Hero image

Managing the Chaos - Effective Engineering Leadership for High Growth Startups

9.1

(17 ratings)

·

4 Days

·

Cohort-based Course

Confidently lead engineering teams that ship and scale using techniques and lessons acquired through real-world experience.

Hosted by

Juan Pablo Buriticá and James Turnbull

Senior Engineering Leaders at Venmo, Microsoft, Stripe & Splice

Course overview

Build and manage effective teams that thrive, even in unstructured environments

Engineering Management can feel like a trap, but hey, someone's gotta do it! A move into Engineering Management can feel like a promotion, but it's a whole new job. Rather than learning that new role on your own, let us share what we've learned from our experience.


Get a headstart or strengthen your existing skillset with frameworks, templates, and real-world, proven strategies that we have refined through scaling multiple Engineering teams.


This course shares the most important lessons learned in 15+ years of leading engineering teams in early-stage and high-growth startup companies.


* Shipping working software confidently and with increasing velocity

* Setting and communicating strategy

* Managing remote and outsourced teams

* Growing your team

* Goal setting

* Tracking and reporting progress through metrics and KPIs

* Partnering with Product and Design

* Keeping your team healthy.


We've written the course we wished we had when we started in Engineering Management.

Who is this course for

01

Engineering managers with a few years of experience eager to excel in fast-paced early-stage and high-growth startup environments.

02

Experienced leaders seeking to sharpen their skills and adapt to the unique challenges of early-stage and high-growth startup companies.

03

Early-stage and startup founders and CTOs looking to accelerate the pace of their teams' software development and delivery.

What you’ll get out of this course

Examples to guide and think about your role as an Engineering Manager

Get clarity on what you need to do as an Engineering Manager in early-stage and high-growth startup companies, so you can take the lead, guide your team, and help your company succeed.

Beyond the basics knowledge on how to ship and support impactful software in a chaotic environment

Discover how to manage multiple tasks, stay focused, and deliver high-quality software in a startup environment where everything moves quickly.


Understanding what metrics are important

Hone your skills in establishing and interpreting meaningful metrics that drive your team's growth and make a measurable impact.

Ready-to-go templates to define fundamentals for your team, such as goals, charter, structure, capacity, etc.

Establish clear goals, define your team's roles and responsibilities, and build a team culture that encourages productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

Strategies to approach your technical influence and responsibilities as a leader.

Unnderstand your role as a leader and how you can use your technical skills to guide your team, optimize processes, and encourage technical excellence.

Communication techniques that will help you minimize dysfunction

Create the communication skills to overcome conflicts, align priorities, and ensure everyone cooperates smoothly.

Frameworks to keep your team healthy

Find out how to create a positive team culture that encourages personal growth, technical excellence, and long-term success, so your team can stay healthy and engaged.

Our hard-earned lessons

Learn from our mistakes before you make the same mistakes yourself.

9.1

(17 ratings)

What people are saying

        Juan and James are two of the most thoughtful and experienced engineering leaders I know, with a wealth of experience in startups of all stages of growth. This class is an excellent way to level up your engineering management skills by learning from two of the best.
Camille Fournier

Camille Fournier

Executive Engineering Leader & Author of The Manager's Path
        It truly was a fantastic experience! The content was incredibly relevant to the challenges I face as an EM in my daily job, especially within the startup world. What stood out was the valuable resources, like the practical templates provided. They're real time-savers and will certainly speed up my workflow.
Adrien

Adrien

Cohort 1 Student
        A treasure trove of actionable advice from two seasoned engineering leaders. They walked us through their playbooks of successfully building and operating a high-functioning engineering organization. With ample opportunity for Q&A in between dense learning sessions, I felt I was able to get personalized advice.
Chad

Chad

Cohort 1 Student
        A great condensation of hard won experiences creating an island of productive calm within the chaotic sea of a fast moving startup.
Brian

Brian

Cohort 1 Student
        Take this course if you want to level up as an engineering manager! I loved the live cohort format of the course. The content was well crafted, and every piece of information was helpful. The exercises were practical, and the feedback was very valuable. Learning from the instructors' experiences was priceless.
Sebastian

Sebastian

Cohort 1 Student

Meet your instructors

Juan Pablo Buriticá

Juan Pablo Buriticá

Executive Product & Engineering Leader

Juan Pablo Buriticá is a seasoned engineering leader with a focus on distributed engineering teams, fast-paced growth, and innovation. With experience at top companies like Stripe and Splice. He also led and scaled engineering teams at Ritchie Bros, Ride, Onswipe, and Panelfly.


