Forem: Lisa van Gelder

Running a Meetup Group - FAQ

Lisa van Gelder — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 23:16:04 +0000

I’ve been co-running Write/Speak/Code NYC since 2015.

We ran a panel on November 14th on how to start a tech Meetup, and here are my answers, in case they help someone who wasn't able to attend.

How did the Group get started?
Write/Speak/Code was a conference before it was a Meetup Group. It’s all about levelling up women & non-binary folks through practical workshops on blogging, public speaking & open source software. I went to the conference and loved how practical it was - but the conference is only once a year and in a different city each time. I wanted to bring that practical advice to women & non-binary folks in NYC on a more regular basis. I messaged the conference organizers and they put me in touch with two other people who had also said they were interested in starting a chapter in NYC (Jessica Armstrong & Jessica Simon). We created the NYC chapter together.

How did you find your first venue?
We started out by reaching out to places we were affiliated with. Our first venue was Devbootcamp because one of my co-organizers was a Devbootcamp alum. One of the attendees of the first Meetup worked at Thoughtworks and put us in touch with them - they hosted our next few Meetups. Once the Group had been running for a while, companies started reaching out to us & offering to host.

How did you find co-organizers?
Three of us started the NYC chapter together. Write/Speak/Code recommends a new chapter find at least four organizers before starting because organizing is hard work, people get busy, go on vacation etc. Three of us isn’t enough - we have eight organizers right now. If some of our organizers get busy and need to drop out for a while, we'll make an announcement at our Meetup that we're looking for new organizers. A good starting point is regular members - typically our organizers are regulars who care about our community and want to keep it going.

When you first started organizing, how did you select events? How has that changed?
Our first event was based on our workshop & conference material. We started with events that were pretty close to our conference - blogging, lightning talks, and then ranged more widely. We try to rotate between Write, Speak, Code & Self Care/Career topics, but find it hard to stick to a regular schedule. There are a few regular type of Events that we run - blogging workshops, lightning talk workshops & open source workshops.

What things do you consider when choosing a venue?
We are hosted by sponsors who pay to have our Group, as well as pay for food & drink
We choose places that we are happy to recommend for our members to work, as giving a sponsor talk & mentioning job openings is part of the perks a sponsor gets.
So we look for places with a commitment to diversity, inclusion & women in leadership.
We also look for places where the venue security will work with us and doesn’t require the names people rsvp with to match their legal ID. It’s normal for venues to require people to present legal ID when checking in, but we have attendees who wish to be known by a different name, for example trans folks, and don’t want their legal name to be public.

How do you find sponsors for events? How did you find your first sponsors?
Sponsors are the same as venues for us, so it’s important for us to pick sponsors that we would recommend. Venues provide food & drink for our attendees. When we were organizing our first event we didn’t realise that we could just ask the venue to provide food & drink and thought that we had to find sponsors to pay for each. Getting the venue to provide them is much easier!

What tools did you use to get the word out about your events?
Meetup, slack, facebook, twitter, bootcamp networks. Just posting on Meetup isn’t enough. If you have speakers get them to post to their networks. There are also regular newsletters like Garys Guide and you can ask for your Meetup to be included in them.

What was something you wish you knew before you started your meetup?
Share the load, you don’t have to do everything yourself. I used to be heavily involved in putting on every single event, with a weekly hangout & it was exhausting. Now we have a really good system where we set the main organizer for each event, so each of us puts on an event about once every 6 months. And we have a monthly hangout where we set the main organizer & the main organizer asks for help if necessary. Delegation is great!

What was the most memorable event you organized, and why?
Our first one. It’s like having a party you’re not sure if it’s going to work or anybody is going to show up. Creating a meetup group you’re not sure if there is a demand or if your idea is going to work. We got more than 50 people! And then people came back to our next events.

What are the most challenging aspects of being an organizer?
Showups :( We get fantastic content and then sometimes hardly any people show up. I’m not sure if we’re not marketing ourselves right or what we are doing wrong. It’s possible that we split our audience too much because our content changes so much each time. We should do another survey to find out what our attendees are looking for.

How do you ensure diversity of your speakers & attendees?
Diversity is something you have to be intentional about. We start by trying to ensure we have a good mix of folks who are our organizers, and are intentional about the mix of folks who are on our panels or speaking to our audience. Representation matters, we get a diverse audience because we have diverse speakers.

Do you allow men to attend your events? How did you reach that decision?
We don’t, we are for women & non-binary folks only and that’s quite unusual. A lot of groups will allow allies as well. We believe that allies are important, but that’s not the problem we are trying to solve. We want to create a safe space for women & non-binary folks to give each other practical advice on writing, speaking & coding and find that having male allies in the space changes the conversation.

How to implement an engineering ladder at your organization

Lisa van Gelder — Sun, 21 Oct 2018 20:52:12 +0000

Why introduce an engineering ladder?

