What lessons did people learn from engineering team learned from management?

It is a lot of difficulties to summarize companies and project teams where many people gather and to lead them. Leaders are required to take action according to changing circumstances like living things, but in the past about important points in such work, Yahoo! Loudcloud and others have created teams and led the teamMr. Tim HoweI am talking about know-how.

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"I have worked on various engineering teams so far and have been scaling the organization at various stages, such as when being euphoric, being frightened by the crisis," Tim Howes said. In the latter half of the 1990s, Mr. Howes showed a rapid popularity at that time. A company that supports the use of Internet companies "Loudcloud"In collaboration with Mr. Mark Andreessen of former Netscape and others who grew into a company with 650 employees in 18 months.


After that in 2002 the company name was "Opsware"And lead to the top class share in the development of data center automation software. Although it was Opsware who was struggling for a while at once, in 2007 it was sold by Hewlett-Packard (HP) at 1.6 billion dollars (about 190 billion yen at that rate)AcquisitionIt is being done. After that, Mr. Howes said that "social browser development"RockmeltAfter that, it was acquired by Yahoo in the United States, and here also as a person who can be said as a team management expert to expand the engineering team which was 150 persons to 350 people.

The organization's scaling technique that Mr. Howes who has made large and small teams after twists and turns, divided and grown has learned with that career is as follows.

◆ 1. Human resources: Become an expert of their team
How important the team is at the stage of growth is to understand its psychological state and how to place the right people in the right place, Mr. Howes says. It is quite different to lead 10 organizations and 100 organizations, Mr. Howes said,Three patterns of talent neededHe seems to have noticed.

· "Sage" and "Prophet"
Every team is enrolled for a long time since launch, and there are people like "wise men" who seek advice from everyone. I can not deny that such a person was important because of the image of the wise men who unleash the hair which is stretched to the beard that is tightly stored and who releases the unique aura, but when a certain time comes, the situation is Changes, the stage where everyone asks for the advice to the wise celebrates. And then becoming important next is a person like "a prophet" who sends new ideas from myself to the surroundings and leads everyone.

· "Firefighters" and "Fireproof sheriff"
If the firefighter is a fire extinguisher, the firefighting sheriff will be a person who can investigate the cause of the fire, identify and arrest those who committed the law. In the early stages of the organization, people who solve problems when they have problems are most appreciated, but as organizations grow, people and mechanisms to prevent problems will become more important.

· Iii "Dennis · Rodman" and "cancer cell"
It collides with the surroundings, breaks the rules but gives results, as if the basketball playerDennis RodmanWhile there are unconventional people like that, there are people who work attitudes are bad and some people are dissatisfied with their surroundings to lower the morale of the whole team. Such a person should be said to be "cancer cells" for an organization and it is necessary to promptly take appropriate measures promptly because it grows tremendously. If it grows the same, it is a "good cancer cell" that leads the team and produces a good linkage to obtain. When such a person appears, Mr. Howes speaks that it is important to properly give a return and to improve the environment for further achievement.

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◆ 2. Human Resources: Do not rush to choose personnel who are the largest investment
Mr. Howes recalls that everyone he hired in the Opsware era left or left the company himself / herself. "They were excellent engineers and had loyalty to the company, but they took a stubborn attitude towards the newly entering staff and could not get along with it well," Mr. Howes said, I learned that when focusing on the stage of selecting people and focusing on the subsequent training and realistic team integration eventually waste time and human resources.

It is a process of "personnel" that is often neglected by many companies, but it becomes important that leaders themselves are involved so much as the organization grows. As your organization gets bigger, your words will not reach the end than at the beginning. It is necessary to share the idea that "personnel" is an important work among teams, and to focus on not only the leader but also the entire team. According to Mr. Howes, companies such as Yahoo and Amazon have an organization called "Human Resources Committee", and every member of the committee checks the candidate's documents at the time of selecting talent to determine whether it is a suitable person for the company It seems to be judging.

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◆ 3: Do not confuse organization and organization to create confusion
As organizations grow and expand, it is becoming increasingly important to manage teams consistently. Mr. Howes advocates the utility of "vertical organization" in scaling the team. About how to do it, Mr. Howes said, "When I was working at Yahoo, I expanded the team from 150 to 350 in 18 months.It continues to achieve results and improve the health of the organization I kept it because the small team worked independently for work. "

But here Mr. Howes says he does not necessarily say that only a vertical organization will succeed. The important thing here is to organize the role of management regardless of the organization of the structure, to make a position of the role to lead the organization and thoroughly do it.

