Building Strong, Resilient, and Sustainable Organizations

The strongest and most resilient orgs are those that simultaneously 1) manage debt, organizational and technical, in a sustainable way, 2) encourage a culture of documentation and individual empowerment, and 3) incentivize leaving things better than they were when you found them.

Ahead of our special Speaker Series with LaunchDarkly Founder and CTO, John Kodumal, and Twilio VP Platform, Jesper Joergensen, we put together a quick roundup of Heavybit content that will help you better understand how to approach building sustainable and resilient teams.

Project Maintenance and Setting Boundaries

If someone is responsible for, let’s say, shipping code but they’re not also responsible for coming back and cleaning things up or refactoring a little bit of what they had worked on, it can cause a problem in organizations of “Well, it’ll be someone else’s problem.”

In this episode of Developer Love, host Patrick Woods sits down with Robby Russell of Planet Argon to discuss tactics for addressing technical debt, navigating large changes in teams, and setting boundaries with projects to avoid burnout.

Empowering Your Team for Growth

How do you keep your team empowered and happy while you grow from $1.5 million in ARR to IPO and beyond? The growth struggle is real with new hires starting weekly, increased customer demands, product leads trying to stay ahead of the product vision and roadmap, and engineering trying to build and ship features fast enough.

The trick to keeping your team empowered is a culture of knowledge sharing. In this post, marketing executive Kiersten illustrates why investing in knowledge sharing is effective and how to build an environment where your team can do their best work and confidently scale the business.

Managing Growing Pains as You Scale

Though this episode of To Be Continuous with Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar is mostly centered around the evolution of local vs. remote organizations, the exercise of thinking through what tools and behaviors need to be in place for a distributed workforce is great for general management best practices.

They bring up an important point about scaling; As with most processes, tools, and practices, what works for your company at 10 people likely won’t work the same when you’re 100. If you’re going to scale a distributed team successfully, you’ll need to safeguard your team against growing pains by keeping an ear to the ground for potential issues and checking in regularly with remote team members to spot points of friction early on.

Learn More about the Realities of Today’s Complex Software Systems and the Teams Behind Them

Have questions? Thoughts? Join us for the live fireside conversation on July 22nd at 12-1:15pm PT with John and Jesper, where they’ll be focusing specifically on engineering culture and discussing how to leverage technical debt strategically for outsized impact, balancing your customers’ needs vs. your engineers’ needs, predictions for the future of enterprise-scale software engineering organizations, and more.