How to measure Engineering Productivity?

By [email protected] | November 27, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

The fact that you clicked on this article tells me that you are leading/heading a Team, group or an entire Engineering function and most likely a fast-paced startup. Assume the following,

It was a regular weekday, and your CEO/CTO asked the most intriguing question.

Do we measure Engineering Productivity? How do we fare? What can we do to improve it?

Well, if your boss’s name is not Elon Musk or if you do not work for Twitter, you can still be saved. Go on and read through. I know it is a long read.

What is Engineering Productivity?

As with anything you’re trying to improve, it starts with measuring the right data. So, you can actually track the right metrics. This data will form the basis of your analysis and baseline. I strongly recommend you don’t change anything about your current engineering process before you can collect sex weeks’ worth of data about your processes. If you start working on processes, you could end up with a Survivorship Basis.

You should have sufficient historical data to make comparisons. On top of that, most teams work in sprints of two weeks, so six weeks of data allows you to collect data for at least three different sprints. This will give you the allowances for any spikes and eliminate any unusual stress or slack on the execution.

Next, you should make gradual changes to the engineering process to see what improves or impedes the value delivery. It’s ideal to only implement one change at a time, so you can see the effect of each change, with all other things being equal. (it never is :D)

For example, if your engineering squads suffer from significant technical debt, you may want to build an additional stub related to feature completion. Every time an engineer completes a new feature, they must document the new feature. This could mean describing the feature, how is it built, what are the outcomes, how it interacts with other functions and the reasoning behind the design decisions.

By continuously measuring engineering productivity metrics, you can determine if this change has positively impacted the developers’ productivity.

How Is Engineering Productivity Measured?

There are potentially 100s of metrics you can measure for an Engineering Org. Here are four key metrics that will help you to get started with measuring engineering productivity. And I have consciously excluded the Sprint Velocity.

4 Prime Directives of Engineering Metrics

1. The One Metrics to rule them all metrics – Cycle Time

Software development cycle time measures the amount of time from work started to work delivered. It is a metric “borrowed” from lean manufacturing, and it is one of the most important metrics for software development teams. In plain speak, cycle time measures the amount of time from the first commit to production release.

2. The Oracle of an Engineering Leader – Release Frequency

You should measure how often you deploy new changes to your customers (production). In addition, you can track deployments to various branches/instances, such as feature branches, hotfix branches, or QA branches. This data would show you how long it takes for a feature/fix to move through the different development stages. In addition, the Release Frequency reflects the throughput of your team. It’s a good stand-in replacement for Agile Velocity, so you don’t spook your Engineers and you are not blind as well.

3. The Guardrail – Number of Bugs

You should definitely track the number of bugs that your team has to resolve within 2 sprints of releasing a feature. This metric helps you to understand the quality of your code better. Higher-quality code should display fewer bugs after feature deployment.

While there are derivative and more evolved metrics like Defect Density, Mean Time to Detect (MTtD), Mean Time to Resolve (MTrR) and Code coverage, those onces makes sense after you’ve taken stock of and address the prime metric “ No: of Bugs” first.

If you want a more detailed list, methodology of QA metrics, refer the links given below.

4. What is your “Blocker” – Review to Merge Time (RTMT)

This may look like a zoom-in on “Cycle time” metric we discussed earlier. But, in fact it is very different. In fact, it is an interesting metric suggested by GitLab’s development handbook.

You should measure the time between asking for a pull request (PR) review and merging the PR. Ideally, you want to reduce the time a feature spends in the review state (or pending review state). A high RTMT prevents developers from progressing while they wait for feedback and encourages context-switching between different issues/features.

Arguably, Context-Switching is the highest productivity killer and should be avoided as much as possible.

So, why would you measure all these engineering productivity metrics?

Why Is Measuring Engineering Productivity Important?

When you’re a “fast-growing startup”, it’s important to keep an eye on engineering productivity. It happens that these startups favour growth through feature delivery at the cost of effectively scaling the engineering team and ensuring the team’s efficiency.

I hear your question.
But, why does my CEO/VP/MD not understand?
Answer is simple
Assume you have to manage multiple VP’s expectations and outcomes (Sales, Marketing, Support etc), Company’s OKRs, and investors (or) board, will you have more time to dedicate to Engineering Productivity?

In these cases, technical debt can quickly grow, which will slowly kill your team’s productivity. Technical debt can have many negative consequences:

More bugs for your team to fix
Lower code quality—not only bugs but also worse code design
Harder to debug code
Scalability issues
A decline in overall happiness and job satisfaction

To avoid all of these scenarios, you should measure the engineering team’s efficiency and avoid technical debt buildup. Avoiding these problems before they occur is an excellent Occam’s razor. But addressing them head-on will have a significant impact on your organisation, both materially and culturally.

In addition to preventing your team’s productivity from going down, the engineering productivity approach allows you to experiment with various approaches to try and improve throughput & efficiency.

