Meetings for an effective eng organization. @ Irrational Exuberance

Hi folks,

This is the weekly digest for my blog, Irrational Exuberance. Reach out with thoughts on Twitter at @lethain, or reply to this email.

Posts from this week:

- Meetings for an effective eng organization.
- Mailbag: What should you do if you report to an underperforming executive?
- Trying Plausible.

Meetings for an effective eng organization.

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that any given meeting isn’t helpful, then iterate on it, and consider pausing it for the time being. It may not be useful for your organization yet, but don’t give up on the idea of meetings.

Good meetings are the heartbeat for your organization.

If you look hard enough, you can find narrow exceptions, but the vast majority of well-run organizations anchor around a few valuable meetings, and they’re likely the best starting point for your organization as well. (As an aside, if you want to read a second, excellent take on meetings, I highly recommend Steven Sinofsky’s, which is exceptionally good.)

Why have meetings?

The most effective communication within an organization is between peers or between managers and their direct team. Your technology strategy is best communicated in a written document. The clearest plan is tracked in a ticket tracker or a document. None of these ideal approaches are large meetings, which isn’t too surprising: large meetings are rarely the best communication solution for any particular goal. However, they are a remarkably effective backup solution when there are gaps in your default approaches.

At a certain size, you can’t discuss everything with every member of your organization, but you can have each manager talk with their team, and complement that with an org-wide meeting. You can’t include everyone’s input early in every technology decision, but you can ensure that the decisions are well-vetted by sharing them in a tech spec review. While meetings are rarely the best initial solution, they are often the best backup solution to ensure important information is communicated across the organization.

While most leaders view organization meetings as a necessary mechanism to distribute context down the reporting hierarchy, I find that they are also effective at two other important tasks: communicating culture, and surfacing concerns from the organization. Accomplishing all three goals within your organization may require a bespoke mix of engineering meetings depending on its size, communication norms, and all-company meetings.

That said, I’d like to recommend six core meetings that I recommend every organization start with, and that I’ve found can go a surprisingly long way. These six are split across three operational meetings (each manager with their direct team, technical spec review, incident review), two developmental meetings (staff engineers, engineering managers) and finally a monthly engineering Q&A to learn what the organization is really thinking about.

Weekly Team Meeting

One key role is keeping the team moving together towards the same goals–what’s really important right now? Another is setting the team’s pace–what have we gotten done this week? Both are best done with a weekly working meeting for your team of direct reports and key stakeholders.

The engineering leadership meeting, along with a similar meeting run by the CEO with the company’s leadership team, is your core hub for operating the engineering organization. First and foremost, this meeting is a working session for your leadership team to accomplish things together. If there’s something you need to solve (disagreement on strategy, conflict about a new career ladder, etc), use this session to resolve it.

Second, it’s an opportunity for your team to share context with each other instead of just with you. What’s going right or wrong for them this week? How could their peers help them with their current project? Serendipity starts with mutual awareness across the team.

Finally, it’s your forum for forging your directs into a first team who’s top priority is supporting each other. (If you’ve not read Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it’s a quick, remarkable read on this topic.)

Some suggestions for making your team meetings effective:

• My weekly team meetings always include my direct reports, and usually include our key partner in the Recruiting, People, and Finance teams. (I’ve also experimented with including engineers, which has been a constructive albeit mixed experiment!) Having cross-functional partners in the room builds trust across functions, and will often allow you to resolve issues immediately instead of putting them on the backlog to resolve later
• Maintain a running agenda in a group-editable document, anyone in the team can add agenda topics over the course of the week. Take a few minutes before the meeting starts to prioritize topics for the upcoming session
• I’d strongly push the core engineering leadership team to meet weekly. I would only reduce that frequency at very small companies (<20 engineers) or slow-moving businesses (not much changes month to month)

However you decide to run your weekly team meeting, remember that your direct reports are likely to model their meetings off yours. If you run a tight, effective meeting, then it’s likely that your entire organization will run similarly effective team meetings.

Technical Spec Review and Incident Review

Technical Spec Review and Incident Review are weekly sessions to discuss any new technical specs or incidents since the previous week. On a quiet week, both of these meetings might be canceled, but on a great week, both will push the company forward in very different ways.

