Intro
Excellence is not a skill. It is a choice, and an expression of belief that tomorrow can be better than today. This kind of optimism is not passive – it requires deliberate decisions, because it often goes against our natural inclination toward comfort.
We humans are creatures of habit, and we are drawn to stability and the status quo. It is the reason I do not use the term “cultural fit” when making hiring decisions. I have nothing against its use. After all, having common values and wanting to achieve the same goals is critical in a startup environment, but the term hints at an unspoken resistance to change and a desire for the status quo. I prefer to say “cultural impact”. Instead of asking “will this person fit into the team”, I prefer to think “how will this person change the team”. It may seem like a minor distinction, but excellence requires constant evolution, and we embrace change and adapt relentlessly.
By definition, a startup is about rejecting the status quo in favor of a better world vision. At CADDi our mission is to “unleash the potential of manufacturing” because we believe that the manufacturing industry has enormous untapped potential. Driven by this mission, we have grown from just a handful of employees to hundreds of employees across four countries in under eight years. As we have grown, we have become more risk-averse, more process-heavy, more conservative in our decision-making. This is understandable; we have real customers who depend on our software to run their business. However, we must not forget that we are nowhere close to accomplishing our mission and cannot let ourselves slide into complacency. At that point we become the status quo that we set out to change.
The pursuit of excellence
Excellence in enterprise software
Enterprise software is often ridiculed for being terrible. In 2018, YCombinator put it plainly in its “request for startups”, stating that “software used by large companies is still awful and still very lucrative.” It is true, and part of the reason is that enterprise software is just hard. Not only are enterprises large and complex, but they also involve many stakeholders.
While consumer software often has a more direct relationship between user satisfaction and purchase, enterprise applications must serve a wider, more complex web of stakeholders. They must satisfy executives with budgetary power, system administrators who maintain it, third party integrators who customize it, and finally the end users who use the apps. In other words, the end user is often not the buyer. An expense reporting system, for example, is purchased by the accounting team, not by the employees who have to use it. It must meet various regulatory requirements that may come at the cost of usability. Purchasing teams often use massive feature comparison tables to make decisions, and vendors optimize for “checking enough boxes,” because that is how the game works.
These constraints are real, and we are not naive about them. CADDi’s product vision includes the phrase “Kickstarting Transformation,” because we recognize that true change requires addressing short-term, on-the-ground problems and connecting them to long-term strategic outcomes. We acknowledge that major changes cannot be achieved through top-down directives alone. They require both executive support and organic adoption throughout the organization. For that reason, our software must be functional, check all the boxes, and deliver outcomes that matter to executives, such as cost reduction, lead-time reduction, or cultural transformation.
But this is exactly where complacency begins to set in. Once a product delivers the minimum acceptable outcome, it becomes easy, perhaps even rational, to stop there. Why optimize performance, when your users are required to use it anyway? Why invest in better UX when feature breadth wins over the buyers? As an industry, we software engineers know how to build performant applications. Achieving a decent Lighthouse score is not rocket science. Cloud providers provide bullet-proof infrastructure, and the open source community empowers us with great frameworks. Component libraries and design tooling have matured and user interaction models on the web are well-established.
Yet, we still find excuses to cut corners – “we don’t have time”, “it’s not a user requirement”, “we have other features to build.” In reality, this is often just a lack of organizational and engineering discipline masquerading as pragmatism.
The venerable Don Norman describes three types of design in his book “Emotional Design”: visceral, behavioral, and reflective – visceral being the instinctive gut reaction that is deeply emotional, behavioral being the effectiveness and usability of the product, and reflective being the conscious intellectual relationship with the product. So often we dismiss the power of the visceral and behavioral response in the enterprise, as if we can just focus on the reflective. But managers and executives are also human. Their job is to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, and rely on their instincts and experience as much as logic. If we truly want to “Kickstart Transformation”, we product development professionals need to do more than simply delivering tools that win customers. We must intentionally build products that inspire confidence and change behavior, because transformation inside a customer organization does not happen by directive alone.
