How To Build A Fulfilling Career Path For Your Engineers

We’ve all been there – you want to be there for your team, but you end up pushing back 1:1 meetings because there’s a lot on your plate. Or your team member wants to practice a particular framework but you don’t have any upcoming work that would let them do that. Or you’re heading into a career development conversation and trying to figure out how to share some tough feedback.

At the same time, a regular piece of feedback from individual contributors is that they’d like their managers to provide more support for their career development..

So what’s an engineering manager to do? How can we help our teams build fulfilling careers while juggling their asks with all the other work on our plate? And how do we balance their development areas with completing the work that needs to be done? Doing this well will not only help our team’s satisfaction and morale, but also support our own progress in our organization – but it’s easier said than done.

This talk provides concrete tips to help you do better in supporting your team on their career development journey. We’ll talk about strategies to:

- The bedrock for a fulfilling career (awareness)
- Make time for 1:1s – even when things get busy!
- Focus 1:1’s on growth & development (not work)
- Balance between improving weaknesses versus cultivating strengths

This is a talk Rahul gave at the [Tech Leaders Chat](https://www.meetup.com/tech-leader-chats/events/293719388/) hosted by [Multitudes](https://www.multitudes.co/).

Master The Art of Successful Negotiations: Unlock Your Full Potential

A practical negotiation workshop led by Nadav Klein, professor at INSEAD and instructor at Minerva Project. 

Nadav discussed the importance of negotiation skills in both professional and personal life, emphasizing the need to understand human behavior and the mechanics of negotiations. He highlighted the significance of practice -- the more you do it, the better you become!

It's important to identify zero-sum issues vs cooperative issues in negotiations. You should **strive to find ways to cooperate and create win-win situations by understanding and prioritizing the differences in what each party wants**. Critical to this is to bridge the information gaps and understand how we evaluate ourselves vs how others evaluate us.

- [Connect with Nadav on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadavklein/)

More resources on negotiations:
- [The #1 Rule Of Negotiation - How To Avoid Giving A Number](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/4T3wTorG47wPzSqVmAOx/the-1-rule-of-negotiation-how-to-avoid-giving-a-number/)
- [[Case Study] How To Land 18 FAANG+ Offers With Steven Zhang (Airtable, USDR, Tableau)](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/gGkO4pLeFq1ctRM9tSBF/case-study-how-to-land-18-faang-offers-with-steven-zhang-airtable-usdr-tableau/)
- [3 Quick, Powerful Negotiation Tips](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/8VeEnbxdbPKsZbTcCFm5/3-quick-powerful-negotiation-tips/)

How To Navigate Your Stock Options

This section of the video explores **what to do with startup stock options**—both while employed and after leaving a company. It emphasizes evaluating offer quality upfront and making strategic decisions about exercising options based on company outlook and personal risk tolerance.

- **Understand the offer**: When joining a startup, it's important to know both the **strike price** (cost to buy shares) and the **fair market value (FMV)** of the shares. A significant gap between these numbers indicates more potential upside.
- **Don’t exercise too early**: While employed, it's typically better to wait before exercising options. Exercising early ties up personal capital and carries risk if the company performs poorly or fails before a liquidity event.
- **Exception for early-stage employees**: If the cost to exercise is very low (e.g., a few hundred dollars), it may make sense to do so early to start the **long-term capital gains clock** for better tax treatment.
- **After leaving the company**: Most startups require options to be exercised within **90 days of departure**. If there's confidence in the company’s future, it may be worth exercising all or part of the options—otherwise, it might be best to walk away.
- **Weigh risk vs. return**: Exercising options is a personal investment decision. If the company is struggling or unlikely to succeed, even favorable strike prices can result in total losses.

Assembling The Feedback "Avengers" For Your Promotion Case

The “Do No Harm” Principle In Coding

In this segment, we discuss the principle of **"Do No Harm"**—a foundational mindset for writing safe, reliable code. While it's great to break large features into smaller diffs, it's essential that each individual diff **stands alone** as non-destructive and does not degrade the product or infrastructure if applied independently.