So, the goal is to improve the engineering process itself. For example, introducing new tools or applying new techniques. Next, you can measure the impact of these changes on your team’s productivity.

In the next part, I will write down on how can measurement improve engineering productivity, Stay Tuned!

References:

Survivorship Bias.
1. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/survivorship-bias
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Cycle Time
1. https://tulip.co/blog/cycle-vs-lead-vs-takt
Release Frequency
1. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/DevOps-articles/Why-should-we-start-measuring-the-Release-Frequency/ba-p/1786430
Detailed QA Metrics to ponder (in addition to No: of bugs)
1. https://reqtest.com/agile-blog/agile-testing-metrics/
Review to Merge Time
1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/performance-indicators/#review-to-merge-time-rtmt
Context Switching
1. https://pacohq.com/blog/guide/the-high-price-of-context-switching-for-developers/

Why Engineers Hate your “Boiler Plate” Job Descriptions?

By [email protected] | August 21, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

How to Attract the most relevant applicants with great job postings

One of the main problems in SaaS/Software engineering hiring is the way job descriptions are written. While I knew this for some time (read years) The problem is, I was too lazy to change anything about it! That is until recently, one of the candidates I was interviewing for an Engineering Manager Role said this in our introductory call,

Me: Hope you’ve had a discussion with Ms.ABC (our HR) regarding the Roles and Responsibilities. If there are questions on it I can answer them, or we can get into the agenda.

Candidate: Yes I had a discussion with Ms. ABC. But, quite frankly it was your boilerplate JD. I’d actually want to understand what exactly I’d be doing. What will I be in charge of? What will I move?

Needless to say, I spent the next ~30 minutes walking through the current team structure, where he’d come in, what will he own, what the growth trajectory looks like etc. Ultimately, we did 2 more calls before both of us were satisfied that there are mutual synergies and went ahead. It made me reevaluate all of our Job Descriptions over the weekend and rewrote almost half of them to include factual details on projects, outcomes expected, tools available, glimpse of growth among other things.

After this, I asked the HR to send this “revised” JD to the candidates once again.

And the result was visible from Monday!

Either candidates that the HR thought super suited started dropping voluntarily from the process or candidates started expressing interest, doing more research on our stack, infra, product proposition and competitor benchmarking, before the call. Some even did a cold reach-out on Linkedin.

So, I wanted to share the small titbit here.

Why General Descriptions Don’t work?

Most Job descriptions barely resemble “specifications” at all, but feel more like generic stubs. Sort of like the equivalent of shopping for a car with as much details as “red and goes fast” or “black and built to last.”

It leaves too much open to the imagination for it to be a successful criterion to enable fitment. With criteria as broad as this you’ll end up spending an inordinate amount of time executing the search, since so many things appear to be a match. For me, Red and goes fast is always a 1971 Ford Mustang, for you it could be a 1998 Ferrari 365.

A Red Ford Mustang & a Ferrari 365, What do you Fancy?

A Black Dodge Ram and Jeep Cherokee, What do you Prefer?

The truth is that statements like the above — or its equivalent in engineering hiring — “Get me a backed dev with OOPS in Python/Java/Go with 5 years experience” — guarantee a similarly frustrating shopping experience. You’ve made it needlessly difficult for yourself and your HR/TA team to identify the specific talent you want. In this trite example you’ve indicated that you’re looking for a mid-level engineer that knows OOPS, but that basically includes everyone that ever graduated with a CS degree in the past 5 (to 10?) years. Surprisingly, many job “specifications” we see contain rarely any more info. These are the “Boiler Plate” Job Descriptions.

How did we find ourselves in this mess?

I understand why hiring managers do this. Sometimes they’re not exactly sure what they want — after all, it takes real time and effort to work out the specific vision for the role. But instead of acknowledging this and then solving the real problem (their own laziness), they delegate the JD writing to their Team/HR and it turns into generic tech JD. But the hiring manager is unfazed — “I’ll know the right candidate when I see them,” they say. Really? It could be true in some instances. Sometimes, we start with a Backend developer, then we come across a candidate with experience in building a full pipeline or a payment system. Then we expand the role to cover wider scope and evaluate against it. But generally, How will they know the right candidate if they can’t write down specifically what the candidate looks like?

Another reason for generic job specs is because a hiring manager is recruiting in a talent-constrained market (sound familiar?), and it feels like a smart move to cast as wide of a net as possible. Theoretically, one should be able to get more candidates into the top of the funnel this way, right?

Perhaps. Theoretically. But in my experience, this approach usually, and utterly, backfires. Here’s why:

Boiler Plate Job Descriptionsaren’t designed to appeal to any engineer in particular

In the current job market, engineers are faced with a wide variety of options from some amazing established companies and lots of seemingly “sexy” startups. (after “the great resignation”)

You need to take your opportunityto stand out! The more specific you are about the challenges a specific engineer will get to work in a specific role, the more traction you’ll get with (the right) candidates.

