Luna Frank-Reese

Category: Leadership

  • The Power of Implicit Storytelling

    Shortly after I transitioned to management, the startup I was working for was acquired by a large multinational company. During the process of onboarding, I was in charge of running introduction sessions about my team’s system for a group from our new parent company. I was pretty intimidated—I had only been a manager for a…

  • Argument Alchemy

    In my last role, I needed to work closely with teams halfway across the world. We usually only had a couple precious hours of overlap in which to meet. I’d be blinking sleep out of my eyes in the early morning, and they’d be desperate to get home to their families at the end of…

  • Returning to My Leadership Values Document

    When I first moved into management, my mentor suggested I think through my management style. What was most important to me as a leader? What did I need my team to know? As I always do when I need to think clearly, I began to write. The document I wrote during those first months of…

  • My Leadership Values

    I wrote the first version of this document in 2020 as a newly minted manager of an engineering team. I return to it when I am building a relationship with a new colleague, handling a difficult situation, or navigating a role change. I’ve updated it over the years, but most of my core philosophy has…

  • The Divorced Parents Problem

    I grew up with two loving, clever, and very willful parents. They divorced when I was around three years old, and generally we all got along quite well. However, when I was a teenager, I started to notice a pattern that cropped up over and over. I would talk to my mom and she’d convince…

  • Putting Potatoes on the Crowded Table

    I’ve seen a lot of senior engineers and junior managers, tasked with pushing forward a big and important cross-team effort, hit the same big block. How do you get all those other teams to actually do what you need them to do? Here’s how I like to visualize this situation: imagine a table at a…

  • Framing the Technical Growth Conversation

    In an early one-on-one, a wise manager asked me a question that has stuck with me ever since:  On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “not set up for success and struggling to get your work done”, and 5 is “well set up for success, an interesting but not overwhelming level of…