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.