Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

by Sarah Drasner

If you say someone is “lazy,” that is an immovable character assessment and absolves you as a manager from figuring out their motivations, potential misalignments, or challenging external factors that might be impacting their work.

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

in the balance of power, the manager can always speak directly to the employee. The inverse isn’t always true.

if you have a big enough group and there’s enough going on, things are going to slip through the cracks, so repetition becomes an important tool to make things stick.

culture eats strategy for breakfast.

In order to make real change, we need to connect people to the why.

In essence, to give good feedback that actually helps an individual or team grow, it’s pertinent that they don’t feel threatened and feel that it’s coming from a place of care.

Ask your team members how they prefer to get feedback, and listen to the answer. The more they are in tune with their own state of mind, the better they think critically and communicate.

By showing vulnerability, you make space for them to be honest and imperfect too.

I like to think through whether the feedback would serve them anywhere: Is this something they will be able to carry in their careers?

Conflict can mean we’re outside our own comfort zones, and conflict can also give us an opportunity to see what we’re made of.

One of the most-valuable skills one can possess as a manager is to help your team scope down large, ambitious, abstract work into more manageable pieces, and often the smaller the units the better.

The truth is, a customer’s time is precious. If they have a horrible time onboarding or using your product, they’re not coming back for when you “improve it next time.”