Athenian Blog

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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

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...

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 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...

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

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....

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...