Lara Hogan
Lara Hogan — Management coach, trainer, and author
Engineering leadership, management skills, and building resilient teams.
larahogan.meWhat we recognize is what we reward.
One of the best resources on the internet for engineering managers and tech leads. Lara writes about the unglamorous, deeply important parts of management — running effective one-on-ones, giving hard feedback, navigating reorgs — with frameworks that are practical enough to use the same day you read them. Her books Resilient Management and Demystifying Public Speaking are staples in the field.
Written by Lara Hogan.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
11
Independent Blog
English
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Find a new role - worksheet
Almost everybody I know is doing some math on longevity in their current role. Whether it’s moral math (should I go work for a place that’s doing more good in the world, despite it being less money?), retirement math (can I go all-in at an AI corp and retire early?) or figuring out a backup plan (our jobs are all going away, have you heard?), it can feel near-impossible to make decisions about what you want to do next. Six years ago, I built a worksheet for this! It’s here to help you identify:...
Why can't they just...? Revisited
(This is an updated version of a post I first wrote in 2017. Given everything happening in tech today, it felt worth dusting off.) The question “Why can’t they just…” has been a common refrain I’ve heard throughout my career. “Why can’t they just X” is, at its core, a great question—“why can’t they just find spending cuts elsewhere?” or “why can’t they just tell us what the technical strategy is?” or “why can’t they just tell engineers to write more tests?”—these are all valid questions that co...
AI 'aha' team meetings
Vicarious learning is a real thing: we absorb skills and knowledge by watching others, hearing about their mistakes, seeing what worked. This is why postmortems are such a great tool for building context, and seeing how other engineers problem-solve. I’ve been thinking about vicarious learning a lot lately, specifically about how engineers are learning to use AI. There’s no shortage of AI content out there: workflow breakdowns, productivity revelations, time-savings stats. But when I talk to en...
Creating momentum when an employee is stuck
Many of us are feeling stuck. We’re managing through crisis after crisis, and we’re watching our leaders and our teammates burn out and not be their best selves. I don’t know anybody who’s thriving right now. Day-to-day, you’re trying to make at least a tiny bit of difference. I see it! You’re working to help people get promoted, you’re running standups to make sure folks have what they need, you’re holding one-on-ones where you check in and see if your teammates are “okay”, for some definition...
Finding a buddy when you’re a team of one
I’ve been working with the rad team at Fly.io for the past few months as a fractional VPE, mainly focusing on management-y and culture stuff as the team grows. One of the things I really dig about Fly.io’s company culture is how teammates use their internal forum for sharing questions about work, project progress updates, oncall recaps, and other stuff that I’ve traditionally seen live (and die) in email inboxes. I’m finding that the internal forum helps keep conversations going async (and out...
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