### Key Takeaways:

- **We ensure every diff is safe in isolation**: Even in stacked diffs, each change must not break functionality or expose incomplete features. Every diff should be self-contained and ideally improve (or at least preserve) the integrity of the codebase.
- **We avoid relying on future diffs to patch behavior**: It's risky to land an unstable or unfinished diff assuming a follow-up will fix it. If that follow-up is delayed or rolled back (e.g., due to a production issue), the earlier diff could introduce bugs or break the app.
- **We use feature gates wisely and early**: When launching features behind flags, we gate the feature at the very beginning—not in later diffs—to avoid exposing half-baked functionality in production.
- **We’re cautious with shared infrastructure**: If a diff touches a shared module or critical system, we proactively reach out to other teams to confirm our changes won’t unintentionally break their workflows or apps.
- **We understand our code lives in a larger system**: Like parts of a giant elephant, changes in one place can affect parts we can’t see. Practicing empathy and caution helps us prevent cascading issues in complex, multi-team environments.

The “Do No Harm” principle reminds us that good engineering isn’t just about adding features—it’s about protecting trust, stability, and the broader system our code lives in.

A Simple Trick To Make Your Meetings More Efficient

What can you do before a meeting to empower it to achieve more outcomes?

You write down an agenda for your upcoming meeting, and you realize that it is incredibly rich and complex. What else can you do to level up the meeting?

Preparing and sharing an agenda before meetings—especially manager one-on-ones—leads to more thoughtful discussions and better outcomes.

- **Pre-fill the meeting agenda early**: Add discussion topics at least a day in advance to give others time to prepare.
- **Proactively notify participants**: Ping the other attendees to let them know the agenda is ready and encourage them to review it before the meeting.
- **Avoid putting others on the spot**: Sharing discussion points beforehand prevents “deer in the headlights” moments where participants may not be ready to respond thoughtfully.
- **Encourage richer conversation**: When participants have time to reflect, meetings become more action-oriented and less reactive.

Why Team Selection Is So Critical

We open by explaining that choosing the right company or team is one of the highest-leverage decisions we can make in our software engineering careers.

Here are the core points from the lesson:

- We use the “bus on a highway” analogy to show that company choice determines how far we can go; our personal effort only determines where we sit on that bus.
- Even if we perform exceptionally, joining a stagnant or declining company limits our long-term trajectory, while joining a fast-moving, hyper-growth company can accelerate our career dramatically.
- Real-world examples like Marin Software versus Google illustrate how picking the right “bus” can either stall or amplify career outcomes, independent of our individual contributions.

The Path To Career Success

Before diving into the pros and cons of Big Tech, we introduce two foundational career frameworks that offer different approaches to growth. These models help structure decision-making as one considers roles at large tech companies.

- **Explore vs. Exploit (David Epstein’s “Range”)**: In the early career stages, it’s valuable to gather a wide range of experiences—trying different roles or disciplines—to discover personal strengths and interests. This sampling period can lead to deeper, more informed commitments later.
- **Cultivate Passion through Skill (Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”)**: Rather than waiting to find a passion, pick a field and become excellent at it. Passion often emerges through mastery and impact in a chosen domain.
- Both frameworks offer valid paths and should be selected based on personal goals and life stage. The talk later connects these frameworks to the realities of working in Big Tech.

Control

In this final phase, we ensure that the gains achieved through improvements don’t erode over time. Control is about sustaining operational excellence, detecting deviations early, and building mechanisms—both human and automated—that keep the system performing at its best.

### Key Takeaways:

- **We implement control mechanisms to preserve gains**: Once we achieve desired service levels, we don’t assume they’ll stay that way. We actively maintain them through tools like regular audits, alarms, and ongoing data validation.
- **The Weekly Business Review (WBR) reinforces control**: Our WBR report includes 200–300 metrics. We review only the outliers, but by tracking all key indicators weekly, we maintain vigilance and are able to quickly detect when something goes off-course.
- **We rely on automation for precision and scalability**: From real-time alarms to machine-driven decision-making, we automate wherever possible. These systems are monitored to ensure they perform within tolerance thresholds.

To dive deeper into Input Metrics Mastery and learn more from Bill and Colin, follow these links:

- Take the full course at their website: <https://workingbackwards.com/>
- Buy the book: <https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595>
- Bill's LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-carr/>
- Colin's LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinbryar/>

Intro To Input Metrics

In this lesson, we explore what input metrics are, why they matter, and how shifting our focus from outputs to controllable inputs transformed the way we operated at Amazon. We learned—sometimes the hard way—that sustainable success comes not from chasing end results, but from rigorously managing the elements we directly control.

