Columns
Building Teams
From frontline management to team design: building, growing, and sustaining a strong team.
- Chapter 1
The Three Outputs of Frontline Engineering Management
Frontline management is not about doing a bit more work for the team; it is about continuously producing better judgment, predictable delivery, and a collaboration system that can repair itself.
- Chapter 2
What to Design First When Building a Team from Scratch
When an existing bench has failed or you need to start over, rebuild responsibility, standards, and development mechanisms first — not just redraw a division-of-labor chart.
- Chapter 3
Team Growth Is Not Expansion: Efficiency, Succession, and Continuity
A team is not simply the sum of its headcount and abilities. Real growth means forming, over time, more reliable collaboration, transferable experience, and the capacity to keep solving problems when circumstances change.
- Chapter 4
Cultivation Is Not Training: How Team Capability Compounds
The purpose of developing a team is not to pour experience into everyone, but to make judgment, collaboration, and responsibility things that can be practiced, given feedback on, and passed on.
- Chapter 5
How to Design Three Growth Paths: Newcomers, Core Members, and Leads
Growth paths are not job-level checklists but three expanding responsibilities: completing tasks, owning problems, and enabling others to do important work.
- Chapter 6
Good Mentoring Relationships and a 90-Day Plan for New Hires
A mentor's value lies not in planning everything for the new hire, but in jointly building goals, feedback, and a rhythm of gradually stepping back; a workable 90-day plan makes this traceable.