Lead Time Chats

Wrapping up Series 1 of Lead Time Chats,  Jean Hsu, VPE at Range, chats with Marc Hedlund about the topic of sponsorship, and how to do it in a way that actually makes a difference.

Marc has been an engineering leader at companies such as Mailchimp, Skyliner, and Stripe. He also is a Director for Code2040, a non-profit that works to bring under-represented minorities into engineering and entrepreneurial roles in tech.

Jean and Marc discuss: 

• Ways to actually learn from and support under-indexed folks in tech that isn’t just performative.
• Not falling in the trap of basking in the attention of getting credit for diversity-related work, as a white man.
• As a member of a majority group, how and why to give away opportunities that come your way.
• Measuring your success by your outcomes, whether the actions are small (making an intro, writing a testimonial) or large (revamping a hiring process).

In Episode 11 of Lead Time Chats, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Harper Reed about how meetings can give everyone a voice in team meetings. Harper is currently CEO of Galactic. Formerly he was CEO of Modest, which was acquired by Paypal, and CTO of Obama for America.

Host note: Harper and I originally met at FooCamp in 2013, when he attended a FooCamp unconference session I led called How to Run Efficient Meetings. When we re-connected a few months ago, I discovered that after that one hour session 8 years ago, he revamped meetings at his company, and at every company he’s worked at since. We re-united to record a Lead Time Chat nerding out on meetings and to encourage more teams to implement these high-density, high-efficiency team meetings.

Jean and Harper discuss:

• How a 3 hour rambling meeting turned into a 30 minute high density meeting, with a bit of structure and facilitation
• The impact that highly efficient meetings have had on Harper's teams over the last 8 years
• How to create a meeting culture that's not dominated by the loudest people in the room
• Tips on how to get started with this type of structured check-in meeting

For more on the evolution of check-in meetings, check out this post:
Nine years of meeting efficiency: Lessons learned from Range's VP of Engineering

You can also find some highlights in this blog post:
Harper Reed on giving everyone a voice in team meetings 

In Episode 10 of Lead Time Chats, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Akhil Gupta — formerly VP of Engineering and GM at Dropbox — about how to navigate uncertainty when transitioning to higher impact roles. How do you know when you’re ready for that next role? How do you fill in gaps, and when do you take the leap?

Akhil started his career at Google, and was a Principal Engineer by the time he left for Dropbox. At Dropbox, he grew the infra org from just 10 engineers, and stepped into the Head of Infrastructure role, then VP of Engineering, and then GM and VP of Enterprise.

Jean and Akhil discuss:

• Akhil’s transition to management at Google — going from 0 to 40 direct reports!
• How to surround yourself with people who are rooting for your success, as you transition to greater impact roles
• The biggest challenges of transitioning from a functional leader to a cross-functional leader (i.e. VP of Engineering to GM of Enterprise at Dropbox)
• What relationship-building looks like when your org has thousands of people, and 1:1s won't scale!

In Episode 9 of Lead Time Chats, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Buffer and co-author of "The Holloway Guide to Remote Work," about supporting your team's mental health — and your own — in what feels like this final pandemic stretch.

Jean and Katie discuss: 

• The difficulty of sitting with a sense of hope, and how this last stretch can actually seem more intolerable than the last year in a pandemic
• Debugging when you’re feeling out of whack at work with the BICEPS framework
• Zoom fatigue and why Kate suggests you might consider lying down on a couch for your next 1:1!
• Work-appropriate ways to start conversations about mental health, including stoplight (red/yellow/green) check-ins
• How managers can ensure they have emotional support through external or internal peer or professional support.
• Unconventional ways to find social connection in a pandemic — i.e. internet friends!

Uma Chingunde (VP of Engineering at Render) and Jean Hsu (VP of Engineering at Range) chat candidly about onboarding into their first-time VP of Engineering roles — during the pandemic, with kids distance learning at home!

Jean and Uma discuss: 

• Directly reporting to the CEO as a VP of Engineering and how the role compares to other engineering leadership roles.
• Figuring out what we needed to know to ramp up and what to let go of
• The wide range of activities a VP of Engineering role can encompass, and doing many things we've never done before.
• The challenges of figuring out childcare logistics as we step into exec roles

In this episode, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with  Kaya Thomas, senior software engineer at Calm, about common challenges that early career engineers face.

Jean and Kaya chat about:

• Overcoming some of the stigmas of being an early career engineer
• How to negotiate your first full-time job offer, especially if you have more experience than average
• Ways that engineering managers can support early-and-mid stage engineers on their team
• Knowing when to leave your first engineering job!

In this episode, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Lara Hogan, author of Resilient Management, about how engineering managers can lead effectively a year into a global pandemic, even when they may be struggling.

Jean and Lara chat about:

• Leaning into one-way asynchronous communication as much as possible — especially for announcements and status updates that don’t require a back-and-forth
• Using Red-Yellow-Green check-ins in 1:1s and other situations to make it as lightweight as humanly possible to check in on your coworkers
• Making sure your oxygen mask is on first so that you can help others
• Defragging your calendar!

You can access Lara's Defrag Your Calendar worksheet here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qOXEOOYvxiA4LDgmEqK0hCYuJ44nf0Z8UM-j48kK4gw/edit

You can also try out Range for asynchronous check-ins that include red-yellow-green mood indicators. https://www.range.co​

In this episode, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Gergely Orosz — formerly at Uber, Skyscanner, and Skype — about the decision to go into management.

Jean and Gergely chat about:

• Why Gergely thought management was LAME - and resisted becoming a manager
• The huge contrast between becoming an “accidental manager” at a startup and becoming a manager at Uber
• Defining his leadership by having a list he had created of all the managers he wanted to avoid being
• How to support new managers and set them up for success
• How a checklist of management activities can create a tighter feedback loop for new managers
• The unexpected loneliness of being a manager

You can find the manager checklist Gergely used for new managers here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/checklist-for-first-time-managers

Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Juan Pablo Buriticá, most recently Head of LatAm Engineering at Stripe, about the common pitfalls engineering managers make at high-growth startups.

Jean and Juan Pablo discuss:

• The difference between being a manager at a high-growth startup vs. a larger, more established company
• The importance of understanding business needs in communicating about technical work
• Why you shouldn't just copy processes from other companies wholesale (like Spotify's matrix management)
• What it means to take a product approach to team processes

Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Cate Huston, Engineering Director at DuckDuckGo and raccoon enthusiast 🦝 about working with an external coach. 

Jean and Cate discuss:

• The role of a external coach compared to a manager
• The benefits of working with an external coach, especially over multiple jobs
• What a good fit feels like when looking for a coach
• How important an engineering background is (or isn't) when finding a coach
• When external coaching can actually harm a situation