The idea is to make an engineer excited when you describe what they will “Get to do” in the first 12-15 months in the role.

Be very specific,

Talk about the product/modules they will own/drive/be part of,
Talk about the outcomes and metrics they will own and drive,
Talk about the toolchains & frameworks they’ll use (or get to choose),
Talk about What’s hard/challenging about the role, How are they a great fit.
The more details you can squeeze into the spec to help them visualize their role and the projects they’ll be working on the better.

Boiler Plate Job Descriptions don’t arm others to help you

Another bad thing about generic JD is that they don’t help others help you. Think of how much reach could you get by using everyone in your network as a recruiter. But in today’s scenario, “everyone else” is already asking them if they know any Python Engineers or React Developers or Go Engineers. Why would they help you? Because you’ve taken the time to get specific about what you want? Maybe.

Take a look at the following Job Description. Anyone in software engineering who had some deployment, infra-planning & communication seems to be a candidate for the role.

I recently got a request from a founder friend of mine to refer a Sr.Tech Lead/Engineering Manager for an early-stage startup. When I saw the JD, it was so generic it did not even have the primary stack on it. Assume sharing it from your handle. I politely declined to share it and asked for some more information and said will come back once he shares. (I believe he is very busy and hence hasn’t come back)

The bottomline is, Make them want to help you — give them a JD that’s so amazing, well-written, specific, (even entertaining) — that they can’t help but pass it on, post it, tell their friends about it, etc. If you make it stand out — you’ll get more attention from the folks that can help because you’ll arm them with something interesting & effective that they can use to reach out to their network.

Boiler Plate Job Descriptions don’t enable you to know what success looks like

This is a very simple point — see above — if you can’t explain what the ideal candidate looks like, how will you know when you’ve found them? The JD shared by my friend looks as vague as this.

Actually, his company was looking for a guy who could not just do Infrastructure Architecture. They wanted someone who has architected/built a cloud native SaaS application. His team has built the application and has no idea how to convert it to truly cloud native format to scale without breaking the bank!

The main idea here is about not being willing to settle for less. I realise the market is tough right now, and maybe you’ll need to make compromises. But do you want to start at the wrong end of the pool? When you go out the door with a generic description, you preemptively give up the battle. If you need to settle — fine! — but know exactly what points you’re compromising on.

The larger problem is that if you don’t know what the best candidate really looks like then the other people involved in making a decision likely don’t know what s/he looks like either. A well-defined, specific description of the role enables everyone involved in the interviewing and hiring process to be on the same proverbial page.

Now go get started!

Fixing your job descriptions will take some work(as I found out). To get to specifics, you’ll need to dig in and make additional efforts. You might also need to do some retraining in your organization and teach others these principles, too.

But when you get through the hard work, your postings will turn into valuable weapons that will,

a.) appeal to the engineers you want to reach,

b.) enable others to help you expand your outreach, and

c.) get your hiring team on the same page to quickly come to the right decision.

If you’re curious to see what roles we currently hire for, we have a lot of openings in Product, Design and Engineering:

It ranges from Kubernetes Architect, React Native Mobile Dev, Sr.Backend Dev, Tech Lead-Mobile Technologies, Engineering Managers, Associate Product managers, Product Managers etc.

More details can be had at https://angel.co/company/itilite-1/jobs or you can ping me 🙂

Do you really need a Product Manager for a successful Product?

By [email protected] | August 15, 2022 | Comments 0 Comment

This post is a summary of a series of “Mentoring” and “Advisory” calls I did with some early stage startups, over the past 6 months. Most of the time, one of the founder ideates, one builds/leads the build. But, they want to go fast and think they need a Product Manager. Unfortunately, most of them don’t need a Product Manager. If you are at a similar juncture, read on to find out more..

The title is a controversial question, I know!

The State of Product Management:

Off lately, Product Managers have to wear too many hats, leaving the role vague and blurring the boundaries of their area of responsibility. This ultimately leads to diminishing the value of the product manager’s core functions. Product Management is a strategic, cross-functional, front-line role that brings great value to the product and business.

But, it commonly gets abused by many fast-paced organisations expecting product managers to fill in the gaps in various disciplines. This may be process, pricing, unit-economics, partnerships, product-marketing to name a few. They can definitely do that due to their broad professional background.

Admittedly, product managers do have a broad background, otherwise they would have a hard time to be able to effectively collaborate with the stakeholders, lead the product and make the informed decisions. But this definitely should not end up with the product managers becoming de-facto “deciders” or “doers” originally intended to be done by other roles in other functions.

How do you decide if you need a Product Manager or Not?

Like any problem, there are two approaches, if an intellectual debate is more to your taste, continue reading on. If it is more of a rational “doer” approach, head straight down to it.

Intellectual Approach

Ask yourselves some questions:

If you are a founder or a leader or a decision maker, before hiring a Product Manager, question yourself as to your expectations from the product manager.

