Notes and Thoughts: The Untapped Potentialhttps://talento90.com/https://talento90.com/posts/set-goals-with-intention/https://talento90.com/posts/set-goals-with-intention/A common management challenge is setting goals for engineers who either do not know what they want or actively dislike the goal setting process because it feels artificial, pressurising, or disconnected from how they actually grow.Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/british-citizenship/https://talento90.com/posts/british-citizenship/I want to share my journey and timeline as a European (Portugal 🇵🇹) to get British citizenship. It might be helpful for someone out there.Sat, 27 Sep 2025 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/travel-gear/https://talento90.com/posts/travel-gear/I am a passionate traveller who has visited over 50 countries on six continents. A key element of my trips is packing light to save time and money. For most of my trips, I only use carry-on backpacks to avoid wasting time waiting for my luggage and paying to check-in.Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/achievement-diary/https://talento90.com/posts/achievement-diary/The achievement diary is a living document designed to help engineers track and communicate their achievements. It records all their contributions in a way that is aligned with their role expectations, fostering visibility, self-reflection, and structured career growth.Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/ticket-etiquette/https://talento90.com/posts/ticket-etiquette/Defining a good ticket is more than just writing a helpful description. A ticket represents a piece of work someone will focus on in the next few hours/days. A well-defined structure helps any engineer on the team deliver high-quality results, build great products, and reduce cycle time.Thu, 17 Oct 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/event-storming/https://talento90.com/posts/event-storming/Event Storming is a collaborative workshop created by Alberto Brandolini in which people brainstorm and explore a specific business process. The concept is to gather people with different expertise (engineers, designers, support, sales), experts and map the business.Fri, 04 Oct 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/guide-for-setting-career-goals/https://talento90.com/posts/guide-for-setting-career-goals/One of the engineering manager's primary responsibilities is to support and develop their teams and individuals to grow. When an individual improves, the whole team and the company benefit. They will be more productive, efficient, and motivated.Tue, 17 Sep 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/working-groups/https://talento90.com/posts/working-groups/Working groups deliver value by bringing together individuals from various engineering teams based on their expertise and enthusiasm.Mon, 02 Sep 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/healthy-meetings/https://talento90.com/posts/healthy-meetings/You might have attended some meetings that seemed to waste your time. Too many unproductive meetings can negatively affect personal and team productivity and overall well-being. These are some guidelines and best practices for running healthy and productive discussions.Thu, 29 Aug 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/mentoring-vs-coaching/https://talento90.com/posts/mentoring-vs-coaching/I want to clarify my view on mentoring and coaching. While mentoring and coaching have unique characteristics, they share a fundamental objective, developing and guiding an individual's skills, knowledge, and performance.Tue, 13 Aug 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/elastic-leadership/https://talento90.com/posts/elastic-leadership/Building a team is a continuous process. A team goes through many phases and challenges before being self-organised. Leaders must adapt their leadership to fit the team's needs.Wed, 31 Jul 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/motivation-unlocking-peak-performance/https://talento90.com/posts/motivation-unlocking-peak-performance/Motivation is the driving force that encourages individuals to pursue and achieve goals. It’s the force that makes engineering teams go above and beyond, turning innovative ideas into groundbreaking products and solutions.Wed, 10 Jul 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/observability/https://talento90.com/posts/observability/Observability is the ability to query our system's telemetry data to understand its current state and find "unknown unknowns". It allows us to answer the question, "Why is this happening?".Fri, 21 Jun 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/the-trifecta-model/https://talento90.com/posts/the-trifecta-model/The Trifecta model (or a Triad) is a group of three leaders who share a goal and have clear accountability and autonomy to deliver a valuable, feasible, usable product.Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/support-engineer/https://talento90.com/posts/support-engineer/The support engineer is a temporary role assigned to an engineer every week. The idea is that this person will spend a portion of their time monitoring the team services proactively to ensure the product runs smoothly (keep the lights on) and handle unexpected requests, such as answering client queries, patching security vulnerabilities, leading incidents, etc.Thu, 16 May 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/graph-club/https://talento90.com/posts/graph-club/Graph Club is a weekly or bi-weekly meeting where the team reviews the system’s observability. During this meeting, the team will look into the service SLIs, review alerts, incidents and investigate anomalies that happened over the past weeks.Mon, 06 May 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/lead-by-delegating/https://talento90.com/posts/lead-by-delegating/The goal of a software engineer is to solve problems cost-efficiently. Most of the time, the solution involves writing some code and delegating the work to a machine. Being an effective manager means learning to delegate work to people to create a more engaged and efficient team.Fri, 19 Apr 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/effective-11s/https://talento90.com/posts/effective-11s/The 1:1 meeting is an opportunity to support your direct reports and enable their potential. It is the time of the week when both give up on their time to be together. Using this time effectively can positively impact their performance.Tue, 02 Apr 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/the-art-of-feedback/https://talento90.com/posts/the-art-of-feedback/Feedback is one of the most powerful tools for building synergies and continuously improving your team's performance. If you are practising active management, you should consistently give and ask for feedback.Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/smart-goals/https://talento90.com/posts/smart-goals/Setting clear and measurable goals for your direct reports is a great way to coach, set expectations, and track their progress. It contributes to their development and team success.Sun, 03 Mar 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/performance-improvement-plan/https://talento90.com/posts/performance-improvement-plan/A performance improvement plan (PIP) is a formal process to help low performers meet their role's expectations. It shouldn't be seen as a punishment or a disciplinary action but rather as a tool to improve their performance and address their issues.Sat, 10 Feb 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/performance-reviews/https://talento90.com/posts/performance-reviews/The performance review cycle is a sensitive period where people expect a salary raise or a promotion. It's not a wrong way to see it this way, but it is much more than that. It is an opportunity to get feedback and understand where people are on their journey.Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/getting-your-first-job-as-a-software-engineer/https://talento90.com/posts/getting-your-first-job-as-a-software-engineer/After spending years at the university or months in a boot camp learning critical thinking, coding and the fundamentals of computer engineering, this is a question that every software engineer needs to answer if they want to pursue a career in the field.Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/wow-manifesto/https://talento90.com/posts/wow-manifesto/The ways of working (WoW) manifesto, also known as a working agreement, consists of a set of guidelines or behaviours that a team has agreed upon to define how they want to work together.Tue, 02 Jan 2024 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/demystify-the-engineering-manager-role/https://talento90.com/posts/demystify-the-engineering-manager-role/Engineering managers are responsible for building, enabling and supporting high-performing teams that deliver quality and effective solutions at a sustainable pace.Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/the-pursuit-of-dopamine-as-a-manager/https://talento90.com/posts/the-pursuit-of-dopamine-as-a-manager/Most engineering managers transition from an individual contributor role. A significant difference in this change is the frequency of dopamine hits.Wed, 01 Nov 2023 15:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/manage-yourself/https://talento90.com/posts/manage-yourself/Before taking on the responsibility of managing people, it is crucial to build a system to help us manage ourselves. A system in this context refers to a set of processes, tools, and strategies that we can use to organise our work, improve our productivity, and achieve our goals.Sun, 01 Oct 2023 10:00:31 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/bus-factor/https://talento90.com/posts/bus-factor/The bus factor measures the minimum number of team members who must be hit by a bus (leaving the company, going on holiday, sickness) to put the project in danger.Mon, 18 Sep 2023 22:00:00 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/setting-okrs/https://talento90.com/posts/setting-okrs/OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results, a framework that helps the company/teams/individuals define measurable goals and track outcomes.Mon, 28 Aug 2023 09:06:31 GMThttps://talento90.com/posts/hello-world/https://talento90.com/posts/hello-world/I am sorry I couldn't think of another cliché title for the first article. But most of the adventures in the software industry start with "hello world".Thu, 10 Aug 2023 18:06:31 GMT