Part II

People & Teams

A productive team is the foundation of everything else. A great team doesn't guarantee a great product, but a broken team guarantees a bad one — and the shape of the team you build will show up in the product you ship.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

Hold on to that quote through every hard conversation, every missed promotion, every layoff. Of everything in this part, it is the one thing that compounds most reliably over a career.

Personal note

  • People management goes further than company needs. People come and leave, but they remember how they were managed. One day they might hire you — or, more likely, be called for a backdoor reference on you.
  • You cannot make everybody happy. Trying to is the job’s most seductive trap. Optimize for outcomes, not for smiles.
  • Most of the feedback you hear as a manager is negative. The team watches how you respond to it. Be the cheerleader. If the negativity becomes overwhelming, work with your manager or HR to address it — don’t absorb it alone.

What this part covers

People management is the part of the job with the longest half-life. The hiring decisions you make this quarter will still be shaping the team three years from now; the engineer you failed to give honest feedback to will take that silence with them to their next job. And the structure you choose to organize those people into is itself a long-lived decision — a team restructure you make today will still be visible in your codebase in three years.

Four chapters:

  1. People Management Fundamentals — the weekly operating mechanics: 1:1s, feedback, strength maps, workload balance, difficult conversations, remote teams, the tech lead partnership.

  2. The People Lifecycle: Hiring, Onboarding, and Departures — building the team you need: hiring plans, interview loops, offers and equity, 30-60-90 onboarding, managing attrition.

  3. Performance & Development — reviews, OKRs, leveling, promotions, PIPs, separations, and how to actually deliver hard feedback.

  4. Team Structure & Organization Design — how to shape the team around the work: functional, cross-functional, matrix, Team Topologies, Spotify, and how organizations evolve as they grow.

You hired smart people — let them do what they are best at. Your role is to monitor, support, and remove blockers, not to micromanage. Like monitoring software systems, keep an eye on how things are progressing and adjust as needed.

Conway’s Law — “organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure” — is true the first time you read it and truer every time you watch it play out in practice. Your team structure will directly shape your product architecture. Choose deliberately.

Table of contents