Klaus Breyer
B2B SaaS Product & Tech Leadership Move Fast And Break Silos!

Become a Great Engineering Leader, James Stanier, 2024

Personal Brand

For whom do I write? For everyone with (C)PT(O) in the title.

Organizational Structure

6: Organizational Levels

9: Military - 3 Levels:

  • VP (Strategic Level): High-level goals
  • Director (Operational Level): Planning and executing to achieve strategic goals
  • EM (Tactical Level): Implementations

11: EM - Success:

  • Committed work done on time?
  • High quality / well-maintained?
  • Respond to incidents/outages in a timely manner
  • Coach, mentor, develop team members

11: Director - Operational (1-year horizon)

  • “Why” is defined, focus on “how”
  • Operational area

12: VP - Strategic (2-3 year horizon)

  • “Why” & “with what”
  • Strategic area
  • Metrics > Planning
  • Investments?
  • Market + Competition

Your Place in the Org Chart

32: Tactical: EM

  • Tech Lead defining technical direction
  • ICS
  • Manager in Training

Tactical: Senior EM

  • Senior ICS
  • EM

34: Operational: Director Engineering

  • Senior EM
  • Other Directors
  • Area Technical Lead
  • Right-Hand Engineer

34: Strategic: VP Engineering + CTO

  • Directors
  • Craft Leads (Frontend, etc.)
  • Technical Lead

37: Best Team Size: 8

42: Dunbar’s Number: 5, 15, 50, 150, 500, 1500

45: Team Topologies are fractal and can represent entire departments.

48: Example: Stream-aligned teams retain a problem domain (reviews, news, social) but are complemented by:

  • Enabling Teams (Collections): Ensuring coherent data formats → Collaboration
  • Enabling Teams (Dashboard UX): Facilitating
  • Platform Team + Crawling Team: Clear “X as a Service” boundaries

Time: Observed, Spent & Allocated

60: Shopify = 100-year company

61: Long-termism

  • Vision & Strategy
  • Hiring & Developing the right people
  • Developing a Bench of Successors (for oneself)
  • Scalability, Resilience & Reliability
  • Slowing down projects that move faster than interconnected teams can handle

62: CTO Tasks:

  • Is the organization on track with goals?
  • Connecting/steering direct reports?
  • Meetings that benefit from my presence
  • Connect & collaborate with peers and other groups
  • Own strategic work

Organizing Work

66: Capacity Management > Time Management. It fluctuates with context.

78: Calendar:

  • Group similar-context meetings together
  • Block time for deep work in the morning/evening
  • Office hours

81: Focus Blocks:

  • With a goal! E.g., daily/weekly objectives
  • Reading / Reviewing
  • Async content to broadcast
  • Other long-term activities

Not for:

  • Normal messengers/emails

Unplanned:

  • Using own product
  • Reviewing other teams’ work
  • Reading design docs
  • Field research

Async Work

84: When to hold a meeting:

  • High-bandwidth communication
  • Building trust & support
  • Everyone must be present simultaneously

85: Meeting Agenda:

  • Lead by example, don’t force others

87: Regularly delete all recurring meetings to reset the org

88: Alternatives to Meetings:

  • Standups → Async updates
  • Group Sync → Async updates
  • 1:1s → Not status updates but coaching
  • Staff Meeting → Focus topics
  • Brainstorming → Pre-prepared async contributions

The Games We Play and How to Win Them

Coaching vs. Directing:

  • Goal (of the session)
  • Reality - Current situation
  • Options - How to tackle it
  • Wrap-Up - Next steps/decisions

96: Delegation

  • 1:1s, weekly, 30 min
  • Shared agenda
  • No status updates
  • Link topics to Employee Development

109: Finite vs. Infinite Games

  • Finite Games: Platforms over a swamp of infinite games/chaos
  • Infinite Games: Goal: Keep playing!
  • Finite Games: Goal: Winning (e.g., task completion, sprint, etc.)
  • Concept for Workshops: Explain how limiting Work in Progress (WIP) enhances strategy execution

Communication at Scale

195: Treat the org as an evolving organism

198: Best async communication practice for leaders covering large org areas: techemails.com

201: Optimizing for decision speed: One-way vs. two-way doors

205: Leadership = Writing

  • Writing to think
  • Interrogate thoughts
  • Edit to read

Performance Management

229: Performance Management of Senior Staff = Measuring the output of their leadership

231: Assessment Criteria:

  • Self-Assessment (Subjective, Qualitative, Quantitative)
  • KPI (Defined, Progressed, Achieved/Exceeded)
  • 360° Feedback (Quantitative)
  • Leader Assessment (Qualitative)

245: “Your lowest performer is the performance bar you accept.”

Strategy 101

259: Engineering Strategy:

  • Trade-offs: Quality vs. Speed
  • Key KPIs to hit
  • Tackling Tech Debt
  • Build vs. Buy decisions
  • Conflicting Priorities

Company Cycles

279: Shift focus from dates to reducing uncertainty

280: Uncertainty: Y-Axis, Time: X-Axis

301: Finance: Profit Center vs. Cost Center

Boom & Bust Cycles

330: Peacetime focus:

  1. Hiring, Onboarding & Ramp-Up
  2. Incubating new products
  3. M&A

Wartime focus:

  1. Reforecasting, Restructuring & Reorganizing
  2. Layoffs - Do them all at once, no early warnings

Career Development

354: Earning vs. Learning (or Quit)

360: Find the right recruiter for what you need, nothing more.