The pursuit of excellence, and the wherewithal to make it happen is what ultimately shapes culture. If we are just one step away from making something meaningfully better, let’s stop debating and just get it done. If we want to be proud of our work, if we want to make an impact, then we must step up to the plate and strive for excellence.
Excellence in building teams
We are all familiar with what typical recruiting looks like: generic, seemingly halfhearted messages on LinkedIn, in hopes that a few will respond. In many organizations, this approach actually works well enough. With enough volume you’re bound to produce some results. But that is not how we believe technical recruiting should be done, because recruiting is not just about fulfilling a hiring quota. It’s about building a better and more capable organization that can deliver on the company’s mission. Of course, metrics such as messages sent and replies received are important as leading indicators for any talent acquisition team, but in the end they are just numbers.
What makes a recruiting team excellent is a genuine desire to do what’s best for the organization. At CADDi, our technical recruiters report to the VP of Engineering. They attend engineering all-hands meetings, and maintain a deep understanding of the organization, product, and technology. It takes commitment and discipline to build a talent acquisition team that is actively involved in the holistic process of building engineering teams, but that is the excellence we strive for.
Yes, we use keywords to help screen resumes, but we expect our recruiters to understand not only how different technologies relate to each other, but also how different industries operate. A development agency will have a very different development style from a product company. Processes and reliability requirements are likely very different between aircraft avionics and a mobile app. These distinctions matter when evaluating a candidate. We do not expect recruiters to be technical experts, but we expect them to be curious, aligned with engineering managers, and have the desire to build great teams. That is what excellence in recruiting looks like, and it is the foundation for excellence in software.
Excellence through management
It is the responsibility of each and every employee to strive for excellence, but it is the managers who ensure we uphold it. Excellence is not something that happens by accident. It requires deliberate actions, continuous vigilance, and the courage to make difficult decisions. Complacency tempts us at every turn; when customers are not complaining, the status quo almost seems rational. That is why we expect managers to set high standards, raise the bar, and serve as guardians of excellence. Together, we actively resist the allure of mediocrity and pursue excellence, because our future depends on it.
Guardians of excellence
The slippery slope of mediocrity
We have all done it before. Faced with a deadline and a mountain of requirements, we breathe a sigh of relief every time we can scope something out. As we advance in our careers, we learn how to negotiate with customers and peers to protect our time. With experience we gain the ability to anticipate what could go wrong, and learn to mitigate risks, whether it be padding timelines, or talking stakeholders out of a requirement. Nothing wrong with that–it’s just the way business goes.
But over time, this can create distance between ourselves and the product. The more time we spend in industry, the more detached we risk becoming. We teach our children to control their emotions, to be respectful, and avoid being demanding. As adults, we sometimes apply that same restraint to ourselves, and forget how to demand excellence from ourselves and from others. Even if there’s a fire inside of us, we smother it because fighting the system can be an emotional drain. This coping mechanism helps us protect our sanity, but there is a critical difference between protecting ourselves, and accepting the status quo. Excellence is not an uncontrolled outburst – it is a well-controlled fire, continuously demanding better.
The reality of modern enterprise software is the product of this very distancing process. From a purely rational perspective, doing the least possible work to deliver the same results is logical. This certainly works in the short-term. But an organization that constantly strives to do less is an organization that lacks the internal strength to drive itself forward in times of uncertainty. If we can only evaluate our value based on external validation, we would never be able to dream beyond today’s expectations. As managers, we should be demanding excellence not only from ourselves, but also from our teams. If it’s just a bit more effort is going to make something vastly better, we should be the first to push for it.
We are developing new ways of doing business in manufacturing. The value we deliver is immense, and external validation can take months or even years. That is why managers need to have a strong internal compass to blaze a path forward, even when no one is applauding yet.
The ethos of engineering management
Engineering management is the art of pursuing, demanding, and delivering excellence. As an EM, you push the product to be better, push the team to be better, and push yourself to be better. It is not just about “keeping the machine running.” It is also about continuously reinventing the machine for the next stage of the business. It is about being principled in your actions and staying true to the mission.
It is much more than just people management. It means representing the company in front of the team, interpreting and translating high-level strategy into something digestible and actionable by the team. It spans everything from designing team structures and architecting complex software, to setting stretch goals and pushing everybody to reach for the stars.