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As the organization gets bigger, it is unavoidable that it will be difficult to control because people with different abilities gather. As the organization becomes a large household with more than 50 people and the management structure is not properly arranged, gradually some members will think "I am the team leader". In this way literally the situation is "to cook a lot and climb a mountain", and the result will naturally end in failure.

Also, Mr. Howes cites "As the organization gets bigger, the work gets slower" as circumstances to avoid, Mr. Howes said, "Mr. Howes says" The most important thing whether it is mobile or web or whatever other field "To complete the product as soon as possible" is said.

◆ 4: Communication · Repeat transmission · Tell · Transmission
As the organization gets bigger, the difficulty of communicating is revealed. When a company started from the founder 's home moved to the office and the floor became separated, it became impossible to speak an opinion to everyone else.

Mr. Howes said, "Communication in conversation is a broadband" broadband "situation, the interactions are interactive and interactive, but if it is 50 or 100 people, it is no longer interactive "It becomes a one-to-many state." In this state, it is impossible to confirm the reaction from the partner, so it is important to clarify the content of the message "and the importance of changing the way of thinking I am preaching. And it says that the effective way is to "tell it many times" here.

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Nonetheless, it can not be called communication simply by simply sending mails and documents. The important thing is to use that method properly. For example, in a field such as program development, by sharing information sharing such as structure review, program review, scheduling, etc., it becomes possible to grasp what the entire team is doing now.

This communicationHardIf it were things, onesoftIn other words, easy communication is also important. It is also important to have a place like a lunch meeting or a drinking party as the organization grows and the relationship between staff becomes thinner. Mr. Howes said, "When I was at Yahoo, one of my manager positions"Three at Four"We have created a style called. This was that three staff gathered at 4 o'clock on Friday every week to discuss two technical topics and one topic not related to technology. By adopting this method, the staff began to think about gathering and communicating with each other ", one of the methods.

◆ 5: Control without giving up on quality / luck
To do scaling is to say that there is a necessity to generate products of the quantity and content that could not be realized by conventional scale organizations. Then, the contents to be managed will increase rapidly and it will be impossible to read through all the contents.

Mr. Howes looked back on the episode at Yahoo, "What I saw when I joined Yahoo was technology to quickly deliver, and the quality was also great, but still the level we wanted We have not reached that. "

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Mr. Howes,Three key rulesWe decided to decide to build a quality culture of the company. That "key rule" is as follows.

· I pay attention
This can be realized in a simple way. Mr. Howes says, "Establish a dashboard on the page that manages the project and start all product reviews with the question" What about quality? " Then send an e-mail to the person in charge who has the problem everyday, or every week. " When Mr. Howes adopts this method and make it known to the staff thoroughly, it is said that each staff personally adopts a workaround of their own by themselves.

· Enrich checklist
The merit of advancing a multi-person project is that a lot of wisdom gathers. Mr. Howes recommends systematizing by putting many of such wisdom into a checklist. "How big is the binary size?" "How much memory is occupied?" "How long will it not crashMonkey testWere you able to continue? "More than 200 check items are said to have been listed in Mr. Howes' checklist. Then, Mr. Howes started to create a tool that can automatically execute those check items. By doing so, we reduced the burden on each team. By this method, the quality of the product greatly improved. It is said that the know-how that each team had had was widely shared.

· Iii incorporate reviews and automated tests
All check contents such as code review, functional test, unit test and so on are said to reach one ultimate goal. Mr. Howes said, "They all lead to building good code, stressing the importance of incorporating the tests at each stage, saying that it is the most important purpose for functional testing and unit testing." And furthermore I'm talking about the importance of "to be honest with engineers, not focus on my colleagues" but focus on raising my own code quality ".

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◆ Summary
Mr. Howes is also sending advice "Do not get caught up in" religion ". This means that you should not be caught on something you do not do, such as "the ultimate coding method perfect for the team" and "checking method that everyone is satisfied with". Mr. Howes' experience has advised against checking methods and contents, but advises that "first trying one and going forward" is important.

Mr. Howes who has traveled across six companies in the past 20 years and has assembled hundreds of engineers has said that he has experienced both success and failure. Among them, what is important to the leader is to make a mistake and learn one step further from there. Mr. Howes said, "There is no universal solution that can be used even in difficulty, things are to fail, what is important is always to recognize themselves, to be aware of mistakes and correctly point out, scaling is to repeat reform It is said.

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