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Jade Rubick
Engineering leadership blog by Jade Rubick
- Posts
- 113 from 21 Jun 2007 to 22 Oct 2026
- Posting
- monthly (12 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://www.rubick.com/rss.xml
2026 11
- Available for advising and coaching.
- The ratchet
- The trendy leadership trend that is trending
- The executive loop
- Yes you can measure engineering velocity (and AI impact)
- How to think about span of control
- Written culture is higher leverage
- How to reason about reliability risk
- Should QA exist
- Adding innovation labs
- First agree on the tradeoffs
2025 14
- Calendar rules I learned from an EA
- Some AI surprises in late 2025
- Getting out of thrash mode
- Reducing dependencies
- Some shoulds for strategy
- Don't make your engineering team commit
- Piles point out your problems aka why your AI coding is slowing things down
- The Campsite Rule
- Reflecting power - using power you don't have
- Product management resources
- How to develop a sixth sense for the long-term
- Task Forces can solve (some of) your cross-functional challenges
- Reliability is all stick, no carrot
- Your team may need a Hero Rotation
2024 16
- Massively multiplayer retrospectives
- Tiny Thursdays
- Why and how to do skip level 1-1s
- Don't repeat incidents
- How to avoid being a bottleneck leader
- Organizational work and the second job
- Macho leadership and bro culture
- Managing a bottleneck team
- The danger of fan out work
- Strategy pitfalls (on the Level Up podcast)
- Evil staging and gauntlet programs, tools to increase your software reliability
- The dangers of unreliable platforms (on the SRE Path podcast)
- Velocity role 4 - the Nowist
- Velocity role 3 - the Dodger
- Velocity role 2 - the Mole
- Velocity role 1 - the Subtractionist
2023 22
- Group leadership coaching
- Organizational danger zones
- The best approach I've seen for hiring junior engineers
- Tactical advice for building effective eng teams, anti-patterns to avoid (Snack bites podcast)
- A detailed look at FaST agile -- a practice well worth your time
- Curious about becoming an executive consultant?
- The ultimate playbook for hiring engineering managers - a step-by-step guide
- The secret to holding a candidate review meeting that isn't boring as hell
- How an executive advisor can help you grow faster and navigate unfamiliar terrain
- Steel threads are a technique that will make you a better engineer
- Solving cross-team priorities with a Product Council - an experience report
- A history of Mini-Ms
- High trust and low trust organizations
- Advice for new directors
- What tools to use for an engineering handbook
- Your process should be open source
- Variations for Mini-M management support groups
- How to implement Mini-M support groups
- Uplevel your managers with Mini-M support groups
- Books on management
- Implementing software engineering levels (with fully-usable examples)
- Leaders make their own problems
2022 10
- A weekly project plan you will want to frame
- How to not screw up your product strategy
- Why are process gates the hellish spawn of evil you should avoid at all cost?
- If you want to be a terrible manager, focus on being a shit shield
- Learn the weekly rituals you should master as a software project manager
- Can this ownership exercise improve how you work with others?
- What do great engineering managers need to know about compensation and equity?
- Make changes that people will embrace
- Use these tips to improve your executive presence
- How security, reliability, and design teams can get other teams to do work for them -- the Objective Expert Model
2021 29
- Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects
- Using a DSLR for video conferencing
- Engineering manager vs. tech lead -- which is better?
- Achieve autonomy in product engineering with the independent executor model
- Working together is the best -- the guide to happy embedding
- Should platform teams deprecate or does that cause massive problems?
- Liaison - the spy you'll love to send to other teams
- Don’t use goal frameworks to manage projects
- Scale platform teams with the best approach for platform teams - self-service
- Beware the service provider model - a recipe for engineering team failure
- No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making
- Coordination models - tools for getting groups to work well together
- How to build silos and decrease collaboration (on purpose)
- Bundled hiring to double the effectiveness of your hiring process
- Write compelling and unbiased job descriptions
- Use a candidate packet to improve your interview process
- Rethink your hiring strategy to stand out and delight the best candidates
- Your hiring process is too slow -- speed it up with these five tips
- Wonderful hiring practices that for some reason aren't more common
- Exploration and exploitation in technical standards
- Everyone lies to leaders
- Use holiday focus days to increase company focus and honor your team's diversity
- Unusual tips to keep Slack from becoming a nightmare
- How to refactor meetings as they grow with the rule of eight
- Glue your happy brains together with shared state
- Use OKRs to drive equity
- Demo-driven development
- Make your team miserable with one of these popular project-management anti-patterns
- Implementing Amazon's single threaded owner model a retrospective
2020 8
- Increase your impact with upstream thinking
- Coordinate your interviews with assertion-based interview plans
- Implementing promotion bias checks
- What can air combat teach us about software project failure?
- Tools to make your organization better
- Why is engineering slowing down? How leaders can create happy teams and good results in chaos
- A practical guide to implementing pay equity in engineering
- If you want a good company culture, focus on equity