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May 3 - August 3, 2022
How often you meet (it doesn’t have to be the same frequency with each person)
Who runs the meeting (how could you take turns running the meeting?)
The agenda for the meeting The goal of the meeting
What would happen if we stopped doing them? What parts are valuable to me and which feel like a waste? What parts are valuable to them and which feel like a waste?
Something I struggled with as a new manager was finding a sense of accomplishment.
it can be easy to feel like you’re just riding a wave of good people doing good work without contributing anything yourself.
There’s nothing like a week off (or more!) to show which of your activities has the most impact. When you come back, pay attention to what you find.
Ensuring that everyone on the team feels a sense of responsibility and ownership, and having a clear Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) is key.
Healthy teams ship, consistently, and keep shipping over time.
success on your team is something that happens interdependently, not as a competition.
feedback is someone’s work reflected back to them, in a way that helps them take pride in their accomplishments and makes actionable the places where they can improve.
What could you take on that would most help your boss? Your peers?
I suck at niceties. I get heated sometimes in discussions. I don’t give praise very much. Well, so what? If you know you have foibles/quirks that you want to change about yourself, do the work.
what happens when you put out this declaration of self-awareness then behave in such a way as to contradict the person you claimed to be? You damage your credibility.
you have a huge power differential over a person who reports to you. Most people have had managers who claim they want feedback and then react by shutting down, blaming, or otherwise making it clear that maybe they do want some feedback, sometimes, but not this feedback, not at this time, not in this way.
making sure the roadmap answers the questions on which you need stakeholders to provide consensus.
Good roadmaps create momentum as more teams’ needs are represented.
Unfortunately, the closer we get to maxing out our capacity, the worse our output gets.
Give your team members slack in their day to respond to things as they come up.
it’s not your job to create or fully outline their career paths; note that you are a guide, not a mapmaker.
I always ask my reports to keep track of the work they’ve done to date. It should include the project, relevant tasks, timeline, and impact to the team/organization/company.
Here are some ways to provide career development: Share the opportunity to work on larger projects Create more specialization Hire experienced mentors Invest in training and classes
a dedicated generalist is probably more motivated by working on the hardest business problems.)
Creating specialized roles actually makes hiring easier in a couple ways. First, it allows you to post more roles. This might sound simplistic, but circulating more unique job listings will increase the overall number of people you hear from.
First, senior leaders faced raw, demanding items and were often fighting fires where mine wasn’t the priority. Second, I probably didn’t communicate in a way that got their attention.
The granularity of your conversations should scale to match your company size On the smallest teams, you might spend time talking about specific tasks. A bit larger, and you’re talking about sprints or collections of tasks.
Push information up frequently without being asked to do so
Keep your manager in the loop proactively even when things are going well. It’s easy to slip into firefighting mode, but pushing bursty updates about things being on track is often just as valuable, and it gives you an opportunity to showcase the work your team is doing.
Team-centric communication is often about fostering autonomy, and overcommunication at that layer can be distracting or come off as condescending. Upward communication is the opposite: rarely will you run into a problem overcommunicating,
Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them
“We’d like to spend three weeks paying down technical debt. Today I’m going to discuss why we’d like to do that and what we’re focusing on, and I would like to leave with a ‘go’ or a ‘no-go’ decision.” Do that and then provide a summary of what you told them (ideally in written form)
I like to write out the narrative, trim the fat, and build slides around it.
Executive radar quickly picks up on evasive answers, so err on the side of “I don’t know but I’ll find out” as opposed to vamping. It’s generally fine not to know something, and if you take detailed notes and follow up after this will almost always work to your advantage.
Use data to explain the current constraints, context, or progress of the problem. If you don’t provide data and instead skip to the analysis, you’re relying on trust and persuasion to get the information, guidance, or resources that you need.
Start the meeting by explicitly framing the goal, and then return to the ask at the end of the meeting.
If you want your message to be consistently heard, try delivering it through different medium and more frequently than you think is needed.
Everyone also has preferences around how they like to communicate. Some people prefer Slack, some prefer email, others prefer in-person conversations. It is your job to learn what they prefer and to meet them there.
Your communication influences your team more than you can imagine. They take cues from you. You can talk about mistakes as learning opportunities. You can remind people of all the progress that they have made. Highlight ways people are growing and stretching skills. Set the tone that you want your team to have.
Instead of filling the silence, give someone space. Show that you value whatever they have to say, and you’re willing to wait to hear it.
The highest leverage activity of an engineering manager is making sure that the engineers who report to them have clarity, alignment, and ultimately understand “The Why” to “The What.”
Why affords them the depth of insight needed to create truly innovative solutions and serves as a wellspring of empathetic user-driven motivation.
To the engineering team in a team channel: I just want to remind you of how impactful [this improvement] is to our current and future users. During two recent interviews, both Sam and Julie commented specifically on how painful that experience was before I even showed them the prototype! When I mentioned that we were already underway with this and that we would complete it soon, they were so excited! What you are doing today matters!
Directly to an individual working on a difficult bug: Thank you so much for persevering through this bug fix, I know it’s been a difficult one to overcome. What you are doing here matters.
values are rarely polemic, and they tend to be aspirational in nature.
It’s your responsibility as a leader to understand that your actions can normalize a bad behavior or model a good one.
Making decisions with imperfect information is never easy. You’re asked to predict a future that you know nothing about based on very little knowledge. But not making one will lead to your team not knowing what to do or where to go. Eventually, the team will burn out and leave.
Start defining the problems and goals Any decision that doesn’t have a good set of goals and problem definitions attached to it will likely not get the buy-in you might be hoping for. There are decisions for which this isn’t possible due to confidentiality reasons. But for most decisions, be clear on the goals. This helps avoid bikeshedding, where people argue about the implementation or a detail rather than first reaching agreement on whether they really need a shed. Collect information from multiple sources Talk to several people in your company to get a fair overview of what people think
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A company’s product is the what. Their customers are the why. Their employees are the who. Culture is the how.
how do the people in the company operate?
