Oscillating between the roles of individual contributor and management has been a recurring theme on this show. Our guest today, Rich Lafferty, has some special insights into this pattern that can help anyone looking to improve their work. Rich works as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer at PagerDuty and has spent many years interfacing with various departments and building projects and proposals. In our conversation with Rich, we discuss how his past roles have informed his work at PagerDuty and how he gets the most out of his teams without exploiting the authority that comes with his more senior role. We delve into Rich’s process for building proposals and learn some of his tips and tricks for ensuring the best possible outcome by investing in the foundation and design phase. We also explore the importance of early feedback, why you need to include a diverse group of individuals, and how to gradually grow your feedback group. Tune in as we discuss everything from risk management to high and low context culture, and much more!

Links

• Rich Lafferty
• Being Glue
• Behind Human Error
• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
• John Allspaw