Leading engineers and delivering software in a large, established company is challenging. Leading engineers and delivering software in chaotic, fast-moving, scaling or high-growth companies is a whole art. Many organizations in high-growth don’t have tooling, processes, prior art, or structure. Or if they do those processes are constantly broken or in chaos because as a consequence of rapid change. As a leader, you’re often creating a new organization from scratch. You don’t just have one job as an engineering leader; you have many roles you might not have expected to perform: recruiting, HR, procurement, product, or finance. You have to be flexible, adaptable, and know how to make the right investment decisions.

On top of that, you have to ship products, find product-market fit, and grow your business. All in an environment where resources are scarce, the market and your strategy can change in minutes, and you’re growing faster and faster every day. At its heart, we want to help people understand how to work and succeed amidst the chaos of early-stage and high-growth companies.

We're Juan Pablo Buriticá and James Turnbull. Between us, we've both led engineering teams for more than ten years and worked in many early-stage and high-growth companies, including Stripe, Splice, Ride, Puppet, Venmo, Docker, and Kickstarter.

We started this newsletter because most of the engineering leadership material we read is fantastic, but its advice sometimes breaks down in high-growth environments. Additionally, "My job is chaotic" or "I work in a start-up" is sometimes an excuse not to apply rigor to leadership and engineering processes.

We will share the advice and practices we've found successful in leading engineering teams and delivering products at early-stage and high-growth companies. These practices, combined with flexibility and adaptability, can help you lead through and control some of the chaos surrounding you as you grow your team and, critically, ship product. Significantly, they'll help you succeed with your team and continue to be effective on an increasingly larger scale with products, teams, and challenges.