Think hard on what you want them to do:

What do you want your new product manager to change/fix in your organization? What is it that you are unable to do?
Do you not already have the in-house expertise that would help you address the current issues?

If you are still unsure about whether or not you need a product manager “in the house”,

I recommend that you go through this checklist and answer Yes/No to each of its questions:

Do you have a vision for your product? Do you believe it is aligned with the market needs?
Are you sure you are building the right product — the one that delivers value to your target audience?
Do you have a direction for your product? A long-term and a short-term roadmap?
Till now, have you been able to execute your roadmap without major distractions?
Are you capable of maintaining the strategic focus across all levels of the organization?
Do you know your competitors and what they have on the game? Proposition, not features.
Do you have an established feedback loop with your clients? (Not the feature request types)
Do you mostly base your decisions on evidence/data?
Do you find it easy to say “No” to various stakeholders from various functions while hearing their “suggestions” and “inputs” and explain them why what they think is not the “most” right thing?

If you answered “No” to more than 4 questions, you probably need a Product Manager, No doubt in that.

But the reality is, that hiring a highly capable Product Manager won’t magically change the DNA of your organisation. I have seen multiple orgs regress into a worser situation than before. Because, the person responsibl has delegated the product decisions to that Product manager with a shiny belt, without enabling/empowering him/her.

The result

Rational Approach

If you’re a CEO, founder, or senior leader considering hiring a PM, check this list and see if you need one. Lets play a guess and eliminate game.

If you can see your organisation is reflected in this article, don’t bother hiring a PM — save some money and hire a cheaper role. You would also spare a PM some misery.

Don’t bother hiring a PM…

If you have a fixed idea of what to build

You already know what you want to build, you just need somebody to build it. You’ve hired some engineers. You need somebody to gather the requirements from you and the team, and maybe manage the back-and-forth of different requirements from many stakeholders. This person then passes the requirements along to the engineers and makes sure they deliver on time.

You need a Project Manager, not a Product Manager.

If your Sales team or clients are dictating what to build

You have a handful of big clients and you’re ready to bend over backwards to deliver what they need, including building custom features. Your Sales team knows best what to build, surely, as they’re the ones talking to the customers all the time. Now it’s just a matter of writing the stories and prioritising them.

You need a Delivery Manager, not a Product Manager

If they won’t have access to your customers

You have some very-important-people as customers and their time is precious. You don’t want the new person you just hired to talk to them directly — may be they will say something untoward?

I don’t know what you need, but you certainly don’t need a Product Manager.

If you’re not ready to delegate authority

You know that product managers should be given a problem to solve, not a feature to build. Heck, you were probably a Product person yourself, who has now set up your own startup. You have the vision and the strategy and you know exactly how to get there…

What’s left for the Product Managers to do, then? Maybe hire an Engineering Manager or a Tech Lead?

If you see technology as a support function

An easy way to assess this: How much of your company budget is dedicated for product/technology/innovation? If you’re not willing to invest significant resources to staff the product/technology team properly, they’ll be left firefighting all year long.

Don’t hire a Product Manager — yet. Assess how you see technology plays a role in your company’s vision. Set aside a proper budget, hire a strong CTO or CPO, and let them build their team. Only do that if you’re willing to listen to them though — or don’t bother doing it at all.

In Sum and summary, Hire a Product Manager only if you believe you can delegate authority, and can come to a rational decision based on data. If not, hire a Project Manager, Engineering Manager or any of the other roles.

Business Value delivery by Engineering Teams in StartUps – Part 1

By [email protected] | October 17, 2021 | Comments 2 comments

In this multi-part post, I will try to articulate my view on the importance of business value and its delivery by engineering teams. While most of this is written from the view of a StartUp, some elements of an established organisation are also used.

Part 1: Defining Business Value & Role of Leadership in it.

Business value is a concept that can mean multiple things to multiple people and the tricky part is all of them could potentially be valid. A product manager may value a long list of features that his/her customers have demanded for months. Another Product Manager working with internal teams to improve efficiency (revenue) will value the enhancements the accounting or support team was after. While the support manager may value a more stable product to keep the customers, s/he deals with happy.

Business value & impacts are a difficult thing to define and deliver, while it is even more difficult to measure.A collaborative effort is required to define and deliver business value, with consideration needed to ensure all voices are heard.

While most of what I will be covering in this article is typically the purview of product management, I have learned that engineering leaders have a critical role to play in this space. (Will write more on that in the next part.)

Engineering leaders bring product development experience and technical expertise to the table to provide a crucial element to the delivery of business value which I will try and explain in this article.

What is Business Value?

I would define “Business value” as any improvements to systems, processes or people that augment the products or the ability to deliver products or services to the customers, thereby increasing the revenue or experience or both. No two companies will have the same definition of business value. Forget two different companies, a company in its 5th year will have a very different perception of value to its first year. This is due to their products and customers being different and requiring different elements to add value. One company may find value in the ability to build out its new product offering quickly. While another may find value in responding to customer support requests in a timely manner.

