Athenian Blog

Building The Right Product & Building The Product Right

Anabela Cesário

As a Product Manager (PM), engineering productivity is essential because it provides the predictability we need in the product development life cycle...

Scaling Your Team From 5 to 250 Engineers: A Complete Guide

‍Picture a map of a city. If it’s zoomed in enough, you’ll have fine-grained visibility of street names, shops, traffic, and restaurants. But as you zoom out, the more challen

How To Choose The Right Engineering Metrics Platform

Maria Alice Roche

If you’re reading this, then you probably already know that you need the right tools to help your software engineering teams perform to the best of their abilities. If not...

5 Steps For Building High-Performance Teams

Fast-growing companies operate with a certain level of uncertainty. But going from IC to VP of Engineering in one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world teaches...

To Build or to Empower: Software Engineering Career Paths Explained

Lou Marvin Caraig

A few weeks ago I did a presentation to my engineering team which covered what their career would look like at Athenian. I wanted everyone on the team to walk away with a...

What is Engineering Productivity & How Do We Measure It?

In the world of software engineering, it seems like nobody can agree on what productivity means. I’ve seen many engineering leaders struggle with its definition...

Hiring Software Engineers? 7 Engineering Leaders Share Their Biggest Lessons

Carmo Braga da Costa

We’ve spent many hours talking to engineering leaders on our Developing Leadership podcast. They are industry experts who have built high-performing teams and generously...

How to Build a Product Delivery Organization: Lessons from Jonathan Nolen, Senior VP of Engineering & Product at LaunchDarkly

Carmo Braga da Costa

A long overdue mindset shift is happening in software engineering: we’re beginning to understand that companies are not building or shipping software - they’re delivering...

Athenian is Now SOC 2 Type 2 Compliant!

Today we are proud to announce that Athenian has been formally attested as SOC 2 Type 2 compliant for how we securely manage user data based on our service and...

9 Metrics Every Engineering Leader Needs to Track

The top 9 software engineering metrics we recommend looking at to start monitoring and discussing with your engineering teams.

How Engineering Metrics Can Bridge the Gap Between Developers & Leaders

As a software developer, the products you build can have world-changing potential, which makes it particularly frustrating when you hit a bump in the road – when something...

How to Improve Knowledge Sharing In Your Engineering Org. (and beyond)

As an engineering leader, a critical element of smooth scaling is having strong communication lines within your team and other departments...

You Have Engineering Metrics. Now What?

So, you've decided to use data and metrics to improve your software delivery pipeline, scale your organization, and continuously improve.But how do you set yourself up...

It’s Time To Professionalize Engineering Leadership, Here’s How

I’ve been a software engineer since I started building games in C when I was 14. For the past 16 years, I’ve been on a journey from Individual Contributor to VP of Engineering

Introducing Engineering Success: Our Journey to Continuous Improvement With José Caldeira

Carmo Braga da Costa

Everyone talks about product-market-fit, but at Athenian, there’s something we like to call customer-purpose-fit, which comes from answering the question: Why does...

How to Build an Engineering-First Company Culture

The expectations for engineering and engineering leadership have changed tremendously in the last 20 years.

7 Fatal Flaws in The Software Engineering Industry

Sometimes Jason Warner and I like to get on our podcast and vent about things that irk us in our industry, organizational structures, and engineering leadership...

Why Context Matters When Analyzing Engineering Metrics

Maria Alice Roche

Since the introduction of DORA metrics, engineering organizations have come a long way in understanding the value of data and professionalizing their work. However...

From IC to Engineering Leader: Three Essential Lessons from Nuno Antunes, VP of Engineering at Datadog

As someone who has spoken to hundreds of engineering leaders, I get asked the most: What advice do you have for ICs who want to/are transitioning to engineering leadership...

The 5 Things You Need to Measure in Your Software Delivery Pipeline

If you're an engineering leader, in one way or another, you're building a product that's changing the world, and you're doing it with a team that continuously strives to be...

How to Use Data to Improve MTTR of Customer-Facing Bugs

Maria Alice Roche

It goes without saying that bugs have a significant impact on company growth. When products do not work as expected, customers get frustrated, and they leave for a competin...

Developing An Executive Mindset As An Engineering Leader

There is a piece of advice that I share with every engineering leader I speak to. It changed my view on engineering leadership when I heard it from my podcast co-host...

