Athenian Blog

Tools, frameworks, and mental models for engineering leaders and their teams!
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Athenian acquired by the Linux Foundation: accelerating the adoption of Data-Enabled Engineering

Unveiling the journey behind Athenian & the Linux Foundation, and what will Athenian & the Linux Foundation accomplish together
Eiso Kant & Marcelo Novaes
Nov 8, 2023

DORA Metrics: What Are They, and Why Do They Matter?

We’ve been avoiding writing an article dedicated to DORA metrics for a while (if you’ve been keeping up with the blog and podcast, you know our views...
Eiso Kant
Apr 20, 2023

The Bets That Pay off for Engineering Leaders

Engineering leaders constantly make bets – from technology choices to product initiatives and staff promotions. But not all bets pay off. 
Eiso Kant
Apr 6, 2023

Align: Autonomous Improvement for Engineering Leaders Has Arrived

The impact that an amazing engineering leader can have on the team and a company blows my mind every single time. As someone with an engineering background...
Eiso Kant
Mar 28, 2023

Engineering Efficiency: A Guide to Decision-Making During The Recession

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but any engineering leader who’s been through it knows: Growth hurts efficiency.As a former VP of Engineering to a team of 200...
José Caldeira
Mar 16, 2023

Engineering Velocity: The Need For Speed in Software Engineering

During a recent episode of Developing Leadership, Jason Warner (Former CTO @ GitHub) and I had a fantastic discussion on one of the hottest topics in our space: engineering velocity.
Eiso Kant
Mar 8, 2023

Adapting During a Recession: Strategies for Engineering Leaders

As an engineering leader, balancing quality and velocity is crucial in delivering high-quality products on time. By establishing metrics, investing in...
José Caldeira
Feb 20, 2023

How To Cultivate Continuous Improvement for High-Performing Teams

It’s the question no one can seem to answer: How to engineering teams actually become high-performing?We’ve talked with hundreds of different engineering organizations in...
Paul Bleicher
Feb 17, 2023

How Metrics Impact Different Engineering Leaders & Their Teams

No matter where they stand on the organization chart, Engineering Leaders share a common goal: To see their teams continuously improve, ideally in an autonomous way...
José Caldeira
Dec 21, 2022

Building The Right Product & Building The Product Right

As a Product Manager (PM), engineering productivity is essential because it provides the predictability we need in the product development life cycle...
Anabela Cesário
Nov 9, 2022

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
Eiso Kant
Sep 29, 2022

How To Choose The Right Engineering Metrics Platform

Discover the key criteria to consider when selecting an engineering metrics platform for your software engineering teams.
Maria Alice Roche
Sep 8, 2022

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...
José Caldeira
Aug 31, 2022

To Build or to Empower: Software Engineering Career Paths Explained

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...
Lou Marvin Caraig
Aug 25, 2022

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...
José Caldeira
Aug 16, 2022

Hiring Software Engineers? 7 Engineering Leaders Share Their Biggest Lessons

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...
Carmo Braga da Costa
Aug 5, 2022

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

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...
Carmo Braga da Costa
Jul 27, 2022

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...
Marcelo Novaes
Jul 21, 2022

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.
José Caldeira
Jul 20, 2022

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...
José Caldeira
Jul 15, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
Jul 8, 2022

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...
José Caldeira
Jun 29, 2022

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
José Caldeira
Jun 10, 2022

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

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...
Carmo Braga da Costa
Jun 8, 2022

How to Build an Engineering-First Company Culture

The expectations for engineering and engineering leadership have changed tremendously in the last 20 years.
Eiso Kant
May 31, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
May 24, 2022

Why Context Matters When Analyzing Engineering Metrics

Since the introduction of DORA metrics, engineering organizations have come a long way in understanding the value of data and professionalizing their work. However...
Maria Alice Roche
May 20, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
May 17, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
May 2, 2022

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

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...
Maria Alice Roche
Apr 22, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
Apr 13, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
Apr 11, 2022

Identifying Bottlenecks as Your Engineering Org. Grows

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.
Carmo Braga da Costa
Apr 4, 2022

10 Essential Lessons from 10 Software Engineering Leaders

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.
Carmo Braga da Costa
Mar 30, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
Mar 25, 2022

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

Approaches to reducing the CI run times. Measure, optimize, leverage the hidden resources, and more.
Vadim Markovtsev
Mar 23, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
Mar 17, 2022

How We Optimized Python API Server Code 100x

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...
Vadim Markovtsev
Mar 10, 2022

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....
Eiso Kant
Mar 4, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
Mar 2, 2022

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...
Eiso Kant
Dec 22, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Dec 2, 2021

Fuzzy Matching People Names

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...
Vadim Markovtsev
Nov 16, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Nov 8, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Oct 22, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Oct 14, 2021

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....
Eiso Kant
Oct 3, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Sep 23, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Sep 15, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Sep 5, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Aug 24, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Aug 14, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Aug 3, 2021

Software Development Productivity is Not About Getting More Done

Does Software Development Productivity always mean getting more work done in less time?
Eiso Kant
Jul 20, 2021

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...
Eiso Kant
Jul 12, 2021

Athenian can help you apply all these learnings.

Find out how!