90-Day Plan | Head of Engineering, Handoff
The first 90 days focus on building the engine that scales: org design, a repeatable hiring pipeline, paved-path delivery, and reliability practices that create trust. I’ve led this transition at multiple companies and know how to balance speed with stability.
My approach starts with people and outcomes. I partner with founders and product to clarify the few things that matter most, then align teams, hiring, and delivery mechanics around those goals.
The 90-Day Plan
Phase 1: Diagnose
Goal: Understand org shape, delivery bottlenecks, and reliability risks.
- Assess org topology, ownership boundaries, manager spans; map what needs to scale first.
- Review architecture and CI/CD to see how code moves from commit to production.
- Baseline DORA, incident trends, deploy frequency, MTTR; identify recurring toil.
- Interview engineers, managers, product, and support to surface friction and bright spots.
Output: baseline with org & delivery risks plus near-term priorities.
Phase 2: Design
Goal: Plan to scale hiring and throughput while keeping quality high.
- Draft org shape (12–18 months) with clear swimlanes and leadership expectations.
- Stand up a recruiting pipeline: calibrated rubrics, structured interviews, hiring bar, training.
- Define paved-path delivery (branching, CI gates, release cadence, ownership).
- Introduce visible dashboards and a lightweight operating cadence.
Output: 90-day operating playbook, hiring plan and budget.
Phase 3: Deliver
Goal: Prove traction with visible wins in reliability, hiring, and productivity.
- Launch two first-quarter initiatives:
- Reliability Win: Reduce incidents/MTTR with clearer on-call, runbooks, and automation.
- Scaling Win: Hire and onboard the first wave with a consistent rubric; cut time-to-productive by ~30%.
- Introduce developer productivity tools (Copilot, Cursor, template repos) and improve docs/onboarding.
- Publish weekly KPIs—showing early improvements in velocity, reliability, and hiring funnel.
Output: early wins that build trust and momentum while the org scales.
Global Teams I’ve Led
Managed and partnered with teams across the U.S. and Canada, London, India, Eastern Europe, Armenia, and South America — including Mexico and Brazil. The focus is consistent standards, strong managers, and clear goals so distributed teams move fast together.
How I Build and Lead
I’ve grown and modernized teams across stages—from zero-to-one to multi-team orgs. The playbook blends clear goals, strong managers, a consistent hiring bar, and paved paths that make shipping the default.
Scale
Recruit, coach, and level-up management; build durable hiring systems.
Velocity
Ship often with quality through paved paths and fast feedback.
Culture
Ownership, trust, and growth with clear expectations.