He is the author of The Holloway Guide to Remote Work, a comprehensive resource for navigating the world of remote work, and leads the organization of conferences like JSConf Colombia.

James Turnbull

James Turnbull

VP of Product and Engineering, Smartrr

James Turnbull is VP of Product and Engineering at Smartrr. Before Smartrr, he worked at Microsoft, was founder and CTO at Empatico, CTO at Kickstarter, VP of Engineering at Venmo, and in leadership roles at GlitchDocker, Timber, and Puppet. He chaired the O'Reilly Velocity conference series, is a startup advisor and investor, and has written eleven technical books.

A pattern of wavy dots
Join an upcoming cohort

Managing the Chaos - Effective Engineering Leadership for High Growth Startups

Cohort 3

$1,250 USD

Dates

Oct 26—29, 2023

Payment Deadline

Oct 26, 2023

|

Bulk purchases

Course syllabus

01

Building and Leading Teams in a Chaotic Environment

  • Understanding Your Role
  • Establishing Team Fundamentals: Charter, Vision, Goals, and Objectives
  • Measuring what matters
  • Developing Ways of Working and Team Agreements
  • Fostering Collaboration,
  • Communication and Trust Within Your Team

02

Shipping Products While Juggling Flaming Chainsaws

  • You only had ONE job!
  • Delivering without dogma
  • Mastering Priorities, Backlogs, and Balancing Types of Work
  • Turning goals into plans
  • Budgeting
  • Vendor Management

03

Bonus: Q&A with Juan & James


04

Unleashing the "Engineering" in Engineering Management

  • Setting Technical Principles to guide decisions
  • Crafting and refining coding practices and guidelines
  • Scaling software without over-engineering
  • Technical Decision Making
  • Traps for young players, don’t rewrite it in [new language]
  • Shipping with confidence at an accelerating pace
  • DORA / SPACE and other metrics
  • Observability & operational Excellence

05

Communication: Your Secret Weapon Against Dysfunction

  • Effective channels and tools
  • Managing up and sideways
  • Productive team meetings
  • Communicating with different stakeholders
  • Priorities and expectations
  • Navigating conflict and difficult conversations
  • Keeping status and alignment in check
  • Talking about technical debt
  • How to escalate
  • Gracefully handling incidents

06

Bonus: Fireside Chat with Guest Industry Leader

You'll get to spend an hour with some of our industry's most established engineering leaders, learning from their personal experiences and giving you perspective on your individual challenges.

Course schedule

3 Day Intensive
  • Thursday, Friday, Saturday

    1 PM - 4:30 pm EDT

    We designed the course for busy leaders.


  • Pre-work

    ~ 3 hours

    Getting started projects ground all students on foundational concepts so we can go deep during the live sessions.

  • Post-course work

    Optional

    You can choose to complete post-course projects for personalized feedback highly relevant to your current role.


Learning is better with cohorts

Learning is better with cohorts

Go beyond the basics

One-on-ones are important, but there is so much more to leading engineering teams.


We will show you the way.

We're living our content

We're neither coaches nor consultants.


In fact, both of us recently left established companies to join early-stage startups and the tools you'll get are the ones we're using today.

Don't go it alone

Leadership is less lonely with a supportive community of peers.


The cohort community will have your back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the time commitment for this course?
Do I need to be in a current engineering management role to join this course?
I'm considering a transition into engineering management. Will this course be helpful for me?
I'm quite new to engineering management. Is this course suitable for me?
I am an experienced manager. Will this course provide advanced insights?
I am a manager in a large, established company. Is this course relevant to me?
Will there be opportunities to interact with other students?
What if I can't attend a live session?
What’s the refund policy?

Stay in the loop

Sign up to be the first to know about course updates.

A pattern of wavy dots
Join an upcoming cohort

Managing the Chaos - Effective Engineering Leadership for High Growth Startups

Cohort 3

$1,250 USD

Dates

Oct 26—29, 2023

Payment Deadline

Oct 26, 2023

|

Bulk purchases

$1,250 USD

9.1

(17)

·

4 Days