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Two Months

As a new technology executive, my biggest worry is whether I am focusing on the right issues. My prior roles primarily required technical work, but they mostly involved small problems and small teams. For my first executive position, I expected to focus on organizational issues more than technical ones. Two months in, I think my expectations and role reset strategy were about right.

Here are some of the challenges I've been working on so far:

  1. Hiring. I'm shifting the organization from being mostly outsourced offshore to a more even onshore/offshore model. Sourcing and assessing engineers for senior roles has been challenging. I'm committed to building a great team. This is my top priority, and so far we've filled two of the four most senior roles. Our offshore people are solid, and I'm really excited about the new people we're hiring.
  2. Process. We need a simple and unambiguous approach for software development. I've been pushing the team to use Jira and Confluence more consistently, but the biggest break is that my first senior-level hire is an experienced agile practitioner - we're working together to reshape development processes. Process improvement is going to be a long-term effort for the team.
  3. Technology Vision. My background in data engineering has mostly been in publishing. The approaches necessary for ad-tech are new to me. I'm reading up on Kafka, HBase, Cassandra, Hadoop, Spark and other data frameworks. I'm focused on how these concepts fit with our business strategy - and how to best evolve our current platform. With the right team, our data engineering efforts will accelerate. Maybe I'll even get to code a bit.
For now my focus is squarely on engineering management - hiring, process, technology vision. My team can code, but only I am positioned to translate our business context into the right overall approach. I have to focus on management.

There are times I doubt this approach, and I worry about my credibility as a software engineer. Is it possible to be a technical leader without coding? Last year my answer would have been an emphatic no. This year I'm making different choices for a new situation.
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