Learn how to create a learning culture as your engineering team scales from Urban Airship Senior Technical Advisor, Reed College Professor and former Twitter Engineer, Lennon Day-Reynolds. Presented at the Hive engineering leadership summit at the Tumo Center in Yerevan Armenia. Learn more about hiring top tech talent: https://teamable.com

1. Those Who Can Should
Teach
Building and Sustaining a Learning Culture

2. tl;dr
• Organizational debt can cripple your team
• As your team grows, knowledge gets isolated in particular individuals
• Training and teaching helps
• Do it all the time, not just on special occasions

3. About me
• Current: Urban Airship + Reed College
• Previous: Twitter, Dark Horse Comics, Sun Microsystems, Kestrel
Institute
• ~15 years as a coder, ~5 as a manager + director
• Particularly interested in how to design and evolve teams to work
better

4. What’s wrong with just doing?

5. A normal team story
• Your team has early success; yay! Praise and promotions all around.
• Now it’s time to do more, and that means more people
• With a bigger team, we can do more, but…

6. Strangely, teams get slower
as they get bigger

7. What slows us down?
• Technical shortcuts create technical debt
• Business and management shortcuts create organizational debt
• Your bigger, better team has accrued both kinds
• As developers we aren’t trained to spot and fix organizational debt

8. What are common kinds of org debt?
• Weak/unavailable managers
• Overwork and burnout
• Poor communication across teams
• Lone experts and knowledge “silos”

9. What’s so bad about “lone
experts?”

10. Great people are still just people
• They get spread too thin and become a bottleneck
• Leads to other kinds of org debt: overwork, bad communication
• Even the best developer on your team won’t be around forever

11. How do we break the cycle?

12. Need >1 person well-versed in your
critical tech
Option 1: Hire
• Can work so long as you use only
off-the-shelf technology
• You don’t write any code in-
house, right?
Option 2: Teach
• Your current expert turns other
team members into experts
• Requires investment of time and
energy

13. Lots of reasons to train (not
just hire)

14. Teaching reinforces understanding
• You can’t effectively teach something you don’t understand
• …and learning to teach others will fill in gaps in your knowledge
• Teaching across teams builds understanding and empathy

15. Good news: you’re already (hopefully)
teaching through your workflow
• Code review, new hire training, design reviews, etc.: all opportunities
to teach!
• Mentorship: make it an official part of the job
• Ditto for internal and public talks and presentations

16. Getting more advanced

17. “Formal” training
• Observe a need (lots of questions on a topic; critical system few
people understand; etc.)
• Develop + deliver a basic talk or tutorial
• Take feedback, improve
• Report out on the results, and repeat!

18. Develop a cadence
• Training opportunities should be ongoing
• Offer training on a repeating basis for accessibility and quality
• Recipients of training should go on to deliver it themselves

19. Parting thoughts

20. Teaching is hard
• Simply talking at people isn’t enough; you need conversation and
feedback
• Senior team members need to be examples of both aspects
• Good teachers adapt the message to their audience

21. Organizations can help
• People work on things that are recognized and rewarded
• Teaching needs to be part of this
• Leaders: make this part of performance review + promotion

22. Questions?

23. Thank you!
Lennon Day-Reynolds
lennon@rcoder.net / @rcoder