TL; DR:
Effective Software Teams: Islands and Autonomy
It's Story Time!
I've been fortunate enough to manage engineering teams for roughly 12 years or so now. I've spent roughly 8 of those years as a startup being a technical manager not only leading the team but acting as an individual contributor in the team, and 4.5 years leading teams in Big Tech.
Being in early at a startup without strong software engineering leadership meant that we had to figure stuff out on our own. And I mean like... all of it. But we had an amazing founder/CTO and CEO who both gave us a lot of autonomy. They trusted us to get things done, and we did.
But it wasn't always easy (read: it was never easy) and we weren't always right (read: we were mostly wrong). But we constantly reflected on what was and wasn't working and the organization continued to evolve to drive towards improvements.
In the beginning, there wasn't a lot of variation across teams. We were just trying to get our footing. Over time, we'd come to learn that software engineering teams aren't one-size-fits-all.
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