January 28, 2022

Practices & Process Checklist

Spanning from your first on-call rotation to reviewing how information propagates from your executive team down to each engineer, there are an infinite number of practices and processes that you can implement in an organization. When you jump into a new organization or come up for air after your latest product launch, it’s helpful to have a checklist to think through how well your existing practices are working and which practices you might want to introduce next.

January 27, 2022

Investments Checklist

**Fork this checklist on Google Docs

This is a stub. For related tool, see Practice & PRocess Checklist.

February 11, 2022

Tech Spec

Fork this template on Google Docs

Healthy engineering organizations make a lot of technical decisions. Many of those decisions impact multiple teams (Frontend, Backend) and functions (Engineering, Product, Customer Success, Finance). It’s normal to either feel like you’re moving too slow (“too many stakeholders in every decision”) or that your reckless pace creates frequent rework as issues are discovered late (“this problem would have been obvious if you’d just talked to Security first”).

January 5, 2023

Incident Review Template

Stub, but in interim the Pagerduty postmortum template is pretty reasonable.

PagerDuty also has an excellent list of other formats: https://response.pagerduty.com/after/post_mortem_process/

February 15, 2022

Developer Productivity Survey

Example survey, Example analysis

While you should rely on your organizational metrics to measure developer productivity, quantitative measurement will sometimes miss important context. For example, you might be proud of how the backend developers are having a great time with their CI/CD, only to realize that the iOS engineers hate their release process that isn’t instrumented in any of your dashboards. A Developer Productivity Survey is an effective tool to bring qualitative feedback into your planning process and reduce your risk of meeting your metrics while missing your goal.

January 12, 2022

Organizational Design

Fork the org growth template and the org design template.

Having been involved in quite a few budget and headcount processes over the years, one thing that continues to surprise me is how often folks make major headcount requests without having done any organzational design of those those requested heads will compose into an organization.

Screenshot of table showing org growth template.

The good news is that the high-level sort of organizational design required for headcount planning is abstract, low granularity, and it’ll likely only take you a couple hours to do a first pass. Add a few more hours to gather feedback, and you’ll have a reasonably good organizational design.

January 11, 2022

Hiring Ratio

Fork this template on Google Docs

It’s impossible to avoid headcount planning when running a large team within an engineering organization. On the other hand, many folks find it’s impossible to be usefully involved in headcount planning when the folks running the process aren’t closely involved with your work: Infrastructure? Oh, that’s going great: no crashes or breaches lately, we don’t need to invest here!

Screenshot of hiring ratio template.

January 10, 2022

Recruiter Velocity Check

Fork this template on Google Sheets

At some point in your planning process, you’re going to get a headcount target. It’s tempting to immediately jump into allocating that headcount–we’re going to do so much this year–but it’s helpful to take an hour to model out recruiting capacity to understand whether your headcount target is realistic.

Chart of recruiter velocity check tool

Once you’ve gone through the exercise, you’ll finish with a simple chart that shows your progress over the year towards that headcount target. If the ending headcount line crosses the target headcount, then you’re in a pretty solid place. Reality is a lot more complex than this model, but at least you’re generally in a plausible starting position.

January 27, 2022

Decision Log

Fork this template on Google Docs

Something about the close-knit social chemistry of a small team gives them a shared brain. Of course you know that last week Michelle decided all new frontend work would happen in Typescript. Ambient awareness is less and less effective as an alignment tool as an organization grows, and becomes quite unreliable as an organization grows past ~twenty folks.

One tool that folks use to scale alignment around key decisions is the “decision log.”

January 27, 2022

5:15 Email Update

Stub.

April 4, 2022

Contract Negotiation Checklist

Fork this template on Google Docs

Negotiating contracts is an important part of managing costs, but it’s also something that you only do infrequently. Particularly in an earlier stage company, you might only negotiate one large contract a year. It’s quite hard to get better at something that you do so infrequently, but using a checklist is one way to be consistent in your approach, and to ensure learnings from one negotiation carry over into the next.

January 11, 2022

Service Cookbook

TODO:

Make “service cookbook” tool and replace link in “trunk and branches” to point to it

https://lethain.com/service-cookbooks/

March 30, 2022

Business Review Template

Fork this template on Google Docs

As your company gets larger and more complex, it’s easy to become embroiled in supporting incoming asks from other teams. That’s important work, but it’s also important that your team is operating effectively and prioritizing your goals in addition to the goals of other teams making requests.

If you’re getting mixed signals on whether your team is doing the right work, the Business Review Template can help cut through the confusion. This written document facilitates an operational review of your team, and even more importantly creates an opportunity for you, your team, and your stakeholders to discuss if you’re focused on the right work.