Due to the rapid changes around us, the things that businesses value changes often. Companies often face new challenges that require a quick response.

“Be agile, be nimble” is the key phrase.

These challenges can come in the form of new product features released by competitors, or a specific feature request by a key customer, or changes in the market that render the current product/feature obsolete. Business needs or desires, therefore change just as quickly as any of these external changes.

You have probably worked for a company that comes to the engineering team with new requirements, seemingly daily?

It is not because they cannot make up their mind; It is in response to the changing business needs. This changing goalpost is one of the main reasons that Agile development practices have taken precedence from more traditional waterfall methodologies for software development.

Velocity is everything, a report by McKinsey on how Developer Velocity fuels Business Performance will give more insights on this. A snapshot from the report is below.

Why is business value important?

Reacting to change and delivering business value with haste is a crucial area of importance for modern businesses. All companies exist for a purpose. The majority of companies exist to return a profit for their owners (individuals or shareholders), while some companies exist to provide a social service. The critical thing to note is that they all exist to fulfil a specific purpose which guides their definition of business value.

No matter the company large or small, if they stop innovating, and their products or services stop being relevant to society at large and market in particular, that company will whiter and eventually die.

Kodak is a prime example of this occurring in recent history. In today’s world, IT, whether it be hardware or software, is the largest driver of business value. It is therefore critical that the software engineering teams keep delivering the things that the business need to fuel their innovation.

We, as engineers, are not employed to just build that shiney app in the latest technologies, but to deliver our contribution in support of the business purpose (If not drive it!)

The importance of Engineering Leadership in Delivering Business Value

An engineering leader is, of course, a People Leader, and s/he is also responsible for the Execution, both technology and delivery of the engineering team. However there is a third dimension which often goes unrecognised, is that great engineering executives must also be great Business Leaders; they help drive alignment with other leadership/executives and shape the strategy and direction of the business itself.

It is this underutilised/forgotten element which I will try to detail here.

A People Leader & an Execution Champion:

Engineering leadership is often naively thought of as being simply a great Architect or Engineer or a Manager. But most of you already know it’s more than that. Team leadership will involve some combination of team building, culture, leadership development, and performance management.

For detailed coverage on Engineering Leadership – Please checkout my Previous Post

Most of this responsibilities will be bang in the middle of the comfort-zone of a rising Engineering Leader. But one of the hardest things for most engineering leaders as we scale is, to continue having an accurate forecast of when products and features will be delivered – what the business always asks for.

That is partially because this bleeds into the third, and the least recognised dimension of engineering leadership.

The Missing Sauce: A Business Strategist

Engineering leadership isn’t just about delivering products faster, or making engineers more productive. It’s about guiding the team in the same direction as the business, about continuously improving, and it’s about being the voice of engineering as a part of the decision-making process of the executive team. Of course, these are all dependent on our ability to understand the work our engineering teams are doing and how it aligns to business goals.

The third dimension – Business Alignment – is often overlooked or made difficult by other executives, but is absolutely necessary for the management of a successful engineering org. This is the strategic practice of engineering management, and all operational decisions depend on it. Business alignment means ensuring your organization is focused on the right projects that align with the business’s goals.

The Product org can detail/design and Engineering org can build as many features as they can agree on, but what/how does it matter, if they do not align with the business objectives or goals? Business alignment involves the right allocation of resources that supports business objectives, and helping to drive those business decisions of which projects are strategically important. (at itilite, this is always the First Principle)

How do we deliver business value?

So how do we actually deliver business value? Business value isn’t created by a soloist delivering a virtuoso performance, but a collaboration of the business, product, engineering and customer success teams working together to realise a shared vision.

Below are the five ways this can take place; together, these provide a roadmap for delivering business value;

Define systems development strategy
Help business define requirements
Visualise the work and prioritise
Schedule and communicate delivery
Deliver value often and get feedback

I will try to articulate through each of these one at a time and dig into a little more detail in Part 2 of this article.

Engineering Leadership in Start-Ups: Engineering Manager, Director, VP of Engineering.

By [email protected] | January 30, 2021 | Comments 1 comment

This post is partly the result of my discussions with our People practice leader and talent acquisition executive. ITILITE is at a phase of growth, where are looking for more engineering & product management bandwidth. And I had to think hard to write the various Job-Descriptions. So, I have tried to generalise it using my experiences from the last 2-3 stints. In case you’re interested to explore an Engineering Management role with ITILITE, please get in touch with me or write to careers{at}itilite.com

Engineering Leadership

As apps are becoming increasingly omnipresent and in most cases, there is a startup behind them. Engineers make up to 70% of a tech startup’s workforce, there is an increasing need for managers who look after those developers. As a result, there is a rise in the number of engineering managers in recent years. Engineering managers are responsible for delivery teams that develop these “Apps”. The following is a very generalised version of what you could do in these roles and a possible career progression.