### Key Takeaways:

- **We learned to distinguish between input and output metrics**: Outputs like revenue or share price are lagging indicators and largely outside our direct control. In contrast, input metrics—customer-facing and operational—are controllable levers that drive those outputs.
- **We saw the importance of focusing on controllable inputs**: By investing resources in areas like software, marketing, operations, or process improvements, we influenced outcomes in a predictable and sustainable way. Examples include inventory record accuracy and marketing spend.
- **We realized the limitations of reactive output chasing**: Trying to salvage quarterly financials with last-minute promotions often distracted us from what truly mattered—improving the customer experience.
- **We began managing our business as a system of processes**: We stopped reacting to fire drills and started proactively measuring and optimizing the activities (inputs) that lead to better long-term results.
- **We gained a competitive edge through disciplined input tracking**: While most teams naturally measure outputs, few rigorously track inputs. By doing so, we developed a significant operational advantage that helped Amazon scale sustainably.

To dive deeper into Input Metrics Mastery and learn more from Bill and Colin, follow these links:

- Take the full course at their website: <https://workingbackwards.com/>
- Buy the book: <https://www.amazon.com/Working-Backwards-Insights-Stories-Secrets/dp/1250267595>
- Bill's LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-carr/>
- Colin's LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinbryar/>

The Five Pillars of Business

In this first module, we explore the essence of individual contributor roles through the lens of core business functions. This sets the stage for understanding how management fits into the bigger picture.

- We break down IC roles across the **five pillars of business** (from Josh Kaufman): value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance—clarifying how each function contributes.
- The **essence of software engineering** is to create value by building software that solves problems for customers.
- Marketing professionals focus on **raising awareness** of that value, while salespeople focus on **exchanging value**, usually closing deals.
- Roles in value delivery, like customer support or DevOps, ensure that users receive and benefit from the value created.
- Finance professionals ensure **business sustainability**, tracking what’s working financially and what isn’t.
- This clarity of purpose—knowing what success looks like—is often **missing in management**, which leads us to part two: defining the true essence of a manager’s role.

If you want to learn more from Gilad, he shares free leadership advice daily on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladnaor/?utm_source=taro&utm_medium=course&utm_campaign=cta) and weekly on the[ δeltas newsletter](https://posts.managementdeltas.com/?utm_source=taro&utm_medium=course&utm_campaign=cta)

Course Introduction

In this opening session, Gilad Noor introduces the Essence of Management course, outlining what we’ll learn, how it’s structured, and what to expect. The focus is on practical, actionable lessons that help us become better managers.

- We’ll explore one core management lesson across **four modules**, combining theory with hands-on exercises to build real-world skills.
- The course begins with a look at the **individual contributor role** to set the foundation, then shifts to the core question: *What is a manager’s job—really?*
- Later modules help us **practice and apply** what we learn, and then explore how to take our management capabilities even further.
- Gilad brings his experience as an engineering manager at Meta, Amazon, and a clean tech startup, along with his work coaching over 100 managers.
- The course is designed to be **accessible, practical, and growth-oriented**, helping us avoid common mistakes and accelerate our impact as managers.

If you want to learn more from Gilad, he shares free leadership advice daily on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladnaor/?utm_source=taro&utm_medium=course&utm_campaign=cta) and weekly on the[ δeltas newsletter](https://posts.managementdeltas.com/?utm_source=taro&utm_medium=course&utm_campaign=cta)

Explanation Examples

In this extended segment, we see the CLEAR framework applied to real machine learning interview questions. Through examples, we’re shown how to craft strong, structured answers that go far beyond buzzwords or surface knowledge. This approach helps us communicate our understanding with clarity and depth.