Finally, it is also about playing the right cards at the right time, and making hard decisions in the face of uncertainty. You are the captain of a ship navigating uncharted waters, with visibility obscured by the fog of the future. You need to act early and decisively, often without perfect information, guided by an internal compass built on the mission, a deep understanding of the customer, and the technical acumen to move fluidly between the “what” and the “how”.
Every engineering manager is different, just as every athlete’s coach has their own style. The fundamentals and goals are the same, but each navigates the murky waters in their own unique style. We do not insist on one prescribed methodology. What matters is that each manager is equipped, principled, and committed to excellence, and empowered to build their own style in service of the mission.
Management as a discipline
Notable literature
Every great engineering manager’s personal style is built on the foundational work of those who came before them. Just as a great coach studies historical plays of the sport, every manager learns from the giants of management science. Anybody who has been to business school has likely studied Peter Drucker, Andy Grove, or Jim Collins just to name a few. Drucker established management as a discipline, introducing ideas such as MBO and emphasizing effectiveness over activity. Grove built on that foundation with a focus on disciplined execution and created the OKR framework. Jim Collins identified traits of great long-lasting companies through extensive historical research.
In Japan, the founder of Panasonic Konosuke Matsushita emphasized building people, not products, while Kazuo Inamori, founder of Kyocera and KDDI, introduced management based on moral philosophy, and employee happiness. Toyota’s TPS (Toyota Production System) is “based on the philosophy of achieving the complete elimination of waste in pursuit of the most efficient methods”, and is said to have been inspired by W. Edwards Deming’s work on quality management and continuous improvement.
Deming and Drucker recognized that the world was transitioning from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy. In the industrial era, laborers were seen more as cogs in a wheel and efficiency was paramount. As the world changed to be knowledge-work heavy, Drucker argued that effectiveness and individual judgement mattered more. Decades later Grove led Intel in a fast changing environment to become one of the most profitable companies in the world. He built on Deming and Drucker’s ideas with an emphasis on speed for technology companies, and defined a manager’s contribution as the output of their team and neighboring teams.
Over the last few decades, the manufacturing value chain has shifted in that direction as well. Metal fabrication processes are largely automated through advancements in numerical control and robotics. Companies such as Apple and NVIDIA have outsourced capital intensive and process heavy semiconductor production to TSMC, and instead focused on design, software, and ecosystems. In recent years, automakers now talk about SDV (software defined vehicle) in much the same way we used to talk about SDN (software defined networking). In short, OEMs are outsourcing operational efficiency, and becoming increasingly knowledge-work heavy.
But even as industries evolve, organizations are still built on strong assumptions of the world. These assumptions are expressed in how companies manage and operate. A Silicon Valley software company’s management methodology will not deliver the operational excellence demanded in a home appliance OEM. Software in the cloud is built through very rapid iterations. Hardware has long lifetimes and correcting mistakes require expensive recalls. There is no “rollback” in manufacturing.
Every organization’s management philosophy is built upon its view of the world. Before diving into the operational aspects of engineering management, we want to share some of the assumptions that underpin our own philosophy.
Strategic World View
"What does it take to thrive in this world?"
Our view of the world is an assumption about how our environment behaves. It is a combination of educated guesses, personal views, and opinions. These will likely evolve over time, but today, they form the foundation upon which we build and run our organization.
Capitalism and our egos demand speed
We are a startup, enabled by the rise of venture capital, trying to do something nobody else has attempted. That means high risk and high reward. Our timeframes are naturally constrained by capital cycles, technology cycles, and simply by the length of our own careers. Planning over a century-long horizon is not realistic; the world moves too fast, and we want to see the impact of our work in our own lifetimes.
Workforce diversification is necessary and inevitable
Much of the developed world is aging quickly with Japan at the forefront, losing almost a million people in the last year. Software engineering skills are largely transferable across the world, but cultural norms are not. Nuances in accountability, scheduling, and feedback can vary significantly. With engineers from over 15 different countries, we have deliberately started onboarding sessions that utilize frameworks (e.g. “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyers), to build shared understanding across the team.