Each company will run a distinct version of these meetings, and the meetings themselves will evolve a bit over time. A few suggestions on what I’ve seen lead to effective review sessions:

• All reviews should be anchored on a concise, clearly written document
• Reading the written document should be a prerequisite to providing feedback on it. Some teams find that it’s helpful to start with ten minutes to read the documents. Alternatively, it may be helpful to block the preceding thirty minutes before the review meetings on engineering calendars for independent reading
• Good reviews are anchored in feedback from the audience, and discussion between the author and the audience. Bad reviews are anchored in the author presenting their document. You will only have good reviews if you’re diligent about steering folks away from presenting their writeup
• There should be a clearly documented, very simple process for getting your incident writeup or tech spec scheduled. The more effective approach I’ve seen is dedicated rooms in Slack to ask to be added to the schedule
• Long-term, you can measure the impact of these review meetings by whether folks are submitting their new tech specs and incidents for review. If the forums are struggling to solicit content, it’s generally a sign that you should work to make them more useful to attendees
• Prepare first-time presenters with a practice run with an experienced presenter! This will make them more confident, foster more valuable discussions, and prevent thousands of hours of time listening to folks who mistakenly believe the review should be them reading their document out loud
• Running these reviews well is time consuming, and I highly recommend finding dedicated owners for each meeting. Although a bit annoying at times, both are highly impactful leadership opportunities that can be run by an experienced engineer

Many engineering leaders skip these reviews when they get busy–and it’s certainly a bad sign when you are the loudest voice in either forum–but they’re important forums to be present in. They’re rare opportunities to see engineers across many teams and a wide range of seniority interact on relatively high-stakes topics. This makes these meetings a clear-eyed barometer of your engineering culture. If you’re uncomfortable, bored, and frustrated by these meetings within your own company, fix it.

Eng Managers and Staff Engineers Monthlies

I run two monthly meetings focused on ongoing team development. The first is the Engineering Managers Monthly, attended by all engineering managers, and the second is the Staff Engineers Monthly, attended by all staff-plus engineers. In most organizations, these groups are in the same order of magnitude, and in all organizations they are equally important to a well-run engineering organization.

The format varies a bit for each session, but is generally along the lines of:

1. [15 minutes] Ask each member to take 1 minute to share something they’re working on, something they’re excited about, and something they’re worried about
2. [30 minutes] Someone, often me, presents on a development topic. These can be anything that create an opportunity for the group to develop their professional craft. For the Managers session, it might be something I’ve recently read like a Lara Hogan piece about delegation or something I’ve written about like reading a profit and loss statement. For the Staff Engineers session, it might be a topic from Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path or my own Staff Engineer
3. [15 minutes] Close with an open-ended Q&A

If there’s a pressing topic–a recent reorg or some such–then we’ll certainly focus on that instead, but I think it’s valuable to support the team in their personal development. Done well, they’ll leave each session both more valuable to the team and more confident that the company is invested in their success.

Engineering Q&A

The final meeting I recommend is the Engineering Q&A meeting. I run it monthly for an hour, starting with introductions of new team members, and then a few minutes sharing any messages I’d like the team to think about. Then we move into Q&A for the remainder of the session. If we run out of questions, we end early, but I find that rarely happens.

Many engineers won’t get to work with you directly, and they will learn to trust (or distrust) you based on how you respond to the most difficult questions during these Q&As. Similarly, you may not hear their concerns in any other forum. The concerns should bubble up to you through the reporting hierarchy, but sometimes there are communication blockages, and this is one way that information will jump the gap to reach you.

Running a good Q&A depends on consistently getting good questions from the audience. There are a handful of techniques that I’ve found valuable to that effect:

