Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

Management is still related to the code, though. Unless our teams are set up well, have support, and have clear strategy, all the coding best practices and linters in the world won’t amount to real outcomes.

“The fact that you’re worried that you’re not a good manager is a key part of being a good manager.”

Values are the fundamental beliefs that guide us, motivate us, and drive our actions.

Accountability, Advocacy, Autonomy, Compassion, Collaboration, Contribution, Creativity, Curiosity, Dependability, Diversity, Empathy, Ethics, Excellence, Fairness, Family, Friendships, Fun, Growth, Happiness, Health, Honesty, Humility, Humor, Inclusiveness, Independence, Knowledge, Performance, Personal Development, Spirituality, Perfection, Power, Preparedness, Reliability, Success, Teamwork, Traditionalism, Trustworthiness, Versatility, Vision, Warmth, Wealth.

Values don’t offer something to fix, or an action to take; they provide us context so that we can be more understanding of what is happening and why.

Clarity is what we’re aiming for here. Clarity is key.

If I was going to nail down what I think my job is, it’s to enable the people around me to do their best work . . . together.

you as a leader have to go first.

I myself struggle with admitting vulnerability—will it make me be seen as weak, given I’m a woman in tech? Some behaviors, when displayed by my male peers, can look like humility. The same behaviors, when displayed by me, could be read as incompetence.

The leadership team is also a team, and should also be treated as your team. How you speak about this team is equally important.

Happiness at work isn’t some “hippie” concept. It’s also connected to the bottom line.

You get fair and timely feedback on your tasks. This does not necessarily have to be human feedback. It can also come in the form of compilation success, tests passing, or PRs (pull requests) going through.

A person will struggle to reach flow state if they are not compensated fairly. Otherwise they will be consumed with the inequity, and it will be challenging for them to focus on the task.

Psychologists suggest a ratio of negative to positive interaction that humans can tolerate before they feel demoralized. This ratio, called the “Losada coefficient,”2 suggests a 2.9 times positive-to-negative interaction (i.e. praises: reproach), with a 6:1 ratio for optimal happiness.

“You can’t call yourself a leader by coming into a situation that is by nature uncertain, ambiguous—and create confusion. You have to create clarity where none exists.” —Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

I’ve also seen underperformers turn around after the career laddering process. What one might see as a lazy quality in a person might actually be a symptom of misalignment with the purpose of the tasks. A career ladder helps them recognize what, when, why, and how the things they’re working on fit into the bigger picture.

At their root, 1:1s should reduce uncertainty by making both parties feel more connected to the rest of the team while clarifying intent.

Your job is now to align people to the outcomes instead of tactical details of how to get something done.

When communicating, it’s worth asking yourself what context people need to see the bigger picture. Erring on the side of saying more, not less, can help build trust. Try to speak in plain English rather than disguising messages in corporate blather.

My suggestion is to treat all feedback exchanges, as much as possible, as though they are a partnership. You are not coming down from a mountaintop of perfection to give advice; rather you’re two people working together toward shared goals, and feedback is part of making that partnership healthy and productive.

In their book Thanks for the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen discuss a few factors to consider when giving feedback: Your baseline: This is your default emotional state. Some people are more naturally optimistic, others feel more general anxiety. Your swing: This is how much you move off your baseline when you receive feedback. Some people react more strongly than others to either positive or negative feedback. Your recovery: This is the duration of your reaction. Some people bounce back from setbacks faster than others. Some people maintain a positive boost for longer.

Note that giving details also means expanding on the why: Why is this information helpful to them? But details also help you steer away from an ad hominem attack, or from hijacking their amygdala and hindering their ability to think logically.

Ego resilience affords you the ability to separate yourself from others a bit and to take responsibility. Will your whole career collapse if you understand that you need to improve how you react to a certain situation? Probably not. Will it be the end of the world if you acknowledge a mistake in front of people? Probably not.

a good meeting is: The purpose of the meeting is clear. There’s an agenda (we dive into the complexity of this in a moment). The right people (and the right number of people) are in the room. Not too many people where communication is overly complicated, and not too few people where those you need to move forward aren’t there. There’s some order. People aren’t dropping in and out, talking over each other, or being generally inconsiderate. There’s a clear decision, outcome, and next steps at the end.

It’s the job of a manager to disambiguate healthy conflict from attack, so that respectful discourse is encouraged.

Conflict is actually a very necessary and healthy part of a productive working environment. Why? Because we work best together when we’re all learning from one another, and that can’t happen without some disagreement along the way.

If you can keep the team focused on the big picture, allow voices to be heard, and provide psychological safety for the team while also time-boxing the discussion and appointing a person who makes the decision, you can avoid situations where conflicts are either undiscovered or drawn out forever. Here again, clarity is key.

A word of caution here. Engineering throughput metrics are easy to be gamed: close a lot of small issues, only work on the easiest PRs, and so on. Some of the “gaming” is actually healthy: You don’t want people to be submitting huge, lumbering PRs that are impossible to review;

You have to be clear what your highest goals are and be willing to let go of the others.

As mentioned above, you can also make use of to-dos. I often do this, and will track what’s left with this VS Code extension15 that goes through and highlights any TODO comments for you. You can also override and customize it, should your team have a different convention.

Previous chapter on OKRs, this one on PRs, very different abstraction level

“It’s not enough for us to go fast. You can run fast in the wrong direction.”

A lot of companies will do hack week, or innovation week, projects where developers can work untethered on some feature related to the company’s product. It’s a great time for exploration, and I’ve seen some powerful features added to well-known applications this way. It’s also incredibly energizing for the team to see an idea of their own come to fruition.

Stop lying to yourself, and admit your real priorities. Start doing what you say you want to do, and see if it’s really true.”

Longer term, respecting breaks and balance can affect things like attrition.

“It’s amazing what you can get done if you just sit down and do it.”

Part of the reason we do the small things early on is because morale is important. When I accomplish a task, I feel more inclined to get my other work done because being productive feels good—a small dopamine rush20 is associated with every check.

Make sure you don’t use boundaries as a way to protect yourself from everything that feels uncomfortable to you. Sometimes growth is uncomfortable, and you may be using boundaries as an excuse to not push yourself.

Please don’t compare yourself to what you see from other people on the outside.

When we feel we have some agency in our lives, when we believe in our own competence to act on what’s within our locus of control, we thrive.

Sorry, Ayn Rand. Research confirms27 that people who give are more likely to feel happiness over a long period of time.