Manager Flashcards
The One Essential Skill of an Exceptional Engineering Manager
This essential skill is the ability to think and act like a CEO.
How to think and act like a CEO
- Understand How Business Success Is Measured at Your Current Company
- Leverage Data Effectively
- Learn to Delegate
- Be Obsessed With Continuous Improvement
- Bring Positive Energy
Understand How Business Success Is Measured at Your Current Company
it’s the responsibility of the team’s engineering manager to ensure those activities contribute towards a desirable outcome for the company. You will be much valued by senior executives if you understand the big picture.
Leverage Data Effectively
As an engineering manager, when your teams are delivering new features or working on any project, think about how this relates to the success metrics of the company and communicate this clearly.
Learn to Delegate
There is a saying that a CEO should work on their business instead of working in it.
Be Obsessed With Continuous Improvement
When you see an inefficiency in the way of working, misunderstanding of the big picture, or lack of clarity in strategy, make it your job to improve it.
Bring Positive Energy
Through a positive attitude and outlook, a CEO is able to inspire and influence others to follow their vision and give their best work to achieve ambitious goals.
The Alpha geek
The Alpha geek is driven to be the best engineer on the team to always have the right answer. They can’t let anyone else get any glory without claiming some of it for themselves.
The process czar
Someone believes that there is one true process that if implemented correctly and followed as designed will solve all of the team’s biggest problems.
The most important characteristics for a great tech lead
- Understand the architecture
- Be a team player
- Lead technical decisions
- Communicate
Tasks required to manage people
- Taking on new report
- Holding regular 1:1s
- Giving feedback
- Working with reports to identify areas for learning and help them
Encourage participation
By asking new hires updating the onboarding doc
Get the feedback from your new hires
They have fresh perceptions.
Don’t encourage them to criticize the established processes or systems in a way that makes the existing team feel attacked.
1:1 styles
- To do list meeting: discuss topics on a todo list
- Catch up: listen to anything they want to disccuss
- Feedback meeting
- Progress report: is it really necessary here?
- Getting to know you: know them as a human being
Micromanagement vs delegation
Micromanagement: step in to enforce something happens the way you want
Delegation: Give clear goal and responsibility then support
The thing is sometimes you need to micromanage
Delegate effectively
- Use the team goals, ask how they measure success， give them a week or two, if they can’t give you anything, that is a sign you need to do course correction and dig deeper.
- Gather information from the system before reaching out
- Adjust your focus depending on the stage of the projects
- Establish standards for code and systems
- Treat the open sharing of information, good or bad, in a neutral to positive way.
Potentials
Up or out.
Having senior engineers or managers can stay in the same level for a long time, if that is ok on both sides, it’s fine.
Firing underperformers
Performance improvement plan
Continuous feedback is key here. Communicate this as early as possible.
Engineer lead responsibilities
- Identify bottleneck in the process and roadblock for the team
- Identify high-value project and keep team focus on that
- Work with product lead to manage project scope
- Manage headcount need for the team
- Communicate expectations clearly to all team members and solicit and deliver feedback frequently
- Identify technical debt
Being a good manager isn’t about having the most technical knowledge.
The work of supporting people was far more important to management success.
While the product manager is responsible for the product roadmap and the tech lead is responsible for the technical details.
Engineer manager is accountable for the team’s progress through each of these elements.
How to drive good decisions
- Create a data-driven team culture
- Flex your own product muscles
- Look into the future
- Review the outcome of your decisions and projects
- Run retrospectives
Team cohesion
The real goal here is psychological safety that in a team whose members are willing to take risks and make mistakes in front of one another
Protect people
1st goal is to protect your team
2nd goal is to protect the individual on the team
last is to protect yourself
Deciding when to delegate or do it yourself
============================================
Frequent Infrequent
Simple Delegate Do it yourself
Complex Delegate(carefully) Delegate for training
Warning signs for quitting
- Personality or behaviour change, either have a major personal issue or get ready to quit. If it happened after a major adjustment, the person may feel that she was overlooked
- Trying to hide something, normally it’s the progress is going slower than he anticipated
- The team has absolutely no energy at all in their meetings
- The team’s project list seems to change every week
- A small team internally seems very fragmented in understanding. They may be resistant to changing their systems based on the needs of the larger team or the business.
A strong manager must develop effective strategies for saying NO
- “Yes, AND”
- Create policies. The policy consists of the hard requirements that must be met in order to say yes
- Help me say yes. Ask questions and dig in on the elements that seem so questionable to you
- Appel to budget. “Not right now”
- Work as a team, Get help from other teams
- Don’t prevaricate. Better to give quick no or yes for low-risk and low impact decision.
The health signals for an engineering team
Frequency of code release
Frequency of code check-in
Infrequency of incidents
These are the key indicators of a team that knows what to do and has the tools to do it and has the time to do it every day.
Durable teams
Durable teams are built on a shared purpose that comes from the company itself and they align themselves with the company’s values
Impatience paired with laziness is wonderful when you direct it at processes and decisions
Practice modeling: figuring out what is important and going home!
Managing managers, indirect feedback
Need to practice honing your instincts, follow through on things that you are not sure are actually important but you sense are off.
Skip level meetings
These are one of the critical keys to successful management at levels of remove.
Their purpose is to help you get perspective on the health and focus of your teams.
Hiring managers
- Has the skills you need
Role-playing 1:1, underperformance - Culture fit
- Do reference check
How to debug a team
- Have a hypothesis
- Check the data
- Observe the team
- Ask questions
- Check the team dynamics
- Jump in to help
- Be curious
Ask the team what their goals are
If the team can not answer, it’s a massive failure for the manager.
In almost every model of motivation, people need to feel an understanding and connection with the purpose of their work.
Setting expectations and delivering on schedule
Be aggressive about sharing estimation and updates to the audience, even when people don’t ask.
4 categories of all management tasks
- Information fathering or information sharing
- Nudging
- Decision making
- Role modelling
wanting to be a CTO or VP of engineering is like wanting to be married
Remember that it’s not just the title, it’s also the company and the people that matter.
Apologize
Practice apologizing honestly and briefly
Showing the team that apologizing doesn’t make you weaker it makes the team stronger
Thoughtful organizational structure
Modern companies often put their structural focus on the goal settings instead of trying to make all decisions from the top.
Don’t underestimate the structure you need to successfully set and communicate goals
Having structure is about learning
Identifying the causes of failures, especially frequent failures and trying to figure out what we can change to solve those failures. This is fundamentally about learning
Engineering process
Think of the process as risk management
Same as “a good political idea is one that works well in half baked form”, the processes should have value even when they are not followed perfectly.