• I start every Q&A by saying, “I’m glad to talk about anything, no questions are off limits. If your question is too awkward or private, I’ll just avoid answering it. Ask whatever you want.” This is partially a joke, but it’s also how I run the sessions. Sometimes folks ask angry questions. Sometimes they ask questions that were already answered by an email. I always try to bring an even, positive energy, even when the questions are messy
• Having a good tool for taking questions goes a very long way. I recommend three core features: ability to ask questions before the meeting starts, ability to vote on which questions are most important to answer, and support for anonymous questions. I would always prefer difficult anonymous questions over folks feeling too uncomfortable to ask them, even if it makes for an awkward session
• Remind folks the day and hour before that the Q&A is coming and steer them towards the Q&A tool to maximize the incoming questions and particularly the question askers
• Use the Q&A as an opportunity to highlight individuals doing important work or who are key leaders in your organization. When a question comes in that touches on someone’s work, I warn them that I’m going to share my thoughts quickly before passing the question to them, giving them a few minutes to prepare, share my thoughts, and then pass it over to them
• Every organization has a small number of folks who can’t help but ask questions. Nurture those folks to ensure you get at least some questions! Good tooling (a question voting tool) or hygiene (creating pauses even when hands are up to allow others to ask questions too) will mitigate the potential downside of only answering their questions
• If your team has a relatively narrow window of timezones (roughly three hours difference), then you can find a fixed time that works for everyone. However, if your timezome window is any larger, consider alternating times between a couple time slots to make sure that everyone is able to easily attend at least every other Q&A. I generally recommend spreading sessions across time zones instead of increasing frequency. I also generally recommend against recording Q&As, as question quality tends to drop. That said, experimentation here is cheap, so try different options if you think they’d work better

Although you may not immediately agree, the Engineering Q&A is often my favorite meeting of the month. It’s where I understand how I’m performing relative to my team and organization’s expectations. Are things going well? Is the team upset about something? Was it a problem I already knew about? Can I fix it to prevent them being upset about it next month? If you’re unconvinced, give it a try for a couple months and then go from there.

What about other meetings?

Many organizations have meetings in addition to the ones I propose above, and that’s totally reasonable. There are other meetings that I’ve run and found quite helpful, ranging from a weekly session to meet new hires to a quarterly Engineering All-Hands where we celebrated launches and spoke about upcoming challenges. To highlight a handful of meetings than many companies find useful:

• Execution Meeting: you absolutely do want some kind of weekly or monthly execution review meeting, to track and debug execution. The name of this meeting varies tremendously across companies, from Business Review to Operational Check-In to Plan Review.

  My experience is that this meeting needs to be cross-functional rather than engineering specific. Any function-specific execution review is likely to assign responsibility to other functions not in the room, whereas a cross-functional review is more likely to resolve issues

• Show & Tell / Demos: are a culture-forming meeting, making it clear to attendees what kinds of work is celebrated at the company. These are often a particularly joyful meeting, centering on folks sharing what they’re proud of. Frequency across companies varies a bit from weekly to monthly

• Tech Talks / Lunch & Learn: are an opportunity for members of the team to learn together, either by teaching areas of expertise, or by reading books and papers together

• Engineering All-Hands: you do want engineering to spend time together, but exactly how you want to do it will vary quite a bit by stage and other company meetings. The other issue is that All-Hands meetings are a bit open-ended. Is your All-Hands really a Show & Tell? Or a roadmap review? Or something else entirely?

My experience is that most of these additional meetings depend significantly on your broader company meeting calendar. For example, does your company already have a monthly all-hands and what do you talk about there? Running a monthly Engineering All-Hands when you already have a monthly Company All-Hands is often a bit painful to coordinate, which you’ll have to decide about for yourself. I prefer aligning with existing company meetings whenever possible. As important as it is for engineering to know what other engineers are doing, it’s even more valuable for them to know what the folks in other functions are focused on.

Who runs the meetings?

As head of engineering, you’ll generally lead your team meeting, Manager and Staff Engineer Monthlies, and Engineering Q&A. You may also lead the Tech Spec Review and Incident Review, but it’s likely that one of your direct reports or a Staff Engineer will take on leading those forums as your organization grows (because they take a level of persistent attention that can be difficult to sustain as an executive focused on putting out fires). If you introduce further meetings like a Show & Tell, it’s varies widely who will run it.

Three important points to consider here are:

1. Leading a meeting doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to do the coordination work to make it a success. You’ll often partner with an executive assistant or program manager on those aspects
2. The team will watch you closely and take cues from your behavior. Even if you say a meeting is important, they’ll only believe you if you show up regularly. It’s very difficult for others to lead organizational meetings if you don’t attend
3. Even if you don’t lead or coordinate one or more of these forums, you are accountable for making it a good use of the organization’s time. That is something that you can’t delegate.

