Since I became a Tech Leader in 2020, I didn’t have time to stop. I went from managing a team in a startup to being Head of Engineering of six teams, about 40 engineers.
It has been three intense years. I’m glad I met talented people I worked with. And I hope I made a great impact on those journies we shared.
Keeping a good work-life balance has been challenging for the last few months when the personal side demands more attention than what you dedicate to. I needed to take care of myself and start creating healthier habits (and I’m achieving it! 🙌), and being a Head of Engineering at a Startup pre-PMF is a considerable responsibility and demanding role. I wasn’t doing myself a favor nor to the team.
That’s why I decided to step down as Head of Engineering to slow down and take care of myself to explore the next journey.
I recall the post “Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder” that a great person shared when he moved back from Management to Developer.
💯 reading recommendation.
Understanding the next step
I’m a person who loves to create stuff and to help others to succeed.
So, being at home away from code and people is challenging. Plus, I still need to pay the bills.
I made a short list of things I want to do:
I want to build personal projects and aim to monetize them.
I want to help others to improve their organizations/socio-technical architecture from what I learned as an engineering leader.
I want to do workshops/trainings on those learnings.
I want to type code.
I also made a list of things I don’t want to do:
Management role with direct reports.
Full-time commitment.
Independent Consultant Journey
Becoming a Freelancer and working as an Independent Consultant is the best option to explore what’s to come.
Let me share with you the two areas I’m exploring now. Services and online courses.
Services
Doing my webpage helped me shape better, which is my value proposition.
I love to help organizations to succeed, regardless of their stage.
Starting: Building the first MVP, what to build first? Which technologies? Is it viable and affordable?
Growing: Your MVP is validated, and you have to build more teams and products.
Scaling: You lead a mid-size engineering organization (50-150 developers), and you need a pair of eyes on how to organize the teams and architecture (the socio-technical architecture) for Fast Flow.
I worked in those environments and had the painful experience of navigating their complexities.
I like to see myself as an engineering leadership pair that helps you navigate your complexities when you miss the right conversations or a fresh view in your product-engineering challenge.
How do I plan to help in those very specific contexts?
Engineering Strategy consulting where I analyze all your business and engineering.
Facilitate workshops to discover domains, define MVPs, …
In-house development for critical components.
Platform as a Product Workshop Course
You might know I’m a Team Topologies Advocate, and I frequently share my learnings when I use it in different contexts and situations.
At Creditas, we needed to create a Platform Team for the tribe. I took the Platform as a Product course by TeamTopologies and encouraged people to take it.
But, aligning people on what “Platform as a Product” is and defining the Thinnest Viable Platform following those principles is hard if you don’t align people first.
Because of that, I created the Platform as a Product Workshop at Creditas to align business, product, and engineering on the Platform initiative. Which combines the TeamTopologies PaaP + Lean Inception by Paulo Caroli.
I’m building a course to help you run that Workshop in your organization and team to adopt PaaP and define the Thinnest Viable Platform.
The price for early adopters is 50EUR + VAT. When I start releasing the course content, the price will go up 🚀
I will also facilitate that workshop for your company if you need it sooner and don’t want to wait for the course to be available :)
Thank you 🧡
For supporting me during my journey. Sharing my learnings and receiving positive and supportive feedback about the content helped me be more confident in taking the step forward and starting as an independent consultant!
Meme for you
