Table Of ContentEngineering manager’s guide
How to choose the perfect leather sofa
Preface
Nothing significant is ever achieved alone, so I would like to thank multiple
people who have helped me finish this book, mostly by motivating me not to give up
and by giving me valuable advice on how I should frame things for the reader to fully
understand the subject. My experience is based on more than fifteen years of being
an individual contributor, startup owner and corporate manager, and people around
me helped enormously in shaping my world views. Without their help, I would not
have gotten to this point in my career. Special thanks goes to a number of draft
readers who have given me essential feedback while I was writing this book.
Additional thanks must be given to the ones that I’ve been lucky enough to have
reporting to me. You let me practice being a manager ‘for real’, giving me a chance
to become better at all of the skills that I’ve mentioned in this book, to the point
where I feel comfortable enough to share them with the wider world. I almost forgot:
thank you for picking up this book. I hope that it will help you in your careers.
About me
I was born in 1979 in Osijek, Croatia. After graduating from the Faculty of
Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2004, I started my
professional career in the private sector, working as a web developer. I moved later
to the world of databases, specializing in business intelligence. After gaining
experience in several local companies on how to do things and, sometimes, on how
not to do things, I started working as an external consultant and manager, focusing
on financial and government sectors. At the same time, I participated in multiple
lectures, conferences and took active roles in startups, as a process of moving from
technical roles to managerial positions. During this time, in addition to improving my
technical skills, I was learning about project management, business strategy and
management theory. I continued by enrolling in the MBA program at COTRUGLI in
Croatia, which I completed in 2011. I regularly speak at conferences, hold workshops
on various topics related to business intelligence and data science and try to teach
people things which helped me in my career, mostly how to build better software and
grow as a human being. If you are interested to read more about me, you can find
more details on my Linkedin profile, I would be glad to connect and discuss the
topics that interest you.
Book Summary (for Amazon)
This book will help you become a better manager.
Across the years, we have constantly been gaining experience in writing software,
but still, projects are late and people turnover is high. So, it becomes obvious that
most problems occur not because we don’t know how to develop software, but
because we are not good at developing and managing people. Computers don’t
create software, people do - we need to help more people succeed and good
managers can solve this problem. One of the worst things that frequently happens,
no matter how many times it backfires, is that people are being thrown into
management without any plan or preparation. Unlike our software creation skills,
which have been developed over decades of academic and practical learning, we
don’t learn about management until we enter the industry and see other people do it.
It usually begins with an internal job opening in one of the teams, and very often the
choice is forced upon us as the only way to progress our careers or "we will get stuck
in operations forever". This means that we haven’t had enough preparation, we
haven’t done any formal education, and we haven’t got much of an idea about what
we should be doing as managers. This book tries to help you handle these
situations. It is a step-by-step guide on how to become a good engineering manager,
who will deliver software on time and be respected and admired by people.
You got your first role of managing a team, either by internal promotion or by
external recruitment and now a very big thing is in front of you - "day one". It is the
morning of your first working day on a new position with a new team. You need to
understand your new role and find out who is in your new team, what they do, and
how they relate to the rest of the organization. You will go through all of these topics,
and much more, hopefully learn how to become a better manager and a better
person.
Introduction
"Tend to the people, and they will tend to the business." - John Maxwell
Across the years, we have constantly been gaining experience in writing software,
but still, projects are late and people turnover is high. So, it becomes obvious that
most problems occur not because we don’t know how to develop software, but
because we are not good at developing and managing people. Computers don’t
create software, people do - we need to help more people succeed and good
managers can solve this problem.
One of the worst things that frequently happens, no matter how many times it
backfires, is that people are being thrown into management without any plan or
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preparation. Unlike our software creation skills, which have been developed over
decades of academic and practical learning, we don’t learn about management until
we enter the industry and see other people do it. It usually begins with an internal job
opening in one of the teams, and very often the choice is forced upon us as the only
way to progress our careers or "we will get stuck in operations forever". This means
that we haven’t had enough preparation, we haven’t done any formal education, and
we haven’t got much of an idea about what we should be doing as managers..