Engineer to Tech Lead/Lead Developer

The first step in your journey from an Individual Contributor(IC) to a management role. This could be a mix of people management, delivery management, process management etc, depending on the context of your organisation. In most organisations, it is a “technical mentorship” role with some aspects of people management, quality and delivery ownership.

Most Tech Leads are natural technical leaders. They are great engineers on their own, they were well respected by the engineers around them, they worked reasonably well with the team, they understood how the product/module was designed, built and shipped, they had a decent sense for making the right kinds of product tradeoffs and they were willing to do just enough project management and people development to keep the team/project humming along.

In this role,

Most TLs would retain some independent deliverables in addition to anchoring and owning the deliveries of their team.
Most of the team still works on the same module/feature or sub-system
They do code & design reviews, suggest changes and have the final say for their modules.
Together with the Product Managers, they “own” the feature/module.

We at itilite, call them Engineering Owners, much like Product Owners

Tech Lead to Engineering Managers

The next step in the Engineering Manager. In this role, you will be “Managing” a collection of inter-related modules/projects. In this role, the focus on timely delivery, people management and quality are higher than technical design & architecture. But, you are very much an Engineer and may be required to occasionally write quick hacks, frameworks for your developers to build atop.

The main difference is you will be responsible for the delivery of multiple projects in a related area. You will be expected to optimise the resources (Devs, Testers, etc.) available with you to maximise the outputs of your group, across multiple projects/modules

In this role, you’d be

Expected to actively engage with the Product Management teams to define what needs to be built
Defining how you will measure the outcomes of what your team is building and quantify the outcomes with metrics
Ensuring quality, getting stakeholder alignment and signoffs
Macromanage the overall deliverables of your group

The Pivot – Tech, Product, Solution Architect

The next step in your career gives you two options. One with people management, P&L accountability and other a purely technical role. If you’re planning for a pureplay technical role, some organisations have Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer etc. In essence, they are mostly a combination of Tech Lead+Architect type roles. Depending on your seniority/tenure and organisational context, you may be reporting to an Engineering/Delivery Manager, Director/VP or the CTO. In this rolw,

You will work closely with Engineering Managers, Quality Assurance leads/managers and Product Owners to design the system architecture, define the performance baselines
You will work with Tech Leads and Sr.Devs to drive the performance, redundancy, scalability among other stuff.
You will be called into discussions/decide when the team can’t reach consensus on engineering choices

Engineering Manager to Director of Engineering

A Director of Engineering role is completely different. You now have multiple leads+managers, likely multiple projects within a general focus area of the organisation. This will mean there will be way more individual deliverables and project milestones than you can track in detail on a regular basis. Now you have to manage both people and projects “from the outside” rather than “from the inside”. You’ll likely start appreciating the metrics and dashboards, as they will help you in tracking those multiple projects and deadlines, schedules, overruns etc.

You have to make sure that your managers and leads are managing their resources appropriately and support them in their effort rather than managing individual contributors and projects directly.

Lots of great technical leaders have difficulty making this transition.

While being an engineering lead/manager is certainly managing, it’s type of managing from “within the project” is much easier than “managing from outside the project” and as a director, you almost always have to manage multiple people and projects “from the outside”.

Also, as a director, you will be responsible for a number of aspects of the culture, such us

What kind of people are you hiring, setting responsibilities and workload expectations,
What is the team(s) doing for fun, how do they interact with other functions
What kinds of performance is rewarded/encouraged vs punished/discouraged.

Now, moving to some serious responsibilities, you may be the first major line of responsibility for what to do when things does not work,

an employee not working out,
a project falling behind,
a project not meeting it’s objectives,
hiring not happening in time, etc…

While most of these things are the direct responsibility of the engineering manager, the engineering manager is usually not left to face these issues alone, they work on it with the director and the director is expected to guide the process to the right decision/outcome.

I’ve seen people who were great technical leaders and good engineering managers who did not enjoy being a director at all (or weren’t as good at it) because it was a whole different type of managing bordering the administration.

Director to Vice-President

The VP of Engineering is the executive responsible for all of engineering. Development, Quality, DevOps and partly to Security and Product Management as well. While both the engineering manager and director of engineering have managers who themselves have likely been engineering managers and directors before, the VP may work for the CEO (in an early stage Startup or a smaller company) who has never been a VP of Engineering before.

A large company may have multiple levels of VPs, but in most cases, you work for someone who hasn’t been a VP of Engineering or doesn’t actually know how to do your job. This means, there simply is no first-hand experience from your Manager, that you can rely on to solve your problem. The first time you step into that role and realize that, it’s a sobering thought. You’re a pretty much on your own to figure things out. Not only are you completely responsible for everything that happens in the engineering organization, but when things aren’t going right, there’s pretty much no help from anywhere else. You and your team have to figure it out by yourselves. Many successful VPs eventually come to like this autonomy, but it can be a big adjustment when moving from director to VP.

