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Notes from Sabin Roman’s conversation

On promotions vs growth

Sabin suggests that promotions, titles and rubrics can become a goal in themselves and can steal focus from what you are building. Instead, he advocates approaching growth as a cycle of continuous challenge and learning during the course of daily work scaling a product.

On measuring performance as an engineering manager

Sabin recommends asking yourself: “What have I done to make the product better?” - A question that pushes you to think about impact beyond the usual metrics around team health and output.

On creativity vs process

In Sabin’s view, for as long as your scale allows, teams should prioritize creativity over process. In practice, this means discussing principles rather than writing detailed guidebooks. While he acknowledges guidebooks have their place in structured processes like incident response, he believes they can stifle creativity in day-to-day work.