Context

At one point in my career as an Engineering Manager, I went from managing a small team of engineers, all within the same discipline, to managing twice as many engineers across several disciplines - accompanied by an expanded team mandate. Here are some reflections on how we were able to produce a productive and successful team.

Disclaimer: As always, all views expressed herein are my own and not meant to be representative of or endorsed by any employers past or present

Evolving in leadership

In order for this new team to be successful with its expanded roster and scope, I believed that I had to be intentional about adapting my role.

Challenges

Some of the challenges of the new arrangement were that

• Whereas previously I had a background in my team’s primary engineering discipline, I didn’t have as much background in the respective domains of the new engineers.
• Even if I had the domain expertise, there isn’t enough time in the day to be a blocking contributor and/or reviewer on work output. Not that I was before but now that simply wasn’t an option at all.
• Along with the new engineering disciplines, there were entirely new problem spaces to learn about and support.

From those challenges, I identified the following guiding principles

Principles

Be intentional about what you put down and what you pick up

Operating in the old way doesn’t scale and it is much better to decide what to stop doing, do later, or delegate than to have things fall through the cracks. So what I decided was to

• Provide the same or more
  • Expectations around ways of working, especially communication and performance
  • Clear priorities
  • Guiding questions around stated intentions (e.g. factors and alternatives considered, stakeholders consulted, etc)
  • Guidance on challenges and ambiguity
• Provide same or less
  • Technical review (initially)
    • Existing folks know at least as much as I do
    • Folks who were new to the team and already experts in their fields know more about their craft than I do; I'll be leaning on and learning from them
    • Frame: tech review is Priority 1-2, people are Priority 0 (0 being higher than 1)
• Ask for
  • Clear communication of intentions, sequencing, timing, and needs
  • Flagging of risks and concerns