At the director level, you can always go to your VP for help and consulting on difficult issues and they can and should help you a lot. At the VP level, you may consult with the executive team or the CEO on some big decisions, but you’re more likely talking to them about larger tradeoffs that affect other parts of the company, not how you solve issues within your team.

As a VP, you are primarily responsible for setting up processes and procedures for your organization to make it productive:

Team/Project tools such as bug system, project tracking, source code management, versioning, build system, etc.
Defining/improving processes to track, monitor and report on projects.
Defining processes to deal with projects that run into trouble.
Hiring: How you hire? What kind of people do you hire? how do you maintain the quality of new hire?
Firing: When someone isn’t working out, how do you fix it: reassignment, training, performance plan, transfer, firing?
Training: How does your team get the training they might need, it could be hard-skills, soft-skills or managerial
Rewards: How do you reward your top individual contributors and for your top managers?

You may be part of the Leadership “Council” or participate regularly in business discussions that may or may not concern your department directly. In a startup, you are often “the” technical representative on exec staff. You help craft the strategy of the business. You are relied upon for technical direction of the company (sometimes with the help of a CTO).

As a VP, you are expected to understand many important aspects of other departments, what is important to other departments and how your department serves or interacts with or depends upon other departments. Two classic example might be,

Sales depending upon certain product features/capabilities being delivered in a given timeframe to be able to convert a prospect.
Customer success depending upon certain product fixes being delivered in a given timeframe.

As a VP, you will participate in the setting of these timeframes and balancing these against all the other things your department is being tasked to do.

—

As you can see, Engineering Management/Leadership is a very interesting career option. We have multiple opening across Product and Engineering functions at ITILITE. Please see if any of these roles interest you.

Building a Log-Management & Analytics Solution for Your StartUp

By [email protected] | November 5, 2019 | Comments 0 Comment

Building a Log-Management & Analytics Solution for Your StartUp

Background:

As described in an earlier post, I run the Engineering at an early stage #traveltech #startup called Itilite. So, one of my responsibility is to architect, build and manage the cloud infrastructure for the company. Even though I have had designed/built and maintained the cloud infrastructure in my previous roles, this one was really challenging and interesting. Due in part to the fact, that the organisation is a high growth #traveltech startup and hence,

The architecture landscape is still evolving,
Performance criteria for the previous month look like the minimum acceptable criteria the next
The sheer volume of user-growth, growth of traffic-per-user
Addition of partner inventories which increases the capacity by an order of magnitude

And several others. Somewhere down the lane, after the infrastructure, code-pipeline and CI is set-up, you reach a point where managing (read: trigger intervention, analysis, storage, archival, retention) logs across several set of infrastructure clusters like development/testing, staging and production becomes a bit of an overkill.

Enter Log Management & Analytics

Having worked up from a simple tail/multitail to Graylog-aggregation of 18 server logs, including App-servers, Database servers, API-endpoints and everything in between. But, as my honoured colleague (former) Mr.Naveen Venkat (CPO of Zarget) used to mention in my days with Zarget, There are no “Go-To” persons in a start-up. You “Go-Figure” yourself!

There is definitely no “One size fits all” solution and especially, in a Start-up environment, you are always running behind Features, Timelines or Customers (scope, timeline, or cost in conventional PMI model).

So, After some due research to account for the recent advances in Logstash and Beats. I narrowed down on the possible contenders that can power our little log management system. They are,

ELK Stack — Build it from scratch, but have flexibility.
Graylog — Out of the box functionality, but you may have to tune up individual components to suit your needs.
Fluentd — Entirely new log-management paradigm, interesting and we explored it a bit.

(I did not consider anything exotic or involves us paying (in future) anything more than what we pay for it in first year. So, some great tools like splunk, nagios, logpacker, logrythm were not considered)

Evaluation Process:

I wrote an Ansible script to create a replica environment and pull in the necessary configurations. And used previously written load-test job to simulate a typical work hour. This configuration was used for each of the frameworks/tools considered.

I started experimenting with Graylog, due to familiarity with the tool. Configured it the best way, I felt appropriate at that point in time.

Slight setback:

However, the collector I had used (Sidecar with Filebeat) had a major problem in sending files over 255KB and the interval was less than 5 secs. And the packets that are to be sent to the Elasticsearch never made it. And the pile-up caused a major issue for application stability.

One of the main use-case for us is to ingest XML/JSON data from multiple sources. (We run a polynomial regression across multiple sources, and use the nth derivatives to do further business operations). Our architecture had accounted for several things, but by design, we used to hit momentary peaks in CPU utilisation for the “Merges”. And all of these were “NICE” loads.

When the daily logs you need to export is in upwards of 5GB for an app (JSON logs), add multiple APIs and some micro-services application logs, web-server, load-balancers, CI (Jenkins), database-query-log, bin-log, redis and … yes, you get the point?