The world is becoming increasingly fragmented and regulated
Geopolitical tensions, data sovereignty, tariffs, and various national regulations are increasingly shaping the way we do business. We can thank the globally interconnected nature of the internet for the proliferation of privacy regulations. Countries sometimes reroute or firewall traffic in their nation’s interest. Flow of physical goods has always been a fragmented and regulated industry, but now we are seeing something similar with the global internet.
Talent density declines at scale unless we fight it
As organizations grow, talent distributions naturally broaden. Creating long lasting value requires a large workforce – you cannot create trillion dollar companies with just a thousand employees. Hiring junior employees is not optional, it is critical for long-term growth. But that makes career development and upskilling essential. We cannot rely on hiring alone. Sustaining excellence at scale requires continuously developing talent and pushing the talent distribution moving upward.
What we must do
Our customers entrust us with their most valuable IP and business critical data. Excellence is not a preference. It is our moral obligation. We operate across borders and languages. We are a global organization requiring systematic execution and unified standards. With such complexity, excellence does not emerge naturally. It must be actively cultivated.
Management in practice
Overview
Our view of the world gives us the foundational assumptions upon which we operate, and management is the discipline through which we cultivate excellence in this environment. Drucker famously wrote that “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Doing things right is about ensuring an effective software development lifecycle, about improving velocity and quality, monitoring execution, developing standards, and enforcing them. It is about governance and compliance–we work with customer data, and it is the manager’s responsibility to enforce data security standards, so that we live up to our customer’s expectations.
Doing the right things is about making sure we are solving the most important problems, and in the process, challenging assumptions that could be holding us back. It is about creating and articulating a vision for the team, and ensuring that teams are aligned around the same goals.
Engineering management requires operating across both of these perspectives simultaneously. Every manager has their own take, but in practice, this work spans several core domains that reflect the primary areas of influence through which EMs translate the abstract ideas of management and leadership into business impact.
Domains
Technology Management
Regardless of whether you are a manager or an individual contributor, your technical judgment becomes more critical as you code less. You are architecting systems and making strategic technical decisions that can affect product direction for years to come. Just as finance managers are responsible for the balance sheet of financial assets and liabilities, engineering managers are responsible for managing both technical assets and technical debt. This means reviewing designs, operating a disciplined SDLC, and ensuring we live up to our quality standards. Strategically, it involves making long-term bets about architecture and technology direction. From an execution perspective, it means ensuring that today’s work is technically sound.
Delivery Management
Delivery is not about following frameworks, but it is about establishing rhythms and structures that fit the team and product. It is about reducing uncertainty, and resolving dependencies between teams, mitigating risks, and maximizing throughput sustainably. Quality is never traded off for speed, because they are inseparable. Just as we never ask ourselves whether we should sleep or eat, because both are paramount for health, quality and speed are both essential to deliver. If we are debating between the two, it means our requirements are ill-defined, and managers should be able to leverage experience and frameworks such as ISO25010 to align the team around shared understandings of what we are delivering and how to measure it.
Product Management
Product management can be a title, but it is also a domain that every engineering manager needs to be familiar with. It is this function that defines what success means. This function connects vision to strategy, and business objectives to technical initiatives. Managers must understand the customer journeys that make our products stand out, steer teams to stay aligned with the high level direction, and empower engineers to make the right decisions to drive product impact. On the ground, it is about ensuring day-to-day work contributes to real outcomes, not just outputs.
People Management
People Management is not simply holding one-on-one meetings. It is about creating conditions where individuals can thrive and do their best work. Coaching, teaching, and mentoring are important methods, but the deeper responsibility is aligning motivation and building capabilities over time. Coaches do not play sports better than their teams, but they know how to take the team to success. Developing people and teams is the same–we do not expect managers to code better and faster, but we expect them to excel at a higher level of abstraction. For this reason, senior ICs often make strong managers, as they carry technical credibility while shifting their focus from making to enabling others.
