Stage 2 of 6 · 8 lessons · ~6 weeks
Ownership and leverage
More tickets and longer hours have a ceiling. Take ownership of a painful problem nobody owns, fix its root cause, and build tools or processes that make the whole team faster.
Start: What ownership meansLessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order
Do this
- List 5 recurring pains: flaky tests, slow builds, manual steps, noisy alerts, neglected services
- Pick the one with the clearest cost and agree with your manager that you own it
- Measure it first: failure rate, minutes lost per week or incidents per month
- Find and fix the root cause, then add a check so it does not come back
- Automate one manual step the team repeats every week
- Write a short before-and-after note and share it with the team
Start with· follow one of these
- BookFreeSoftware Engineering at Google
Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck and Hyrum Wright · Intermediate
The chapters on testing, CI and large-scale changes: fixing problems at team scale
- BookPaidThe Pragmatic Programmer
Hunt and Thomas · Intermediate · About $45
Automation, broken windows and orthogonality: the habits behind leverage
Also worth your time
Before moving on: Fix one unowned problem on your team end to end, such as flaky tests or a manual release step, and share a short write-up with before and after numbers.
Look for the thing everyone complains about in standup and nobody has a ticket for: that is your opening. Measure it before you touch it and fix the cause, not the symptom. Prefer deleting code and dependencies to adding clever ones, because every line is something someone has to maintain.