We are right in the middle of a pretty serious economic downturn: We see big layoffs at major tech companies, the stock market is on fire and all companies are switching gears. I collected some thoughts on how Engineering Managers can best navigate this downturn and adapt what we’ve been doing during the boom years. Let’s explore good ways on how to do more with less, how to support our teams during this cycle and how we could adapt our hiring for the time to come.

Software Architects and their boxes and arrows: I have enjoyed working with some and suffered working against others in my career. I feel that in the majority of cases, the dedicated Role of “Software Architects” needs to be abandoned and the responsibilities need to be moved into the teams. This article outlines how this can be achieved by creating a rotating role called “Feature Owner” that enables the team to make the right local decisions and align themselves with the needs of the wider organization.

Trying to prevent all failures is a foolish endeavor. This doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to prevent and reduce failures as much as you can, but limiting the impact of failures turned out to be the most impactful strategy I found to improve Operational Excellence so far. In this article, we’ll build a taxonomy of failure types and explore some strategies to limit the impact of these failure groups on your software system.

Failure is inevitable. But every failure is an opportunity to learn, and to harden your system against more catastrophic failures later down the road. Blameless post-mortems are a very good tool to achieve this and have been adopted quite widely in the industry already. But of course, the details and diligence of this process vary a lot, so I’ve taken a stab at putting together all I know about how post-mortems can be great.

We all can benefit from being proficient at technical writing - no matter if we are Software Engineers, Product Managers, Engineering Managers or Designers. In the last decade of working in tech, I found one of the most remarkable shifts in how we work to be the switch to remote work. Especially after the pandemic and the hyperinflation of Video calls, our mode of work shifted a lot towards more asynchronous communication.