Level-up Engineering Antifragile - Manage Your Team Under Pressure: Adam Wolff (VP of Engineering, Robinhood)
Learn how to build an engineering team that not only survives under pressure, but consistently gets better. Adam Wolff explains the key ideas you need to know to make your team antifragile, and shows you how they've worked out through his personal experience from Robinhood and Facebook.
In this interview we're covering:
- Concepts of antifragility
- Internal and external sources of stress for engineering teams
- Necessary characteristics of an antifragile engineering team
- Agile methods and antifragility
- How to measure antifragility in an engineering team
- The leader's contribution to antifragility
- How to make an agile team antifragile
- Hiring for antifragility
Excerpt from the interview:
"What I don't like about agile is that it's become more like a cult than a set of ideas. It has great basics, like the team should get together every day to discuss what they're doing, or to run development in a few weeks of increments. Agile also preserves optionality well if development doesn’t go smoothly.
What I sometimes miss from agile software development is the longer arc.
Agile can be surprisingly short-sighted. You set a goal, and you work towards that in two-week increments. It lacks the moments where you consider a black swan event and the monthly checkpoints where you make sure if you’re still building the right product..."