Презентация на тему Moving Towards Structure

Moving Towards Structure

Camille Fournier
CTO, Rent the Runway
@skamille

My Story

Grew Rent the Runway’s engineering team from ~12 to 55 and counting

My Organizational Goals

To create a relatively meritocratic environment
To limit bias
To develop the leadership talent on my team
To hire a diverse workforce

Flat

We start flat, except of course for “the founders” or perhaps “the executives”
First you have 3 directs
Then 5
Then 10
Then… you start to break down

Time to add some structure!

Maybe I’ll hire a VP of Engineering!

How about a Tech Lead?

Great I’ll take my most senior/favorite dev and make them “Tech Lead” of some of the software

Perhaps a Director of Engineering

Not quite VP, not quite Tech Lead

Either way, your flat is dead

It was never true anyway, so it’s probably for the best

What does this new leader DO?

They make my life easier, of course!

No, really

I dunno. They handle…
Project Management!
People Management for part of the team!
All Management so I don’t have to!
Architecture!

If you don’t know, you’re set up to fail

Inevitably, this person is going to not read your mind exactly the way you wish they did
How do you know whether they’re incompetent or just confused?
How do you hold them accountable when you don’t know what they’re SUPPOSED to be doing?

“They’ll define the role themselves!”

If you hire someone who has done this job before and you have a shared context, that might be ok
IE, you both worked for Google, and you hired a senior manager at Google to be a Director of Engineering

A bad, but common, case

HR hires people with random titles based on what you said you needed to hire
“Frontend Engineer”
“Lead DevOps”
“iOS Specialist”
Pay people directly based on experience and whatever HR magic formula

Creating Clarity

The minute you create hierarchy, you need clarity

The Engineer Ladder: What

The list of job levels and the description of what goes in each of those levels
BEST PRACTICE: Above Senior Engineer, has a separate path for “Manager” vs “Individual Contributor”
A device to create clarity on your team and, if done well, limit bias

The Engineering Ladder: Why

Gives you a framework for hiring, paying, promoting
Forces you to become more clear in what you expect from people
Forces you to push that clarity into your hiring process and possibly hire better
Gives your team a growth path that helps them imagine their future with you

Creating an Engineering Ladder

Step 1: Ask your friends for theirs
Step 0: Make friends with people who have teams big enough to justify a ladder
Step 2: Be realistic about how it applies to your team
You may not need all the levels. You may need more levels.
Write it up. Get feedback. Rewrite it.
Share it.

I really don’t want to do this

Why not?

I’m afraid everyone will be clamoring for titles

They probably will when you roll this out BUT
This gives you the chance to make it clear to them what success looks like!
Give them something to work towards!
Give you both a framework for talking about how they are succeeding and how they are not

Expect some anxiety

Ladder rollouts do generate anxiety around upward mobility
On the flip side, with no ladder, people that care about upward mobility leave for a better title elsewhere

I’m afraid people will think they should be promoted who aren’t ready

Well then, that is why you need to be very clear about what you expect at each level
People will want to be promoted with or without a ladder, if you have any sort of leadership
They’ll also want bigger pay, more options, bigger projects
How do you determine who gets what?

I’m afraid titles will cause us to lose voices of others

It takes more than “no titles” to ensure that voices are actually heard

There are more paths to excellence than climbing a ladder!

True! And a ladder doesn’t take the place of other training
Embrace add-ons, badges, specialties

Premature optimization!

True. You probably don’t need to do this when you have only 1 non-founder/executive “leader”
But the minute you need 2…

WHAT ABOUT MY VIBE?

Your vibe is a function of your company values and culture
Do you know what your company values are?
It is very possible to design a ladder to reflect and reward those values

I’m the CTO, this isn’t my job!

Like hell it isn’t
If you are very lucky, you might find a VPE to do this for you
I would not hold my breath
This isn’t rocket science. If you can architect a system, you can architect a team.

Conclusion

Clarity Clarity Clarity
Clarity