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September 28, 2020 - January 15, 2021
Make every fourth one-on-one meeting a retrospective to discuss improvements to your one-on-ones.
Ensuring that everyone on the team feels a sense of responsibility and ownership, and having a clear Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) is key.
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. This means having enough insight into
Pay attention to the topics people seem to value your opinion on. It shows what they notice — which are often the things we most take for granted.
“You want to give people a little more freedom than you’re comfortable with.”
Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them
Think of it as a three-step process that does the following: I’m telling you about X because of Y. Here are the details on X. I need you to do Z so that I can accomplish X because of Y.
If you want your message to be consistently heard, try delivering it through different medium and more frequently than you think is needed.
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.”
A company’s product is the what. Their customers are the why. Their employees are the who. Culture is the how.
Intentionally not doing certain tasks is a manager super power.
if you are not great at getting your team to be productive, this is a critical growth opportunity.
Engineering productivity is a difficult thing to measure, but most of us know intuitively what it feels like to be on a productive team. We’re shipping things, we’re focused, we feel like we know what we’re doing and why it is important.
If you view your team as a system, you’ll see where you have bottlenecks that, if cleared, would increase the overall capacity of the team.
Usually people outside the team (leadership, marketing, etc.) are talking about dates and delivery, but you need to get the team itself estimating its timelines and embracing Continuous Delivery.
Confidence is gained most quickly in production.
If shipping is one of your values, center it in in your rituals. Do not present work at wins that’s almost done, almost done waiting for a PR, will be merged to master next, is merged to master but hasn’t been deployed. Wins need to align with your values.
Almost every bad process I’ve encountered has had the same problem: the problem statement is wrong.
A good standup is a constant reevaluation and refocusing tool for the group. A good standup answers the following questions: Are we working on the right things? Are we making the kind of progress we expected to be making? Have we gathered new information in the course of the past day that should change what we’re working on now?
The “responsible” person, or decision maker, should also be communicating the decision. If it’s unclear who will make the decision, you can end up with a bystander effect in which everyone participates in the decision, but no one takes ownership of (1) ensuring a decision is reached and (2) communicating the decision.
This engineer will tell you their story, and it’s your job to dig deeper. Your first response could be, “What are they really telling me?” or, “What’s really going on here?”
Leadership is responsibility, not authority. In other words, we as leaders have a responsibility to make our team members succeed, not an authority to make our ideas hold.
management is in no way a promotion. Prepare to go back to feeling like a junior developer: every day you will get nominally better, but you will make mistakes regularly. If you’re lucky, you’ll knock out some of the basics early on. If you’re like most folks, you’ll make a massive mistake when you least expect it. This is totally normal and expected. Good luck!
“People leave bosses, not companies.” Also true is, “People stick to bosses, not companies.”
Create a system and culture where creating public channels to build company networks is the norm, to foster frequent and open communication within and across those networks.
Take action quickly. Be transparent about your actions so that you preserve the safe space and trust. Ask them, “Is it OK if I take action on this by speaking with this person about this thing?”
We make decisions based on information and how we feel about that information.
good managers know when to amplify or dampen corporate leadership
I have seen it multiple times where teams have developed and deployed software that did not actually meet all the needs of the business only for retrospectives later
if a team is acting in a way that you don’t understand, there’s probably something making them feel unsafe.
You need to change the ways in which you perceive success. Shift the focus away from your individual contributions and instead measure yourself on the health of your team and their progress as a unit.
Psychological safety is positively correlated with team effectiveness and negatively correlated with membership changes.
Your one-on-ones should be so regular that if one is canceled, your report thinks something happened to you.
As leaders, we should be trusted that we have our clients’ and organizations’ best interests in mind, trusted that we have our team members’ best interests in mind, trusted that our team members can come and speak to us when they have new ideas or concerns, especially if they have concerns with what we’re doing. Developing this kind of trust takes work, it takes relationship building, it takes consistent active demonstration that you can be trusted in these ways.
“Code wins arguments” implies an argument and a defeat. “Code moves us all forward” might be a better, although less pithy, approach to bring to the work.
Your job is to get results for the business. To get stuff done. As an engineering manager, this means providing direction and motivation, removing roadblocks and pain points, and ensuring great communication in the team you are managing and among peers and departments. All in a sustainable way. Bonus points if you improve any of these areas.
