Episode description

Interview with John Ford, VP of Engineering and Site Leader at LogMeIn about his management framework to turn around underachieving teams and improve overall team performance. Learn from his practical tips and tricks while listening to some of the stories from his decades worth of engineering leadership experience!

In this interview we're covering:

• Assessing team performance
• Velocity goals for a productive engineering team
• Focus points for underperforming teams
• People improvements
• Process improvements
• Technical improvements
• A story about turning around an underachieving team
• Bonus advice

Excerpt from the interview:

"My advice for engineering managers and leaders is to keep an open mind because there might be many reasons for suboptimal performance. There are lots of differences between companies in engineering culture, team history, management, etc.

If you’ve been running your team for a while, and the performance is dropping off, the reason is often a lack of clarity around the high-level objectives. In this case, you need to link the product or company strategy to the daily work of the team, and to provide direction about the higher-level strategy. Consider these questions:

• What's important for my manager?
• What’s the team doing..."

Click here to read the full interview!