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January 3 - January 12, 2021
while you may only have the authority to guide decisions rather than dictate them, you’ll still be judged by how well those decisions turn out.
You need to think two steps ahead, from a product and technology perspective.
The goal is to identify problems that are causing the team to work less effectively together and resolve them, not to become the team’s therapist.
The real goal here is psychological safety — that is, a team whose members are willing to take risks and make mistakes in front of one another.
The challenge of the brilliant jerk is that she’s probably been rewarded for a very long time for her brilliance, and she clings to it like a life raft.
It’s incredibly hard for a manager to justify getting rid of someone who produces great work, even though she’s a drain on everyone around her — especially if this person is only irregularly a jerk.
The only way to achieve these goals is to cut scope at the end of the project.
“Whenever asked for an estimate, take your guess and double it.”
Managing your time comes down to one important thing: understanding the difference between importance and urgency.
Urgency is often more clearly felt than importance.
I feel bad when I suck at being an engineer, but sucking at being a manager would be a choice I inflicted on other people. That’s not fair.
The best way to describe the feeling of management from here on out is plate spinning.
frequency of code change is one of the leading indicators of a healthy engineering team.
there are two areas I encourage you to practice modeling, right now: figuring out what’s important, and going home.
you must make the time to proactively hold skip-level meetings with the people who report to your direct reports.
By trying to make everyone happy, people pleasers often burn themselves out.
Sometimes all it takes is awareness that his habit of saying yes is a problem for the team. Recognize that this usually comes from a personal value of being selfless and caring about others, and honor these values even as you try to correct the unhealthy behaviors.
One common sign of a struggling first-time manager is overwork.
Don’t compromise on culture fit, especially when hiring managers.
Experienced managers will have different ideas about management than you do, and you’ll have to work out the differences.
the critical elements to hiring in new managers: the reference check.
I believe that the best engineering managers are often great debuggers.
One of the most frustrating questions that engineering managers get asked regularly is why something is taking so long.
you must always be aggressive about sharing estimates and updates to estimates, even when people don’t ask,
it’s possible to do up-front work to drastically reduce the unknowns that make software estimation difficult.
break down big projects into a series of smaller deliverables so that you can achieve some of the results,
Don’t promise your team exciting technical projects “later,”
Dedicate 20% of your team’s schedule to “sustaining engineering.”
treat big technical projects the same way as product initiatives.
you’re accountable for making sure the team is placing its technical bets in the right places.
Your first job is to be a leader. The company looks to you for guidance on what to do, where to go, how to act, how to think, and what to value.
You’re capable of making hard decisions without perfect information and willing to face the consequences of those decisions.
The strong senior leader is capable of synthesizing large quantities of information quickly, identifying critical elements of that information, and sharing the information with the appropriate third parties in a way they will be able to understand.
Reminding people of their commitments by asking questions instead of giving orders.
If making decisions were easy, there would be much less need for managers and leaders.
making decisions is one of the most draining and stressful parts of the job.
my role was to help the team make the best possible decisions and help them implement them in a sustainable and efficient way.
never underestimate how many times and how many ways something needs to be said before it sinks in.
most people need to hear something at least three times before it really sinks in.
As a person in senior leadership, you’ll need to excel at communicating sensitive information to large groups.
The worst way to communicate bad news is via impersonal mediums like email and chat,
the second-worst way to deliver this message, especially to a large group that you know won’t be happy, is with them all in a room at once.
If you absolutely can’t deliver the news in a way that won’t betray your strong disagreement, you might need to have someone else help you deliver
Try to bring solutions, not problems to be solved.
Your boss may not want to be stuck solving your problems, but you can bet that she’ll be happy to provide feedback if you phrase it as needing advice.
Senior leaders, more than any other group in a company, must actively practice first-team focus
need to figure out how to communicate the complexity of our work in a way that an intelligent but nontechnical peer can understand.
At this level especially, you must decide whether you want to fall in line or quit.
reports are going to have a hard time distinguishing between their buddy thinking out loud and their boss asking them to focus on something.
Practice apologizing honestly and briefly.
