LeadDev Austin 2019

When you're a first-time leader it's hard to transition from being a problem solver to leading a team to solve problems. It's often tempting to step in and solve problems for your team.

Investing in your customer success team is high leverage. The more knowledgeable your team is, the more effective it can be at investigating, diagnosing and triaging customer issues.

In a fast-growing, agile organization, teams are usually encouraged to self-organize. Equipped with the guiding principles such as fast iteration and frequent feedback loop with the customers, we entrust the most valuable asset, people, to make informed decisions.

Navigating any new personal scenario while leading a team can be extremely challenging, but last summer I found myself nine months pregnant and leading our engineering organization through an acquisition while preparing for the birth of my son. On the day he was born, I got the news that the acquisition had been finalized.

As more companies offer longer parental leaves and other leaves of absence, managers and their teams are learning how to handle them successfully.

InVision started as a small startup several years ago with tens of engineers, small teams working independently as velocity was paramount. But as InVision grew to hundreds of engineers, all fully remote, we realized that this independence was actually slowing us down - teams resolving the same problems, inconsistent metrics, etc.

You wouldn’t hire a senior developer without giving them any support or possibilities for growth, would you? Of course not!

Creating relationships with the individual humans on your distributed team is difficult since you rarely get to see them in person! But a team is much less likely to be effective and successful without a foundation of interpersonal relationships and trust.

After years—even decades—on the existing legacy mainframe, we pitched a plan to migrate a company to a new, microservices-based architecture. Convincing management seemed easy, but now we have to deliver: Take the years-old legacy system and break it apart into smaller services and systems we can actually maintain.

Corporate Culture is an ecosystem and diversity is the air we breathe. As such, how a project/delivery team cultivates its culture impacts the entire project, client relations and end-user experience.