How One Director of Engineering Uses Nemo to Manage a Growing Team
Introduction
Managing a fast-growing engineering team working on several products is a daunting task, but using the right tools makes it far more manageable. In this blog post, we’ll explore how one Director of Engineering is using Nemo to manage his team and streamline his workflow.
Matt Cullum, Director of Engineering at thatDot, has found that mind mapping with Nemo is an effective way to manage his growing engineering team and the rapidly expanding functionality they own.
thatDot provides high-scale graph stream processing, allowing users to combine multiple high-volume event streams and detect high-value patterns in real time. Applications include financial and cyber fraud detection, observability, ETL pipelines, and more. thatDot’s offerings span open-source, licensed software, and fully-managed cloud services.
Deep technology × many use cases × multiple products × rapid growth = Matt has to keep track of a LOT of moving pieces across different domains.
“The first time I saw Nemo I could immediately see the value—I’ve been trying to do this in my head for a decade.”
How Matt uses Nemo
Matt uses Nemo diagram views to visualize his teams and functional areas in a mind map - he’s able to get his mental model of the org out of his head, so he has a fast reference for the many dimensions he needs to consider.
He also uses Nemo’s live imports to automatically add in-progress Jira tickets to his mind map so he can do a two-way check:
- What are the impacts of each piece of work tracked in Jira? Does everyone understand not only the immediate goals for each project, but also the ripple effects on other teams and systems?
- Is every critical area being addressed by worked tracked in Jira?
“It’s letting me visualize all the various things going on at once, with their dependencies and resources, and it’s all mapped to the Jira boards my teams use.”
Nemo’s validations let Matt flag any in-progress Jira tickets that haven’t yet been linked to his mind map. Another validation identifies all the finished Jira tickets, so Matt can update his mind map with the new state of the world and delete the finished Jira node from the map.
Any validation alerts prompt him to check with the relevant people to clarify, which helps him zero in on the areas that need attention, instead of relying on inefficient, expensive status meetings that have to walk through every single piece of work.
Matt’s a visual thinker, so having flexible diagram views of everything feels intuitive, and Nemo keeps the actual data linked, so it’s easily shareable in table views and stays up to date in outside systems like Jira. Nemo lets Matt add his own context to shared work items in Jira, without confusing the team, cluttering the tickets themselves, or generating notification spam. Plus, always-updated diagrams are a helpful conversation aid when providing context to the team.
“I could never make Jira do what I want, and I realized I could make the Kanban view I always wanted in Nemo”
Try it yourself
If you’re leading technical teams in a complex domain, consider giving Nemo a try to see how it can help you manage your team more effectively.