As with all things, there are no firm rules about who does what across organizations. If you want to try something different, then give it a try.

Scaling meetings

Many organizations have more meetings than this, and that’s totally fine. Do what works well for you. Similarly, an organization with five engineers would only need one of these meetings, the weekly meeting with their direct team. Scaling down is relatively easy–drop meetings that aren’t helpful–but scaling up can get a bit messy.

Generally, I would recommend:

• Scale operational meetings to optimize for the right participants. If your technical spec review sessions are skewing towards mobile concerns, but most attendees don’t have context on mobile, then you may want to split out a dedicated mobile session
• Scale developmental meetings to optimize for participant engagement. If you have more than ten folks in a developmental meeting, many of them will stop participating or even stop attending. If you have 20+ engineering managers, consider pushing this meeting one layer down the reporting hierarchy, such that your reports run their own development meeting with their managers rather than you running it with the entire organization. (You can, of course, find hybrid approaches! You could run the meeting every other time. You can focus on splitting into small discussion groups after introducing the content, etc.)
• I would recommend keeping the Eng Q&A as a whole organization affair, but you could absolutely consider your directs rolling out their own Q&As as well at a certain size (e.g. an engineering organization with 600 engineers can certainly tolerate an Eng Q&A and also a Product Eng Q&A every month)

Finally, I find that many organizations split meetings prematurely because there are one or two individuals who behave badly in important meetings. For example, you may have an antagonistic engineer who joins every technical spec review meeting to advocate for a particular technology. It’s extremely valuable to solve that problem by holding that engineer accountable to a higher communication standard. You cannot scale large meetings without holding participants responsible for their behavior.

1:1s and skip-levels

For completeness, I also strongly recommend weekly 1:1s with your direct reports and peers you work most closely with. Borrowing from my concrete experience at Calm, during my first year I met with three executive peers every week, and my other peers once a month, for an hour. I met with each member of my team for an hour, although as we’d worked together for several years, some weeks those 1:1s happened to be thirty minute meetings instead.

Skip-level meetings with your organization are very valuable as well, although I’ve found them difficult to create space for as your organization grows. My recommendation is to determine a fixed amount of time to devote to skip-levels, say one to two hours a week, and to iterate on frequency and format to stay within that allocation (do group skip-level meetings, meet once a quarter instead of once a month, etc). Skip-levels feel productive, and you’ll probably feel bad if you don’t do them as often as you’d like, but don’t let them get in the way of performing your core work.

Meetings don’t stand alone

Finally, a couple of ending notes. First, it’s important to point that you cannot build effective communication within your organization solely through meetings. Great communication includes meetings, but requires strong individual relationships and working through many other channels (email, chat, etc).

Second, you should integrate your approach to meetings with the wider company’s approach. In some cases, you’ll find that many of these meetings already exist, and you want to integrate with those existing forums instead of creating duplicates. In other cases, you may even find that running these within engineering, or even a subset of engineering, can be an effective way to create awareness that they’re a good use of time.

Mailbag: What should you do if you report to an underperforming executive?

Recently, an email came in asking what to do when you report into a mediocre or underperforming executive. I’ve gotten variants of this question a number of times over the years, and it’s worth digging into a bit:

Have you written anything about working in middle management where you are managing a high performing team but under a low performing executives? How do you demonstrate your value to the broader organization so that your team remains motivated, and you can eventually move across groups?

Before answering the question itself, it’s worth mentioning that almost all middle managers are periodically frustrated with their executive’s performance. This is natural, because the executive’s job is balancing frustration across their organization to sustainably accomplish the business’ goals. If you think about an executive who has the budget to grow one of their six teams, five of those teams will probably feel they’ve made the wrong decision, so whether they made the right decision can’t be judged wholly by sentiment. (Acknowledging that whether teams feel good or bad about the decision probably depends more on how the executive messages the decision than on the actual decision itself.)

That’s not to say that most executives are effective, many executives aren’t, it’s just a warning against evaluating their performance from your perspective. There may be missing context that’s contributing to their seemingly odd decision making. With that caveat out of the way, time to answer the actual question: what should you do if you report to an underperforming executive?