Your education should, like all educations, start with lots of input from people
wiser and more experienced than you, and in most cases, this means you have to
read a lot of books. Reading online blogs is not really the best approach since there
is a mixture of contradictory information, some of it written by people promoting their
coaching services, and some plain wrong, outdated, or irrelevant. This part of
education is here to teach you just one thing - how to create conditions that allow
others to succeed, learn, feel psychologically safe and be creative. You can be the
person who helps your staff grow and achieve way beyond the level they thought it
was possible. You can create the team that allows people to enjoy turning up to work
each day, ready to tackle challenging problems together. Many years from now, you
can be the name that comes to mind when some of your staff are asked where their
careers began to take off...or you can be a person remembered as being someone
who should not be given management roles again and is hated for the damage
caused by their actions.
Management and leadership
Over the last few decades, the word "management" has gained a bad reputation.
First what comes to mind are pushy people in suits who know nothing about "real
work", layers of bureaucracy and pointless activities to maintain high-paying jobs in
the hierarchy. In order to avoid your name getting associated with this, and before
you can even start managing people, you must first learn to lead. There is a big
difference between managers and leaders, and the leader role should come first. To
be in a leadership position, irrelevant of your current status in the company's
hierarchy, you have to be the inspirational figure that others look up to, a role model
of behavior in tough times and somebody of highest personal standards - if you can
achieve this, everything else will flow naturally.
When I started working after university, my first manager was, by all criteria,
terrible. She didn't know how to lead people, didn't care about people development
and even avoided people whenever she could. When everything was OK, she would
take all the credits but when issues occured, she would become invisible or even
turn hostile to her own team, trying to avoid responsibility. Employee turnover was
extremely high and in the end she was let go, but not before incurring significant
people damage and lowering department productivity. This experience brought into
my personal focus a fact that management is a skill that can and should be learned,
and even if we have a person with obvious managerial flaws, there are ways to learn
how to do this job properly to become a better person in the process.
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Management is a collection of methods, best practices and tools that you use to
perform your job. However, using them well, alongside being a humble and caring
human being, will elevate you higher. You will act with respect, grace and kind
consideration, as well as provide honest, candid conversation. You’ll practice what
you preach through your actions, and that is going to make you into a leader. That’s
because doing management diligently and skillfully is a hard and rare skill. In the
end, it is a craft, much like writing software. You’ll get better every day. Consider it
being art, not science. It’s a mixture of your creativity, personality, heart, mind, your
ethics, and your values. It is you. You can be a manager and a leader that others
look up to. That others want to work for. That you enjoy being every day. Or you can
be a person everybody hates...it is up to you.
What is next?
You got your first role of managing a team, either by internal promotion or by
external recruitment and now a very big thing is in front of you - "day one". It is the
morning of your first working day on a new position with a new team. You need to
understand your new role and find out who is in your new team, what they do, and
how they relate to the rest of the organization. The next thing to learn is how to
manage yourself by getting your routine and habits in order.
New adventure
"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say
thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." - Max De Pree
Day one - you come to work, maybe holding your new ID card, thinking how
strange you look in the photo. You return the card to your pocket, but you know...it is
day one. Hopefully, somebody will come pick you up soon and introduce you to your
new team, the people you are now responsible for. After a few minutes, you see an
approaching figure with their arm extended, saying: "I’m so glad you’re here!" This is
your new boss. The moment you enter your new office is the moment your new role
really starts to sink in - you are no longer "another developer". Things have changed.
You sit behind your new desk for a few minutes, thinking that you will soon be
introduced to the team and everybody will be looking at you, assessing the "new
boss", while you will be asking yourself whether you really needed all of this. The
game has changed, you made it...or did you?
How should you start? What should you do? There is no documentation, no
development environment, no source control, no colleagues taking you for a cup of
coffee and showing you the code that you will maintain or develop or discussing the
new fancy project that you will be working on. Many engineers enter their first job
having studied or practiced their skills for many years. However, most new managers
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have never managed anyone before and often find themselves overwhelmed and
unsure on how to do their job, which leads to poor managers, bad results and high
people turnover. This can be immensely stressful, and many give up with the usual
excuse "I want to be more hands-on again", which is another way of saying they
want to go back to their comfort zone because they were not ready in the first place.
First things first, you need to meet your team and discuss expectations with your
manager, create an overview of necessary meetings in your calendar, make a team
snapshot (capabilities, seniority, roles, first impressions) and an action list of items to
focus on. During that process, try to get an initial feeling on how the team works,
what the atmosphere is and try to subtly find out why the previous manager left,
which will give you insight on how much "initial damage control" you need to do.
