Rising to engineering leadership challenges at Honeycomb with Emily Nakashima from Honeycomb
Aug 8, 2024
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Emily Nakashima, VPE at Honeycomb, dives into the nuances of engineering leadership and collaboration. She discusses the tough decisions leaders face when structuring their teams and the pivotal shift from monitoring to observability. Emily emphasizes the importance of cross-functional collaboration, revealing stories of successes and missteps. She shares insights on effective goal-setting, innovative hiring practices, and the value of a strong communication culture in scaling teams. Tune in for her hot takes on tech trends and organizational challenges.
Effective engineering leadership involves navigating structuring challenges while fostering cross-team collaboration to enhance organizational efficiency.
Establishing clear goals through processes like OKRs and KPIs is vital for aligning engineering efforts with overarching business objectives.
Deep dives
Leadership and Structural Challenges in Engineering
An engineering leader must navigate the complexities of structuring and restructuring their organization to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. This involves making tough choices about team composition and the balancing act of maintaining daily operations while contributing to strategic decision-making at the executive level. Such leaders often transition through various roles, gaining insights from their previous experiences, which can uniquely inform their approach to management. For instance, Emily Nakashima's journey at Honeycomb showcases how she evolved from a front-end engineer to Vice President of Engineering, learning the intricacies of leadership along the way.
The Essence of Observability
Observability is defined as the ability to understand a system's state without altering it, and it extends beyond simple monitoring to offer deeper insights into performance. Honeycomb, as a pioneering observability platform, allows users to ask complex questions about their systems without the constraints of pre-aggregated metrics. This distinction helps engineering teams not only identify known issues but also discover underlying problems through exploratory data analysis. The conversation highlights how such tools are valuable not only in production environments but also for understanding development processes and bottlenecks.
Collaborative Engineering Culture
A successful engineering organization thrives on cross-team collaboration and clear communication, which are critical to tackling complex projects. Honeycomb emphasizes transparency and respect across functional disciplines, fostering an environment where engineers engage meaningfully with teams like product and marketing. This approach cultivates curiosity among staff, encouraging them to share insights and feedback that improve overall productivity. The ability to negotiate ownership of tasks and projects across teams is facilitated by a culture that values diverse perspectives and expertise.
Goal Setting and Performance Metrics
Establishing clear goals through processes like OKRs and KPIs is essential for engineering teams to measure success and align efforts with business objectives. While KPIs serve as health metrics for tracking ongoing performance, OKRs focus on setting specific, impactful targets for the future. The challenge lies in the need for engineering teams to deliver significant projects within a quarter, making it difficult to assess the long-term effects of their work in such short cycles. Balancing these goals while ensuring team engagement and maintaining momentum can require continuous refinement of the goal-setting process.
Emily Nakashima, VPE at Honeycomb, shares her experience about the hard choices an engineering leader has to make about how to structure — and sometimes restructure — their engineering org.
Emily and Rebecca talk cross-team collaboration, emphasizing eng as an equal partner to other functions, and mistakes that seemed like such a good idea at the time.
Find the transcript at: https://www.unblocked.fm/episodes/emily-nakashima-honeycomb/
Timestamps
(0:00) Introductions
(0:49) Emily’s journey to Honeycomb
(4:45) Observability vs. Monitoring
(7:55) About being VPE at Honeycomb
(10:13) What makes Honeycomb unique
(15:50) About Honeycomb’s structuring strategy
(19:20) Cross-team collaboration
(23:57) Examples of cross-team collaboration
(26:20) About ownership challenges
(29:01) Setting goals
(33:41) Hiring software engineers
(38:26) Pros and cons of ‘culture fit’
(42:35) Emily’s hot take on tech
Follow Emily on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eanakashima/
Follow Rebecca on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rmurphey/
Links and mentions
• Honeycomb: https://www.honeycomb.io/
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