First, build cross-functional relationships so you don’t depend on your executive for information and access. Go out of your way to be helpful to other executives, and show up prepared to forums where those executives are present. When a company does performance review or layoffs or hiring plans, generally the full executive team has input on the plan, so having advocates outside of your direct reporting chain goes a long way.

Second, don’t spend time trying to get the company to recognize the executive’s underperformance. I wrote about this a bit in Hard to work with, but it’s generally my experience that companies and executives are aware of performance issues and have chosen not to address them for whatever reason (e.g. the underperformer is good at something else, their manager is conflict-averse, etc). You will only burn your own reputation by trying to undermine your manager.

Next, executives tend to underperform in two ways: they either overly detached or they micromanage. Detached executives create a lot of room for you to lead within your team, and use something like Model, document, share to drive change outside your team’s scope. In these scenarios you can simply recreate the missing organizational elements and run them within your team. It’s a lot of work, but you can maintain a goals process, performance process, etc, and you can definitely use this approach to keep teams engaged.

Micromanaging executives are a bit trickier to figure out, because you need to understand why they are micromanaging. Sometimes micromanagement is poorly communicated feedback that you are not performing well. Sometimes it’s just a bad habit. Dig in and try to figure out what’s driving it.

Finally, have an honest conversation with yourself about the situation. Sometimes underperforming executives move on quickly (you can tell because they have a career history of one to two year stints), but generally companies are loathe to exit executives because it can cause a fair amount of turmoil. Unless this executive has a history of early departures, then you need to decide what’s right for you while assuming that they’ll still be around.

Trying Plausible.

I’ve been wanting to spend some time trying out recent developer and infrastructure tooling, starting with taking Tailscale for a spin (it’s quite nice). Next, I’ve been thinking about replacing Google Analytics on this blog for some time, and decided to try out Plausible.io as a replacement.

For the record, I don’t have any profound gripes with Google Analytics, rather I’d say that I’m profoundly grateful to GA. It’s a tool that I’ve greatly benefitted from over the past decade, and it hasn’t charged me anything for it! That said, my personal experience is that GA’s user experience has degraded as the friction between consumer privacy (especially in EU) and cookie based analytics have increased. Since the forced move to GA4, I’ve essentially stopped looking at Google Analytics because the default views are less helpful for me, I lost my custom views from GA3, and I’ve found it harder to configure to my liking.

Summary thoughts

Overall, Plausible has a great onboarding experience, is slightly overpriced as a consumer product but underpriced as an enterprise product, and I’ve enjoyed using it. For the time being, I’ve switched off Google Analytics and moved to Plausible, which I imagine reevaluating after a month or two of additional usage. I appreciate the privacy-forward approach here that should avoid having to migrate to yet-another analytics service as privacy laws continue to ramp up over the next few years. At this point, I don’t think it’s viable for most businesses to switch over given the inability to connect these analytics to advertising data, and are missing a few core features (SSO, something like SOC2, etc).

Plausible is basically a prediction that Google Analytic’s data-aggregation strategy, and in particular using GA to facilitate increased Google Ads spend, is going to be rendered less efficient by ramping up privacy regulation. This seems like a good thesis to me, and ties into my general thesis that compliance is eating the world. Conversely, I think Plausible could do more to explain why they are great in general, rather than focusing on not being Google Analytics (there are a lot of companies out there that aren’t Google Analytics). I think the reasons are there and fairly compelling (hosted in EU, not venture funded, open-source, etc), and that it’s more of an empphasis issue in marketing than an actual gap. (Although I’d love to see more emphasis on the specific technical solution to tracking.)

I think this is largely a function of the growth model, with Plausible aiming to start down-market with creators and startups. There’s a significant gap between the current offering and what would be needed to successfully pursue scaled companies, particularly integration with advertising (arguably Google Analytic’s most important feature to most companies), US-based compliance regimes (e.g. SOC2) and SSO. It’s possible SSO is hidden somewhere, but I do think it’s a fundamental security feature, and would love to see a security and privacy minded tool offer support. (Their Data Processing Agreemenet is an interesting read.)

