic organizational problem, not merely an individual resilience failure, yet most interventions target personal coping rather than workplace conditions. McKinsey's research across 15,000 employees in 15 countries identifies toxic workplace behavior, not workload, as the strongest predictor of burnout. Effective interventions redesign work systems by addressing role clarity, decision-making authority, and manager support structures.