Being caught without a fraud system during Black Friday is like jumping into a shark tank naked and covered in fish oil.* At Sift, my team built the 'shark suit' that protected our customers’ most sensitive business units. We ensured the correctness of thousands of fraud models and…
How Not To Betray Your Team As a manager, it’s inevitable that one day you’ll be asked to do something that puts the company’s interests over your team’s. If you genuinely care about your team, but you haven’t prepared them for this reality, you’re…
I was talking to a founder about engineering velocity recently, and was excited to dig into all the tactical things, until I remembered that no matter how much you tweak processes and incentives, you can’t get peak performance unless people genuinely care and take ownership. Now this isn’t…
The most unnecessary stress and toil in my career has come from letting those tiny cracks of misaligned values grow into a loud dissonance that drains creative energy. I’ve learned that if you don’t reconcile your values with those of your management chain quickly enough, you’ll find…
You know that feeling where you’ve found a bit of time to dig into that meaty design doc but just as you start, your boss pings you because the ceo wants something right now? Now imagine how bad this is for an engineer who has pushed a ton of…
There are rumors of a reorg. People are anxious. Nobody wants to stick out their neck and decisions are stuck in endless meetings. Innovation has come to a grind and critical feedback replaced by head nods. Teams, more defensive, are playing hot potato with that thorny customer problem that has…