A common complaint from engineers is that there isn’t a clear path for career progression at their company, and reasons for promotion (or being denied promotion) aren’t transparent. Sometimes roles aren’t well defined - what is expected of a team lead? What does ‘senior’ mean at your company? Sometimes the skills needed for a role or a level aren’t clear. Sometimes the different paths to progression aren’t clear - Is management the only way to get promoted or can individual contributors stay technical all the way up? Are those tracks equivalent?

An engineering ladder makes career progression much clearer, makes the promotion process transparent, as well as providing guidelines to engineers at all levels on areas they should focus on growing their skills. It can help with retention as engineers see clearly how they can progress at your company.

I also use the engineering ladder to define what skills to look for in the the recruitment process, and to decide what level candidates should be if we make an offer. It’s really useful for setting salaries when making offers, particularly in conjunction with salary bands. It’s typical for me to explain to an engineer that we’ll be making an offer in the Mid-level range because they didn’t demonstrate specific skills we expect of our seniors, and that if we hired them their manager would work with them to build a plan to work on those skills.

Where do I start?

Great! So now you’re convinced, you’ve reviewed Rent the Runway’s engineering ladder & you know you want to implement an engineering ladder at your company. What’s next? If you just tell your engineers you have defined a ladder and it now applies to them, you may find they revolt!

As VP of Engineering I’ve introduced an engineering ladder at two companies, Stride Consulting and Bauer Xcel. Here are the seven steps I’ve gone through to ensure it has been successfully adopted.

1.Communicate the why

You want your team to feel the ladder is for them. If your company has never had an engineering ladder, you need to be very clear to your team on why you think now is the right time to introduce one and what problems you think it will solve. Explain how they will benefit!

2. Get your team to define the levels themselves

You want your team to feel the ladder is for them rather than imposed on them - the best way to do that is to get your teams to define it themselves. I start by taking Rent the Runway’s engineering ladder and adapting it to the organization. Then I share it with the entire engineering team, along with some other example ladders (Kickstarter, Meetup Intent Media etc) and make the ladder editable by the whole company. Everyone gets the chance to add comments and define levels - including their own level - before the ladder comes into effect.

At Stride I had a series of meetings with the seniors where we went through each level skill by skill & agreed on definitions. At Bauer Xcel I put stories into the sprint for every team to make sure people had time marked out when they could review the ladder & comment. Then we created a slack channel for people to discuss wording they disagreed on & come to a consensus.

3. Communicate the how - how will it be implemented?

What happens if people aren’t acting at their current level? Do they get demoted? Is there a grace period?
What happens if a role people are doing is redefined? What happens if they feel they can no longer do that role?
What happens if people are acting at the next level up? Do they get promoted? how much of the next level do people have to do before they get promoted?
How is salary impacted?
How will this tie into the performance review/promotion process?

You’ll want to think through all the implications before introducing the ladder to your team. At Bauer Xcel we sent out an anonymous survey asking about team preferences for how to handle level-setting.

4. - Try it out!

Use your new engineering ladder in the performance review process and give folks the chance to discuss where they are on the ladder. I wouldn’t use it for a formal performance review before people have had time to kick the tires a little, so I’d suggest doing a trial run on volunteers before using it for real.

How long does this take? In my experience it takes at least a quarter to roll out an engineering ladder. It takes time to go through the initial comments & create the levels and then if you do a trial run as part of the standard performance review process, you may have to wait until the next performance review starts (at Stride they were every 6 months) That’s fine, it gives your engineers more time to get used to the idea. Hopefully your volunteers are enthusiastic about how much the ladder helped them so others are excited to use it next time!

5. Review

Get feedback from your volunteers - were some areas unclear? Were some skills missing from different roles? Give people a chance to adapt the ladder, based on the review they just did. Open up to a final review round from the rest of your engineers too.

6. Use for real.

Build the engineering ladder into the performance review process. After getting feedback engineers discuss where they are on the ladder with their manager and what they need to work on to get to the next level.

7. Make it a living, breathing document.

Skills & roles are constantly changing & the ladder needs to adapt with them. I allow the ladder to be edited by the whole company before every performance review cycle, lock it during the cycle, and then allow editing again afterwards.

Conclusion

I’ve been really happy with how well introducing an engineering ladder worked at both companies. When I introduced ‘maker’ and ‘manager’ tracks at Bauer Xcel, people from the ‘manager’ side told me that after reviewing the paths for progression on the engineering ladder they realised they were on the wrong track and wanted to switch, which is great as they got a much greater clarity for where they wanted to go in their careers. It brought a lot of clarity to what senior titles meant and who should have them, as well as defining a promotion process and recruitment process that ensured we looked for the skills we needed at each level.

The downside - if your company hasn’t done a good job of defining roles & titles consistently and you want to use the engineering ladder to level set, that is incredibly stressful for your organization. Morale took a big hit at Bauer Xcel while we worked through the implications and I had a lot of hard conversations with people who knew their title was at risk. It takes a while to implement a ladder and that is a long time to leave people in a state of uncertainty about their title and potentially their salary. You risk losing people if you aren’t careful.

In conclusion - an engineering ladder is a really useful tool, but also a big change for your organization, and as with all big changes be careful about how you introduce it.