Hour one of day one
Regardless of whether you joined the company to write code, perform quality
assurance tasks, be a Scrum master, project manager or to be part of the top-level
management, it is likely that you will be spending your first week muddling through,
feeling like an impostor and worrying whether you’re making a good first impression
with all of your new colleagues.
Starting a manager role is usually much more difficult than starting as an engineer.
As an engineer you will get into familiar grounds. You can ask to be assigned some
bugs to fix, while working out how the development environment is put together. You
can read some documentation to fill up time or just slack off at meetings, pretending
to listen and understand. In short, you can be productive straight away. As a
manager, what should you actually do?
When you got the job offer, you felt good about yourself but now new questions
pop up: how will your new team accept you, will your relationship change with
existing colleagues, what is actually expected and what are you responsible for.
There is no more "easy" frame of IT operational work where you code, test and
deploy - this is unknown territory which nobody prepared you for at university, and
this is why so many people fail and/or become bad managers. Hopefully you have
come prepared, have read some good books or have shared a drink with
experienced managers. If you haven’t you will probably feel out of place and
unqualified for the job.
Time for the first step - putting some structure into place.
Creating a team snapshot
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A snapshot is the state of a system at a given time and creating it will be the basis
to start your work with the team. In time, you will be able to form your own
independent view of your team, but your first step should be some investigative
work. The snapshot has to include several things: your own, your team's and your
manager’s observations. Your observations are what you see every day while
working with your team. At this moment you will need to rely on others while you
form your own view, but be very careful. If these opinions belong to the previous
manager, they might hide a reason why he or she is no longer there. The team's
observations are very individual, but you need to aggregate them in a structure and
look for gaps. The key questions here are how they feel about themselves, their
colleagues and as part of the wider company?
To create a snapshot you need to combine all these views, compare them against
each other and discover where your work can begin.
Introduce yourself to the team
First things first, you need to say ‘hello’ to your new team. The relationship that
you form with them is the foundation on top of which everything else is built. The
meeting has to be as personal as possible. Do it in person if you can, otherwise by
video link. Don't use e-mail or chat as introductory communication tools. After the
initial group meeting, you need to do a one-to-one with each team member. The goal
is to create a snapshot and develop a more personal connection. Don’t make the
meeting too long; thirty minutes is usually enough for this step. Don't forget to make
this as informal as possible.
To create a good team snapshot, you need to get a couple of things from each
team member: their responsibilities, current work description, their opinion about
what they like about the team and what is going well compared to what is not.
Summarizing this data gives you an overview of what the department is actually
doing. At this moment, you will start uncovering numerous issues and conflicts within
their current situation, ranging from communication problems, work stress to
interpersonal issues and beyond. These are great starting points for your initial
contribution and an opportunity to see why the previous manager was replaced. End
your initial meeting by thanking them for their time and letting them know that you’ve
noted everything down. Don’t worry about doing anything right away. Just keep it
written down, and let the week continue to unfold.
The art of one-on-ones with each team member
Now let’s talk about one of the things that most operational IT people deeply hate
- getting a meeting invitation from their manager. Unfortunately, meetings are how a
lot of your work as a manager gets done. If you have a severe allergy to meetings,
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you should seriously consider getting out of management right now - you’re going to
spend a lot of time in them. But if you persist, you may learn to tolerate them, or
even love them. It is an amazing game which tests you in a way that no IT work ever
will.
One-to-one meetings are one of the most important regular activities that you’ll
perform as a manager. You should consider making them recurring weekly events,
ideally at the same time and location each week. Make sure that they are in a private
space such as a meeting room, so both of you can talk about confidential and
sensitive issues. Also, as your calendar is pretty empty at this moment, ask each of
your staff if there is an ideal time of day for them to have the meeting with you. This
enables you not to break their flow and sends a message of respect.
Schedule difference - makers VS managers
This chapter is based on a post from Paul Graham “Maker's Schedule, Manager's
Schedule”, in which he outlines the key differences between the daily schedules of
makers and managers. Managers typically schedule their days around hourly blocks
in their calendar, whereas makers are most productive when they can schedule their
time in blocks of half a day. This is because the IT work of makers requires deep
focus and time to achieve productivity.
As a new manager, you might be tempted to drop meetings into the calendars of
your staff at your convenience rather than theirs. Sometimes it is unavoidable, but if
you can, try your best to protect the time of those on a maker’s schedule. Have
meetings with them at times that allow them to be focused and productive during the
rest of the day.