Plausible is open source software, meaning that you could theoretically run it yourself. Of course, actually running a high-performance, tuned analytics setup is not necessarily the sort of thing most companies should invest time in, but it does provide an exit if the hosted version became prohibitively high. Altogether, I think this is a pretty smart move, and the AGPLv3 is a good license selection (as they discuss here).

Signup & Onboarding

The signup process starts with enter email and password on first screen, and then confirm your email address.

This is followed by a very short installation screen, instructing me to add a simple script to my head tag.

My blog uses Hugo, so I updated the partials/head-additions.html to look like this:

{{ if eq (getenv "HUGO_ENV") "production" | or (eq .Site.Params.env "production") }}
<script defer data-domain="lethain.com" src="https://plausible.io/js/script.js"></script>
{{ end }}

Finally, I removed my Google Analytics keys from config.toml, commit the changes, and pushed them out.

Minor onboarding suggestions

Throughout my onboarding and early usage, I had a handful of small ideas of how the experience might be adjusted. Caveats abound: I have not dug into the codebase, these are matters of opinion, etc.

1. Plausible anchors more on not being cookie-based than it does on what it does instead. As an analytics consumer, and particularly if I was adopting it for a site that had revenue implications (which, blessedly, my blog does not), I would really want to understand how it identifies visitors. I think this could be solved with some messaging (maybe on the page after you’ve installed the event collection script). For the record, their data policy page does a good job of explaining this, I just found it relatively easy to miss until I actively searched for it.

   Overall, there is a general positioning tact of being “not Google Analytics” as opposed to being “a specific, good thing.” I’m sure they’d landed here for good reason, but ultimately I think this will be a limiting way to market

2. I’d love if Plausible offered to walk me through the event collection script. I read through the script, and it’s quite small (and whitespace is preserved, so fairly readable), and I think it would be nice to offer an explanation of what it does for other users. Particularly as Plausible is focused on a more privacy oriented audience, this would help build trust. (I also think this would be pretty quick.)

Analytics

Plausible’s approach to analytics is basically: keep is simple. Quoting some of their marketing copy:

Plausible Analytics is built with simplicity in mind. Anyone can understand all the metrics we present at a glance and without having any training or prior analytics experience. Everything you need to know is on one page.

This approach is consistently implemented, as you can see from looking at their screens.

The overview chart is basic but reasonable, supporting date ranges and four metrics (unique visitors, total pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration).

They additionally show users grouped by source, page, geographic location, and device. Seeing as these are the only pieces of data collected–along with metadata from the request itself that is used to fingerprint the visitor and build sessions–there’s simply not much else that they can show.

Within that constrained scope, I think the UX is quite good. For example, I particularly appreciate that it only takes one click to filter traffic to a single page (or source, or device), making it possible to quickly answer questions like, “Where did traffic for this particular page come from?” This is very doable on Google Analytics, but it’s easier to get to here.

Pricing

Pricing is slightly higher than I’d like for a personal product, but very cheap for an enterprise product. It’s hard to guess how many pageviews a given analytics provider will say I get, but I’m guessing 100 to 200,000k pageviews each month, so roughly $20-$30/month. There’s a 30 day trial, so I should be able to get a sense of actual pricing before making a final purchase decision.

It’s worth noting, that Google Analytics is free because Google gets significant value from the data that Google Analytics provides. There’s a very reasonable argument to be made that it’s worth paying to own exclusive access to your analytics data.

Performance

Without claiming any sort of robustness, my observed latency for Google Analytics was around 120ms to complete, whereas Plausible is closer to 180ms or so. Increased latency makes sense if Plausible is hosting all servers (excluding, presumably, a CDN for the javascript) in the EU as they claim (roughly 90ms roundtrip from US to EU versus <30ms from San Francisco to a nearby Google datacenter). That is with locally cached script, without there’s an additional ~80ms of latency for loading Plausible’s scripts, and a somewhat shorter one for GA. GA is, of course, far more likely to already be cached on any given machine. Altogether, I think it’s fair to say that Plausible is about twice as slow as Google Analytics wrt time to completing the first event on the average website.

Still, even twice as slow isn’t bad at roughly 250ms. In either case, I think this is a reasonable latency given page load isn’t blocked behind it.

That's all for now! Hope to hear your thoughts on Twitter at @lethain!

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