Thread by @TiffanyJachja

It's been officially three weeks since I've started my new role as an engineer manager at Vox Media.

Other than feeling through ongoing projects and processes, I've been having fun articulating and ideating on ways to make major wins.

Here we go 🧵

More about the data team at Vox.

We're a small data team at the moment, but we have the right attitude, curiosity, & support to become a world-class team leading in developing democratized & integrated data solutions.

Defining a team mission and vision statement is more than saying what we're working on.

The vision is what we hold at a distance almost like the carrot on the stick.

The mission is more about how and why we do the things we do to get to said carrot.

I wanted both to be special and a little bit inspiring. Of course, these things are subject to change, but it was worth sharing and ideating the different values and ways of working to accomplish the said mission and vision statements.

I'd love to share how exactly we're going to make these dreams a reality, as we (the team) start to bring these processes and results to fruition.

My role on the team is to support this journey. This also lead to other developments such a future team plans.

Much of phase 1 hiring is focuses on the main concerns, risks, projects, and needs of the team. There were a lot of conversations and documents I needed to get through to get to this point, but I'm quite happy.

The second bit of work I needed to do to support my team was starting articulating my thoughts and ideas through presentations.

There's a lot unknown in the data science space as it relates to building successful full stack data teams. It doesn't only involve one ML engineer

In fact, many organizations have buckets of data type work and it's often as cross-functional if not more than having a front end and back end engineers on a single project.

In articulating these details I'm referencing quite a bit of success stories and expertise in this space.

But I'm not afraid to make the team structure work for me and my team's needs. It's all about getting it right not being right.

I've also learned that there are never ways to escapes the fundamentals of managing and understanding technical teams.

Especially as the teams become more specialized, one of a kind, and bleeding edge.

I'm super grateful for the opportunity to do this work.

I'm still processing that this is my reality. I'm so excited to be sharing more opportunities and learning for the wider technical community through my role. :)