- For a question like **"How do decision trees work?"**, we learn to walk through each part of CLEAR: define the concept, link to related ideas (e.g., random forests), provide real-world use cases, weigh pros and cons (e.g., interpretability vs. overfitting), and explain evaluation metrics (e.g., accuracy, RMSE).
- When comparing **CNNs vs. RNNs**, we avoid vague statements and instead explain each model’s core function, typical applications (e.g., image classification vs. time-series forecasting), and evaluation metrics, even including hybrid use cases for extra depth.
- For the common question **"How do you handle class imbalance?"**, we’re shown how to define the issue, link it to broader modeling challenges, provide realistic examples (e.g., fraud detection), explore trade-offs in techniques like resampling and reweighting, and select meaningful metrics like precision, recall, and AUC-ROC.
- We’re reminded that **bad answers often list jargon** without context or reasoning, while **great answers show structured thought**, connect theory to practice, and demonstrate the ability to make sound trade-offs.

If you want to learn even more from Yayun:

- Book 1 on 1 career guidance with her here: <https://calendly.com/your-friend-yayun/1on1>
- Follow her on LinkedIn: <https://www.linkedin.com/in/yayunjin/>

You can’t force someone into ownership.

You don’t know how much someone is carrying.\
But you feel it when they stop moving.

This isn’t about accountability frameworks or “holding people to outcomes.”\
It’s about what shuts people down—and what might help them open back up.

**Want to go deeper?**

- Explore more tools and courses at [**Taha’s Method**](https://www.tahasmethod.com/) — from interview prep to leadership development.

- Follow me on [**LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahahussain/) and subscribe to my weekly newsletter, [**The Conscious Leader**](https://tahahussain.substack.com/), for more lessons like these.

- Get 30% off [**Top Tech Leader**](https://bit.ly/tarotopleader) with code **ILOVETARO** (exclusive for Taro members).

Become A Debugging Master [Part 13] - Create A Real Fix

Quick fixes are tempting, but true engineering excellence comes from addressing the real problem. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- A surface-level fix, like returning null to avoid an exception, hides the real issue and often leads to worse problems later
- Always stress-test your fix, check nearby features, and invite feedback instead of hoping a band-aid fix is “good enough”
- If you must land a short-term patch, clearly document it and create a task for a proper fix to maintain team trust
- Use the “Five Whys” method to dig deep into the root cause rather than stopping at the first obvious error

Become A Debugging Master [Part 12] - Take Breaks

Sometimes the smartest move when debugging isn’t pushing harder—it’s stepping away. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Taking breaks is critical to avoid getting trapped in unproductive rabbit holes and to regain a fresh perspective on tough bugs
- If you haven’t made meaningful progress after an hour, switching tasks, taking a walk, or asking for help can prevent burnout and unlock new ideas
- Breaks scientifically boost memory consolidation, accuracy, and problem-solving by giving your brain time to process and connect scattered information
- Studies show staying awake too long severely impairs your mental performance, making rest essential for effective debugging and clear thinking

Become A Debugging Master [Part 11] - The 2 Styles Of Bug Searching

When you’re stuck on a tough bug, how you approach it can make a huge difference in how quickly you find the root cause. Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Top-down debugging starts from the full application and removes pieces to isolate the bug, while bottom-up starts with a clean slate and adds code until the bug appears
- Bottom-up debugging can dramatically speed up iteration and discovery in large, complex codebases, even if it requires more upfront effort
- A key mindset is to “move the ball forward” by adding logs, setting alerts, or gathering information that will help your future self debug faster
- Forming clear written updates or questions based on your debugging history allows you to get much higher-quality help from others

Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech [Part 18] - Give Deep Thanks

"Thanks" is a magic word but only if you play your cards right. This lesson teaches you:

- Why basic thanks (what many software engineers do) is so ineffective, especially in the context of networking
- Ways you can give deeper thanks, shown in order of intensity
- An incredibly powerful way to give deep thanks in the context of a work setting

Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech [Part 12] - Build In Public

It's way easier to have people come to you instead of you having to go to them. This lesson teaches you:

- The difference between inbound and outbound
- Why building in public is such a powerful technique to generate inbound (i.e. talented people coming to you)
- Different ways to build in public

Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech [Part 7] - Play The Long Game

Patience is a virtue, and it's incredibly important for engineers. This lesson teaches you:

- Why human nature makes relationship building more of a long-term endeavor
- How the difficulty of adding yourself in your network scales with their important and power
- How networks generally form organically and why this nature fundamentally makes them something you need to wait on (but it's worth it!)

Tech Career Growth Videos

Our instructional videos provide software engineers with insights needed for career growth. Masterclasses go incredibly in-depth on a specific tech topic while case studies are real examples from established engineering leaders.