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November 7, 2022 - April 17, 2023
1-1s serve two purposes. First, they create human connection between you and your manager.
Great managers notice when your normal energy level changes, and will hopefully care enough to ask you about it.
The second purpose of a 1-1 is a regular opportunity for you to speak privately with your manager about whatever needs discussing.
Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.
It’s great when managers can identify and assign stretch projects that will help us grow and learn new things. Beyond assigning stretch projects, though, good managers will also help you understand the value of the work you’re doing even when it is not fun
Your manager should be the person who shows you the larger picture of how your work fits into the team’s goals, and helps you feel a sense of purpose in the day-to-day work. The most mundane work can turn into a source of pride when you understand how it contributes to the overall success of the company.
Developing a sense of ownership and authority for your own experiences at work, and not relying on your manager to set the entire tone for your relationship, is an important step in owning your career and workplace happiness.
Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.
Set expectations appropriately before reviews are delivered. If someone is underperforming across the board, the review should not be his first time getting that feedback. Similarly, if someone has recently been promoted, you may want to prepare her for the fact that she will be reviewed based on higher standards.
Real potential shows itself quickly. It shows itself as working hard to go the extra mile, offering insightful suggestions on problems, and helping the team in areas that were previously neglected.
As a manager, be careful about focusing on your teams to the exclusion of the wider group. Even when you have been hired to fix a team, remember that the company has gotten this far because of some fundamental strengths.
What was the last task you delegated to a member of one of your teams? Was it simple or complex? How is the person you delegated to handling the new task?
Any manager you hire should role-play a few 1-1s as part of the interview process.
If you value servant-leadership and you hire a manager who wants to dictate exact marching orders to the team, there will be a bad fit.
Don’t overpromise a future of technical projects. Don’t promise your team exciting technical projects “later,” because the product roadmap for later hasn’t been written yet.
CTO should be the strategic technical executive the company needs in its current stage of evolution.
Apologize. When you screw up, apologize. Practice apologizing honestly and briefly.
Get curious. When you disagree with something, stop to ask why.
The Outage Postmortem I’m not going to talk about the details of incident management, but the “postmortem” process is a critical element of good engineering. In fact, instead of calling the process a postmortem, many have started calling it a “learning review” to indicate that its purpose is not determining cause of death but learning from the incident.
Architecture Review I’m going to roll into architecture review all major systems and tools changes that the team may wish to make. The goal of architecture review is to help socialize big changes to the appropriate group, and to make the risks for those changes clear.
The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you have to be able to manage yourself if you want to be good at managing others. The more time you spend understanding yourself, the way you react, the things that inspire you, and the things that drive you crazy, the better off you will be.
Great managers are masters of working through conflict. Getting good at working through conflict means getting good at taking your ego out of the conversation.
