Engineering Manager role

Work in progress

Management roles are there to balance the needs of the organisation with the engineering teams ability to deliver

The role naturally focuses on on the larger goals and challenges facing the engineering teams, supporting the engineers to solve specific challenges using their own skills and experiences (that is why they were hired)

Meetings

one to one are regularly held with direct reports and those people the engineering manager reports to, ensuring there is good working relationship between the respective people.

• direct reports focus on supporting that persons ability to thrive within the company and identify actions to help

• stakeholders to ensure their concerns are understood and they have a realistic view of current capability from engineering teams

Engineering team meetings may occasionally be joined to review how effective the format is to those involved, or should a wider issue be addressed (especially in retrospectives)

• standup can highlight issues with motivation and team cohesiveness
• retrospective can help identify action items that the engineering manager can actively support or help direct others to support

Performance reviews supported by one-to-one meetings

Where performance reviews are applicable, include the review as an aspect to raise with one-to-one meetings with direct reports throughout the year.

The need to complete a review should be raised as early as possible in one-to-one meetings and regularly raised (even if only briefly) to ensure supporting tasks are carried out to swiftly complete the review at the appropriate time.

Creating regular journal entries can speed up the completion of a self-written performance review submission

Journal

Write regular journal entries and encourage others to do the same by sharing the journal across the organisation (except for private notes)

Use the knowledge sharing tool for the organisation, e.g. Atlassian Confluence, Notion, Tettra, etc.

Example Journals

Practicalli personal journal is a purposely unstructured journal to capture important but ad-hock information quickly, in a central place to it can easily be found and added too.

Management anti-patters

micro-management is highly ineffective, demonstrates lack of trust, highlights poor communication and lack of management skills. Shows lack of understanding of the needs of the business and engineering teams.

overt control suggests a lack of confidence, demoralises the team, incurs a lack of trust and engagement by team under control. Drives inefficiency, stifles agency and creativity.

emotional pain degrading and emotionally attacking a person has no place in a positive relationship.

dominating by tearing people down to (allegedly) build them up in the (perceived) right way is an act of emotional torture and highly counter productive in the long term.

Working with Product

Important relationship for and effective team

Ensures the work is readily understandable by the engineers on the team.

There should be clear goals to achieve (e.g. milestones) and a common understanding of what DONE looks like (and how to demonstrate DONE).

Fintech Startup

• wrote a pitch to enhance API security by introducing HTTP Message Signatures (RFC9421)
• reviewed and help simplify pitches created by the product manager, e.g. a new billing system and authorisation permissions and roles
• introduced concept of engineering pitches to address technical debt and engineering concerns, expressing the value of this work to the business and ensuring the most concerning technical debt was alieviated

Avoid solutionising

Product requirements for a project should avoid providing a solution as this can be very distracting, especially if this leads the engineers on the team down an inappropriate approach.

For example: Product suggested an API approach to an intricated billing system for a high volume service. This would not have performed effectively and would have had a detrimental impact on the overall service. A busy engineering team may have adopted this approach rather than seeking out existing services they could build a builing service upon (i.e. a ledger service).

EM responsibility

The EM is ultimately responsible for everything the team does and agrees to do

• delivery of all work agreed
• Health and wellbeing of team
• Carrer progression of team members
• Onboarding new team members
• Rolling off new team members
• Overall quality of the platform
• Overall schedule of the team and meetings they attend

product Manager

The PM for the team is ultimately responsible for providing clear guidance on business features required by Griffin customers.

• The Product owner should be aware of the respective value of any work proposed and any time frame in which this value is constrained by.
• Why is it valuable
• When is it valuable
• How is it valuable compared to other business features

Work focus & cadence

Short term cycle - 4 weeks product driven work - 2 weeks engineering driven work - Introduce goal keeper concept (based on need - initially engineering managers sole responsibility)

Planning view

• 3 month high level goals
• 1 month plan overview
• 1 week detailed work

Priorities for product driven and engineering driven work agreed at start of week.

• Work broken down to small pieces, 1 day to 1 week.
• Epics used to orchestrate larger pieces

Cycling analogy

Onboarding

Create the basic engineering environment - Getting a bike and making it ready for a ride - Wearing the right clothes for the weather - Food and snacks for the journey

Starting as Engineer Manager

(analogy breaks down a bit)

• I have an idea of the destination, but not an exact route
• Discover several hills to climb (at the same time)
• Understanding organisation principles, practices and tools
• Understanding the team
• Understanding platform & products
• Understanding the needs of the business
• Identify where I can add value without detracting from delivery

Reaching the destination

• Delivered what the business currently needs
• Climbing up each hill to be able to add value
• Identifying Where next?