Stuff I learned at cinch

career (13) , leadership (18) , management (12)

Today’s my last day at cinch, where I was a Tech Lead across multiple teams for the past two and a half years. I’ve learned so much working there, and I wanted to end my time there by collecting my thoughts on what I learned.

  • The power of one tech stack: There are enough new problems to solve at a growing company, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to technology choices. cinch’s engineering principles are founded upon event-driven architecture using AWS serverless technologies. This decision, along with a set of reusable services and libraries, allowed engineering teams to solve customer problems, and not waste time on already-solved technology decisions. I’d later come to the conclusion this is a great example of leveraged work.
  • Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners: cinch was the first place I’d come across the concept, and it instantly resonated with my mental model of choosing companies to work for, and my role in them.
  • The only constant is change: Being comfortable with change, and accepting this is a part of working at a fast-paced company. People will leave through no fault of your own, teams’ roadmaps will change, and top-down initiatives are to be expected. Accept this is a part of day-to-day life, and work with colleagues on navigating this change as smoothly as possible.

  • Engineering leadership frameworks: Presented to me by Paul Ingham, I think these pillars succinctly describe the foundations of good engineering leadership:

    • Engineering artisanship
      • Technical skill and the quality of the engineering practice itself.
    • Engineering strategy
      • Setting long-term technical goals and making sure the engineering work serves the business.
    • Culture
      • Building a team environment people want to work in and can do their best work in.
    • Stakeholder engagement
      • Communicating with the people inside and outside the department who need to understand and back what engineering is doing.
  • The fog of war: Looking back, the situations that felt earth-shattering at the time weren’t. This one is a personal reminder not to overthink things and to know the storm will pass (apologies to whoever is reading this for the metaphors).
  • Observability as a first-class citizen: Building observable systems was at the heart of cinch’s engineering philosophy. That went beyond the systems themselves. The habit of asking what a well-observed system looked like was built into how the department worked.
  • Lots of other stuff, such as using working groups for cross-org initiatives, DevOps checkpoints, DORA metrics & Team Topologies.

As a final thought, I just want to say how much I’ve appreciated the people I’ve got to work with at cinch. There are too many to name, but they were truly the best part of working at cinch.

Published on . Co-authored with AI.