02 The Philosophical Layer

“You are entirely correct but you’ve also horribly failed your task. You are way off track. These are not values”. Gal said after I showed him The Triangle, what would become the philosophical layer and guidelines of Silo’s architecture.

The boog’s first article, I don’t know, ended with the one one thing we knew for sure - the customer expectations. Not only that, Silo’s device design, patents and future marketing were all about the customer experience. I remember the first time we showcased the device, repeating again and again “Silo is the world’s smartest and easiest vacuum sealer - ever!”. There are other vacuum sealers in the market, but ours is the most user friendly that will ever be.

As I expected an endless stream of tasks, one of the first things I needed as an engineering manager was to manage them. I needed to manage tasks and my team. As I was sprinting (pun intended) towards signing up to Jira, I halted my horses thinking to myself “you know how to use Jira, do you know why you use Jira?”. Historically speaking the answer is because until now I’ve always joined a company that already used Jira, so naturally I wanted to go with what I know.

I’ve opened this series of articles with a conversation I had with my mentor about Company Values. Another interesting conversation we had was iterating and optimizing the company’s workflows and culture. As an industrial engineer it was no news to me, but as an engineering manager it was. I had to ask myself what is it in our development culture that causes Velocity drops. When was the last time you questioned yourself… about yourself? What is it that you as a manager do that causes Velocity drops? What can you do to prevent them?