(())Upon further investigation, The sidecar collector was actually not the culprit. Our architecture had accounted for several things, but by design, we used to hit momentary peaks in CPU utilisation for the “Merges”. And all of these were “NICE” loads! (in our defence)

So, once the CPU hit 100% mark, sidecar started behaving very differently. But, ultimately fixed it with a patched version of sidecar and actually shifting to NXLog.

Experiment with the ELK is a different beast in itself, as provisioning and configuring took a lot more time than I was comfortable with. So, switched to AWS “Packaged Service” . We deployed the ES domain in AWS, fired up a couple of Kibana and Logstash instances and connected them (after what appeard to be forever), it was a charm. Was able to get all information required in Kibana. One down-side is that you need to plan the Elastic Search indices according to how your log sources will grow. For us, it was impractical.

Fluentd was an excellent platform for normalising your logs, but then it also depended on Kibana/ES for the ultimate analysis frontend.

So, finally we settled down to good old Graylog.

Advantages of Graylog

The tool perfectly fit into our workflow and evolving environment:

Graylog is a free & open-source software. — So we wont have pay now or in future.
Its trigger actions and notifications are a good compliment to Graylog monitoring, just a bit deeper!
With error stack traces received from Graylog, engineers understand the context of any issue in the source code. This saves time and efforts for debugging/troubleshooting and bug fixing.
The tool has a powerful search syntax, so it is easy to find exactly what you are looking for, even if you have terabytes of log data. The search queries could be saved. For really complex scenarios, you could write an ElasticSearch query and save it in the dashboard as a function.
Graylog offers an archiving functionality, so everything older than 30 days could be stored on slow storage and re-imported into Graylog when such a need appears (for example, when the dev team need to investigate a certain event from the past).
Java, Python & Ruby applications could be easily connected with Graylog as there is an out-of-box library for this.

#logmanagement #analytics #startup #hustle #opensource #graylog #elk

DevOps Post Series : 1, How to install and configure LAMP on AWS EC2

By [email protected] | November 7, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

In this #DevOps centric series of blog posts, I will write about some of the interesting yet common problems and their solutions or quick guides and how-tos. This is the result of setting up a new #Datacenter setup for the #Startup I am working.

In this post, I will assume that you have already launched an EC2 instance type with the operating system of your choice. Generally, Amazon Linux (based on RedHat/CentOS) or Ubuntu is the preferred OS of choice. In case you prefer an exotic flavour of Linux, which does not support either the rpm/yum(RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/AMI) or apt (Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives) this article may not be of much use to you.

Connect to your instance – Use the private key you downloaded during the ec2 launch.
1. If you’re in Linux or Mac – use the following by replacing it with your private key name and instance’s public dns – ssh -i "loginserver."[email protected]
2. If you’ve launched an Amazon Linux, use “ec2-user” instead of “root”
3. If you’ve launched an Ubuntu Linux, use “ubuntu” instead of “root”
4. another important thing is to ensure that the private key has 0400 privilege and it is “owned” by the “User” as who you’ll execute the ssh connection.
Update your package manager
1. Amazon Linux : sudo yum update
2. Ubuntu Linux: sudo apt-get update
Tools & Utils (Optional/Personal Preference) I normally prefer to have a couple of tools installed in the server for quick-hacks/edits, monitoring etc.
1. Amazon Linux :sudo yum install -y mc nano tree multitail git lynx
2. Ubuntu Linux: sudo apt-get -y mc nano tree multitail git lynx
  1. For details on the above-mentioned tools, refer the bottom of the article.
LAMP Server
1. Amazon Linux :sudo yum install -y httpd24 php70 mysql56-server php70-mysqlnd mysql56-client
2. Ubuntu Linux: sudo apt-get install mysql-client-core-5.6 mysql-server-core-5.6 apache2 php libapache2-mod-php php-mcrypt php-mysql
  1. Your operating system will start to download and install the specified software, as for MySQL, you will be prompted for a root password. After installation, I strongly recommend you to run mysql_secure_installation and proceed with the onscreen instructions.
  2. Some of the critical things to do are remove the “test” db, remove access to "root"@"%", others are optional.
  3. The optional steps are,
    1. remove the anonymous user accounts.
    2. disable the remote root login.
    3. reload the privilege tables and save your changes.
Configuration and other dependencies
1. Amazon Linux :
```
sudo yum install php70-mbstring.x86_64 php70-zip.x86_64 composer node -y
```
2. Ubuntu replace yum install with apt0get install

Finally, restart the services and off you go. You have successfully installed LAMP server in EC2. Now, go to your browser and enter the publicDNS of the ec2 instance and you should be able to see the default apache page. If you get either a timeout or not found error, it may mean you have to configure the security group accordingly. You should “ALLOW” port 80/443 (http/Https) in the security group.