Week 4 of the year 2025

- 3 minutes read - 582 words

This Week’s Challenges:

Finalize FY26Q1 planning (Management)

This week we worked on the Q1 planning finalization, refining our estimations based on evolving details of expected OKRs and multiple discussions with upstream and downstream teams. At this point, it’s all about prioritization and commitment.

The final commitment plan was arranged by TPMs and presented to the senior leadership review as org-level commitments for the upcoming quarter. I already explained the process in the articles below, so you might want to take a look if you’re interested in the internals of engineering management. Nothing new happened this week, pretty much iterating on the original plan plus calibrating expectations with product management folks.

Why am I calling this challenging? Pretty much because of the excessive communication - we need to make sure that we’re building a setup for success. I.e. all upstream teams are adequately prioritizing our needs and we’re meeting the expectations from our downstream as well.

Also, my group works on the Real-Time Ads Targeting - this is a vertical service, which ends with multiple integration points with third-parties like TheTradeDesk, Google, Facebook, etc. Some of our new features require the extension of these communication protocols - which basically means we needed to consult with their customer success engineers as well and brainstorm how we’re going to tackle one or another problem. And sure thing, it requires Product and TPM involvement as well.

The good news - this work is pretty much over. There are just a couple of steps remaining:

  1. Grab my tech lead and build the “game plan” for the next quarter. This involves detailing the timeline: what we’re going to do in sprints 1, 2, …, 6 (quarter = 3 months = 6 sprints).
  2. Present the “game plan” to the team.
  3. Finalize the areas of responsibility for each engineer in the group.

Engineering excellence metrics (Engineering)

From the engineering perspective, the Engineering Excellence was on top of my mind for a long time. I’ve finalized the PR Lifecycle to the extent I can effectively communicate this and set the proper expectations. This naturally brings us to the Engineering Excellence Metrics, and it’s going to be a big push in this area during the next two weeks - I’ll need to collect Q4 stats (from GitHub and JIRA) to host the Q4 retrospective meeting for my group. And obviously, the end of the fiscal year is coming fast, so it’s going to be the annual performance review conversations and all that. It’s going to get pretty busy pretty soon.

Why I call this challenging? We switched from Gerrit and mono-repo setup to GitHub and poly-repo literally in this quarter. For Gerrit I built the tool that extracts stats on changes (Gerrit version of PRs), comments and reviews using Gerrit HTTP REST APIs. This tool collects the data, normalizes them and puts it in MySQL DB from where I fed a Tableau report to summarize the contribution in codebase on team, pod and individual levels. That worked spectacularly for the last two years, but now we’ve moved to GitHub, which is a new process besides the new tool. To cover this gap, as you know, I’m working on building the Codehub - the project which pulls GH data and provides some analytics, again I need this on engineering pod and individual levels. Some glimpse of the project is here Week 2 of the year 2025.