My journey out of management has created some space for me to think about how to grow as a technical leader. There isn’t an easy recipe here. In management, there is a clear list of things for everyone to work on: organization, EQ, delegation, effective status reports, efficient meetings, wrangling backlog negotiations, etc. There are similarly obvious moves on a purely technical track: learn technology X, complete a Staff project, mentor other engineers in their technical ideas and practices, keep track of and evangelize tech debt, improve monitoring and observability, etc.

I spent the last year and a half or so managing an engineering team at Olo. It was a ton of fun. I grew a team from 3 engineers to 8. I led projects of critical importance to the business. I advanced important changes for individuals, teams, and the whole org. I worked with an outstanding Product Manager. I had a excellent group of EM peers. My team performed great, and seemed happy with my leadership.

In [my last post about #noestimates] (https://smallerinfinity.com/posts/my-approach-to-noestimates/), I touched briefly on story sizing. This prompted a couple of questions from a thoughtful reviewer. What made you pick 5 days as the right size? Are you just comparing the stories to previous ones to say - yep, this feels like 5 days compared to the last x number of stories that we have sized in the past? Let’s dig into this some more.

For the two and a half years, I’ve been running projects with significantly less estimation ceremony. The approach has not been perfect, nor has it been entirely without estimation of any kind. Here’s an overview on how I tried to make it work. Backlog Setup At the beginning of each project, I met with Product Owners repeatedly, for deep dive conversations about what they wanted out of the project. My starting goal was to identify the least amount of work possible to barely satisfy the project needs.

Today is my last day at BIOVIA. It’s been nearly twelve years. I’m excited and afraid, prepared and uncertain, glad for something new and grateful for everything customary. I’ve been really lucky here. I’ve had some great mentors and trainers. I’ve received the wonderful gift of leaders giving me opportunities and getting out of my way to work on them. I’ve travelled to cool places. I’ve made friends in far flung corners of the world.

Welcome to smallerinfinity.com! I have owned this domain for close to a decade now, and I have never made the time to make it anything more than a joke. Here’s a picture of how the domain looked yesterday to an external observer: Clearly, something more professional was warranted. How I set this site up I got the inspiration for doing this site from this very excited post describing the ease of setting up a static site on github pages using GoHugo and Github Pages.

Wow. Starting this with something named “First Post” inspires my “paralysis by analysis” response in a big way. For example, I just spent thirty seconds thinking about whether to change “inspires my” above to something else. My name Seth McCarthy. I currently manage a software development team at BIOVIA, a brand of Dassault Systemes. For a long time I haven’t done anything technical outside of my job. It hasn’t been for lack of interest, just for lack of white-space in my schedule.