Information Management
Information Management is not sending out status reports. In a diverse organization that crosses languages and cultures, it takes deliberate effort to ensure information flows well. Managers need to make sure their teams receive the right context without being overwhelmed by unrelated noise, and that critical insights and alerts alike flow upward such that leaders can interpret and act on them appropriately. Strategically this means building consistent systems of communication and documentation. In the day-to-day, it means making sure the right people get the right information at the right time.
Stakeholder Management
Not only are enterprises complex internally, but they are also further shaped by diverse regulations and external demands. Delivering to such organizations requires large teams, and often teams of teams, to tackle these challenges. Engineering managers must understand how organizations function, both internally and externally, and ensure that expectations are set, aligned, and communicated clearly with all stakeholders, technical and otherwise. This means building long-term trust and mapping influence across the organization, and keeping relevant stakeholders informed to avoid surprises, and delivering on commitments.
Orchestration
These domains are not independent, because technology does not exist in a vacuum. They function together to enable teams to build great products. Product direction affects technical decisions, and stakeholder management requires coordinating delivery timelines. Lack of good information management can cause people management problems and misunderstandings. Management is not about optimizing each domain individually, but rather orchestrating them in a coherent manner to solve the problems at hand.
In each of these domains, there is a spectrum from the strategic side of deciding on direction and making bets, to the execution side of actually turning those decisions into reality. Naturally, the relative proportion depends on each manager’s role and the needs of the organization. A frontline manager will be heavier on execution, reviewing design documents and ensuring that engineers are producing quality software, whereas a VP may be more focused more on long term strategy such as technical architecture and organizational structure.
Regardless of these differences, the underlying domains do not change very much. The real skill lies in the ability to dynamically move up and down along the spectrum as the product and organization evolves. The elasticity to go back and forth between questions such as “how do we resolve this bug?” to “what goals do we need to hit in two years?”, is what allows great managers to operate across the organization, and drive good decisions.
Building the future
Over the millennia, societies have built stability layer by layer. Agriculture increased the caloric yield of the land, freeing some from the daily need to hunt and gave birth to specializations and the trades. Modern economies extended that stability through social safety nets. This stability fuels progress, but it also carries a hidden risk. The very systems that allow us to innovate and take risks can just as easily foster complacency. Left unchecked, stability becomes inertia. For startups and leaders alike, resisting is not an accident – it is a conscious act of will, powered by curiosity and a commitment to excellence.
As historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens, our society went through a transformation around the 16th century, shifting from one having low trust in the future and thus lacking appetite for credit, to one with high trust in the future outlook. After all, if you do not believe the future is bright, why would you lend money to somebody looking to start a business? Basic economics tells us that lack of credit translates to lower money supply and sluggish growth. Around the Scientific Revolution, perhaps as the elite grew accustomed to the idea of discovering the unknown, this belief in human progress gave way to economic progress, convincing many to extend credit in the hopes that a better future will bring about returns. This transformation has given us the modern financial system, and the speed of innovation and progress that we all enjoy today.
Manufacturing today is at an inflection point, facing headwinds of geopolitics, tariffs, and a declining working force. It has been a trailblazing industry that has led to the rise of commerce as we know it today, and formed the foundation for software that runs all of the biggest companies in the world. And yet, for decades, manufacturing has been labor-intensive, anchored in a traditional cost-up efficiency-first paradigm, requiring a strong focus on risk mitigation. This fosters a defensive mindset and walks a fine line between progress and stagnation.
But we bet on a better future.
Manufacturing companies have decades of knowledge, accumulated experience, and operational data that previous generations could only dream of. When combined with modern computer vision and machine learning technologies, they can transform what used to be bits and bytes on a disk, into leverage. We believe in a future where organizations can take their collective wisdom, and empower individual workers to make smarter and faster decisions. Just as societies that believed in the future unlocked economic growth, we want manufacturers who bet on their future capabilities to unlock exponential returns on their years of process refinement and quality initiatives.
Pursuing excellence is the practical expression of optimism. The role of an engineering manager or leader is to translate this belief into action. It is to build teams, systems, and cultures that do not optimize for today, but create the foundations for tomorrow. To achieve such a world, we must actively resist the allure of mediocrity, and pursue excellence.
