Anton Drukh’s Post

חברות וחברים, זה קורה היום בערב! ניר ואני נספר על החוויה של כל אחד מאיתנו בתקופה הראשונה בחברה, תבואו לשאול שאלות :)

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at not one, but two panels! Symbol organized the amazing #Buildcon, a conference for #Builders and early start-up employees. I got the opportunity to speak about my early days at Snyk and what actually mattered in hindsight. Several folks approached me after the talks to dive deeper on things I said and how they can be relevant. I'll repeat some of these points in the comments, so take a look below. Thank you Racheli Kogan and Maayan Gottlieb for the opportunity to share my experience with the wonderful audience!

Starting a company is hard, right? Wait till you need to scale and reinvent it as the business grows! I'm very excited to speak on this topic next week at Buildcon (by Symbol). Among great professionals - Maya Mandel, Wiz 👋🏻, Motti B. and Maayan Gottlieb - I'll get to share some of my learnings from the first days, weeks and months at Snyk.

מתרגש להזמין אתכן ואתכם לבוא ולשמוע קצת על החוויות של Nir Glikman ושלי בהקמה וניהול של ארגוני פיתוח. נדבר על החלטות טכנולוגיות ואנושיות, ומה שביניהן. ותודה ל-MonkeyTech האלופים על האירוח!

In April, we're about to kick off the first 2024 Downleft pod for Tech Executives, with just 2 more seats available. A group of 10 professional leaders will meet monthly to discuss their main challenges, and learn from one another. Some homogeneity in the group keeps people relevant to one another. We have seasoned leaders, experienced managers of managers, all coming from fast-paced companies. But the true power of the pod is in its heterogeneity. To give everyone broad perspectives, we have both co-founders and salaried employees; people who have climbed the ladder in their company and those hired into their current leadership position; and more! Having facilitated 5 such pods so far, I'm very excited towards this new cohort. If you want to join us, the time is now! #downleft #peersupport #newbeginnings2024

Technical leadership. Your organization likely has Tech Leads, Architects, Principal Engineers or a similar role. And if not, you probably heard about these titles, wondering if and when you would also need them. What problem do these roles solve, and what is the best way to support people in these roles? One way in which your organization grows is by extending the boundaries of feasibility. What was unthinkable a short while ago, can now be one product release away. Technical Leadership allows this growth by pushing for innovation, staying ahead of the curve on technology, and not slowing down over past decisions. I see two common failure modes when implementing this vision in reality. The first one is under-doing it. You pick the most innovative and experienced engineer on your team, and give them the Tech Lead title. They are now responsible for technical leadership, right? What usually follows is that this person gets a lot of expectation for the change in their day to day, with little to show for it. They still lead complex feature development, as they used to. They are also the first to respond to production issues involving their team. Is this technical leadership? I don't think so. The other failure mode is over-doing it. You may decide that to truly focus on innovation, people in your org must be safeguarded from the demands of product development. You create an 'innovation' or 'architecture' team, and at first it feels right. But with time, people on such teams struggle to connect their work to company impact. You find yourself justifying the existence of this team, struggling to show how their impact is enabling the company's success. The solution that worked well for me was to position the technical leadership role (we called it a Staff Engineer) on the same organizational level as an Engineering Manager. Staff Engineers were mainly responsible for Technical Roadmaps. Just as the Product Roadmap is focused on increasing the product value for its users, the Technical Roadmap is focused on increasing the 'value' of the engineers working on the product. We kept a ratio of one Staff Engineer for every two teams. The Staff Engineer would chart the Technical Roadmap for their two teams, and, with the teams' help, make progress along this roadmap. The positioning of these roles outside of teams supports a clear career progression for Senior Engineers. The cohesion with specific teams keeps these roles accountable to their expected impact on the Engineers around them. #technicalleadership #engineeringmanagement #organisationaldevelopment

Career ladders. Some of us work in organizations that don't yet have titles or levels defined. Others join an organization that already has clear career ladders. Rarely do we get the chance to lead our own organization from one state to the other. Identifying the right timing to introduce a career ladder is just as important as the execution of this change. Working with clients, I see a lot of hesitation in embracing the need for a career ladder - it usually feels like it's too early for such a move. Maybe some important flexibility will be lost if we decide on who is more senior, or what is generally expected of our roles. But more often than not, this coveted flexibility is quite costly to your organization. At Snyk, with around 50 people in Engineering, recognizing our Engineers' individual impact across the org became hard. It was even harder for our Engineers to know how to grow to the next professional level. Managers found it difficult to vet the right level of seniority when hiring new talent. If you relate to these challenges in your org (an engagement survey can help surface them), a career ladder might be the right solution. Here are a few ideas to consider as you begin your org's leveling journey: - Focus your expectations - what do you want the career ladder to do for your org? Pick two or three main changes you want to achieve, and use them to keep the process from spiraling out. - Involve your management team early on. Give them as much presence as possible in the process. Your leadership should extend to their active participation. Beware of having them feel like they are instruments in solving a problem that only you see. - Go for the maximal ROI - choose the most impactful change with the smallest amount of work involved. At Snyk, the first step in our career ladder was the distinction between Software Engineers and Senior Software Engineers. This was easier to execute, and taught us a lot towards the steps that came later. - Prepare for difficult conversations. You may surface gaps in how a team member sees their impact compared to the view of their manager . Doing so as part of a career laddering process can help you reach constructive outcomes. - Think of the day after the great reveal. Using the new role definitions should make hiring and promotions easier. Everyone on your team should expect that. #leadership #careerladder #growth

Org structure. In the early days of a start-up, the Engineering team is flat. There is no need for hierarchy, and everyone knows everything that is going on. But after a while, you get the feeling that your team is not as efficient as it used to be. Keeping everyone up to date is more tasking than ever, and no longer seems to be as beneficial as before. It's time to split into smaller teams, but how? The main concern is real - by making it easier to operate within a smaller team, you will also make cross-team collaboration harder. A lot is at stake with this leadership decision you are about to make in your growing organization. Diving into this topic with my clients, I ask them to reflect on their org. First, we point out what works really well in their organization. These are things they are likely to double-down on in the org split. Is it the product-market fit they have achieved as a company? Is it some deep tech innovation that will evolve further with the right focus? A cultural aspect of the team? For us at Snyk, it was a combination of a strong product mindset coupled with a distributed teamwork culture. We had confidence in our product offering, and decided to split by Personas. This aligned Engineering and Product above all else, while keeping our distributed teamwork in place. I still remember the phrase I used to relieve the anxiety in the team towards the split. Our mantra was "everyone can do everything across our product, but it makes sense for individuals to focus on a certain part of it over time". We reordered it with the org change: "each team focuses on a certain persona, but everyone can still do everything across the product". Implementing it wasn't easy, but it was a great guiding principle for our initial org split. What have you seen in such stages that left a strong impression on you, positive or negative? What org strengths stemmed from that initial decision you took part in? #organizationalchange #teambuilding #leadership