6 Decision-Making Frameworks for Engineering Leaders

Decision-making is an indispensable skill for engineering leaders. In any company building software, engineering is where the rubber meets the road, and your decisions...

Identifying Bottlenecks as Your Engineering Org. Grows

Carmo Braga da Costa

As an engineering leader, your role is to build a high-performing team that can scale. But this can be challenging, especially as the team grows.

10 Essential Lessons from 10 Software Engineering Leaders

Carmo Braga da Costa

Building high-performance teams, creating a company culture that scales, and more. Here are 10 lessons from the Engineering Leaders we’ve interviewed on Developing Leadership.

The Engineering Leader’s Process For Continuous Improvement

In my last couple of posts, I talked about the 7 Mental Models for engineering leaders and the 5 Pillars that Engineering Leaders should always have on their minds...

My Continuous Integration Takes Too Much Time. How Do I Fix It?

Vadim Markovtsev

Approaches to reducing the CI run times. Measure, optimize, leverage the hidden resources, and more.

The 5 Pillars of Successful Engineering Leadership

As engineering leaders, our job is to know how we can set up our organization for success and how to deliver impact to our end customers. This means being able to juggle...

How We Optimized Python API Server Code 100x

Vadim Markovtsev

Some of the tricks we used to speed up calls to our analytics API written in Python: played with asyncio, messed with SQLAlchemy, hacked deep in asyncpg, rewrote...

7 Mental Models For Great Engineering Leadership

A handful of mental models that, when combined, will provide a clear understanding of what is required to be a great engineering leader at different stages of your company....

The Future of Data-Enabled Engineering

I've always been a computer geek, spending a significant chunk of my life coding and the last decade building companies with strong engineering cultures. Nowadays, I limit...

Empathy Driven Software Engineering Metrics

As an engineering leader, I have experience in introducing the idea of implementing metrics to my software teams. Quite often, it is met with a groan and reluctance...

How to Optimize The Value Stream of a Software Engineering Organization

Projects used to be the cornerstone of software engineering organizations. Software companies and teams used them to manage investments, organize teams and create new...

Fuzzy Matching People Names

Vadim Markovtsev

The empirical laws of how long it takes to review and release a pull request depending on its size. We inferred them from 100,000 pull requests to commercial closed-source...

How Metrics Benefit Three Types of Engineering Leaders In An Org

Metrics don’t only help in the decision-making process, or solely benefit the highest seniority levels within a team. They have advantages for all members of the team...

In-Depth Analysis Of Software Value Stream Mapping

In this article, we first focus on how to measure value streams. Then we look at the benefits and drawbacks that value stream mapping (VSM) has...

How Should Code Reviews Be Conducted?

Code reviews are essential before releasing code. They have become a common collaboration practice and help teams distribute knowledge, maintain consistency and avoid bugs...

How Continuous Delivery & Squads Decrease Lead Time

Engineering velocity is one of the key elements to deliver valuable and innovative ideas to the customers. That is speed, but with a purposeful direction. Lead time is....

How Mission-Based Teams Benefit Your Org

Why mission-based teams are sought after. Traditionally, technology-based companies operated with a front-end team for the user interface, and a back-end team dealing with...

The True Value of Software Engineering Metrics

Modern software engineering organizations are agile. They are focused on delivering value rapidly by using continuous delivery, integration and improvement. As such...

What Is Cycle Time, and Why Is It Important?

How to better estimate when a new feature is going to be released? Cycle Time helps you better estimate time spent working on future tasks. It also helps you understand...

9 Metrics Questions Engineering Leaders Need To Ask

Why are metrics important to software engineering leaders? Since performance metrics have become readily available to software engineering leaders, they use them to...

Why We Care About Pull Request Size, and How High-Performance Organisations Break Down Work

Nowadays it’s a common collaboration practice in software development to open a Pull Request. It helps your other team members be on top of committed changes and develop...

How To Develop A Software Delivery Pipeline That Can Deliver

Engineering Managers are under constant pressure to improve their team’s output quality. Regardless of the contributions of each individual team member, there is always...

Software Development Productivity is Not About Getting More Done

Does Software Development Productivity always mean getting more work done in less time?

5 Common Issues In The Software Delivery Pipeline

Even High-Performance Organisations need to actively monitor their Software Delivery Pipeline to improve. But you don’t need to turn your team processes upside down...

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