First meeting with your manager
Now it is time for a different kind of meeting. You need to get an impression of
your new manager. But do not wait for him to schedule this meeting for you - be
proactive and request a time slot which would fit his calendar. Don’t worry about
them thinking that this is rude and that you should leave the scheduling up to them -
this is actually what they expect you to do.
Follow the same procedure you did for your direct reports - use open-ended
leading questions, listen, and take notes. However, you need to be more guided in
your questioning, since your manager will likely have some key insights that you
should know about. Your goal is to find out what is your manager’s opinion about the
team, some personal (subjective) thoughts on the team’s quality ("superstars" or
"average") and how the clients perceive them. Ask about your initial tasks. Do not
forget that managing “up” ( forming relationships with your superiors and creating
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two-way communication through coaching, sharing of responsibilities, and mutual
support ) is equally important as managing “down” ( managing a team of people ).
You should frame this relationship as one that encourages two-way empowerment
through coaching, sharing of responsibilities, and support, understanding how they
view you and your team within the rest of the department and work out how to make
it a better place. Your coworkers might not be getting the support they need from
their own manager, so you can form a strong partnership by being on their side, with
both of you supporting each other and getting meaningful work done. And when that
promotion that you’ve waited on for too long for finally comes, they will gladly support
you.
These findings form the other half of the snapshot that you’re putting together.
After the meeting, follow the same procedure as you did with your staff - thank them
for their time and schedule a recurring weekly one-to-one.
Next step - create your snapshot.
Creating a snapshot
You have collected data from your new manager, your team and formed your own
subjective opinions, which was your main task for week one. In the meantime, you
have probably had to do some mandatory onboarding activities and have made initial
connections with the people who are your customers. You form your snapshot by
taking what you’ve learned from the team, your manager, and yourself and create an
overlay in a form of a Venn diagram:
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Now you can begin to work out where particular observations fit into the
intersecting circles. The snapshot is divided into four areas that you need to analyze:
alignment, poor communication upward, poor communication downward and false
beliefs.
The area ‘Alignment’ stands for observations or beliefs that you, your team, and
your manager all share. ‘Poor communication downward’ is where you and your
manager share observations or beliefs, but the team is either unaware or disagrees.
‘Poor communication upward’ is where you and your team share an observation or
belief, but your manager is unaware. ‘False beliefs’ is where both your manager and
the team have a conflicting observation or belief from your own - this can be
especially true if you’re new to the organization and have seen things done
differently elsewhere.
It’s worth mentioning that these scenarios can apply to both positive and negative
issues. Topics that even a good performing team might not be aware of also require
your attention. You won’t be able to solve everything that you discover immediately.
However, this snapshot can form the beginning of productive discussions and
investigations that you have to initiate.
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Action list
The last thing you should do during week one is creating an action list for week
two, when you will start your regular one-to-one meetings with your manager and
staff. Use the snapshot you have just created to put the observations into categories
that include things to discuss with your team and manager. Depending on the team,
these lists can consist of just a few items or, in worst case, you might have
generated months of discussion material. If the latter is true, prioritize the items in
order of impact so that they don’t become overwhelming.
Then, pack your things and head on home, proud in the knowledge that you’ve
had a very productive first week in which you have met your team and your manager,
made your observations, created a snapshot, booked one-to-one meetings and
created an action list.
Next topic for you to learn is how to manage yourself before you can effectively
manage others.
Self-management
"What you do has far greater impact than what you say." - Steven Covey
In week one of your managerial career you met your team, your new manager and
made some notes on future actions. And then it happened. A production issue of
high priority, and you have no idea where to start. You scrambled the team together,
trying to figure out how things are done in such cases, and you were forced to miss
several introductory meetings while dealing with the fallout. Most importantly, you
missed your lunch with someone important and now the afternoon begins. You are
stressed and hungry, and to top it all off, you watch your water bottle fall in slow
motion as you’ve accidentally tipped it over, soaking your notebook. The doubt hits.
Is this chaos what management is like? Have you made the right decision in
choosing this role? Just how are you supposed to feel organized and get anything
done amid all of this?
If this description is not familiar to you, I doubt that you have ever worked in the IT
industry. This is how life looks like, even on an operational level, but now it is even
worse. You are dragged back into daily operational issues and you cannot focus on
the requirements of your new position. This is exactly how management looks like -
constant interruptions by your people who want something, ad-hoc meetings and
phone calls combined with much smaller time periods to do your work. Day starts
with a beautifully prioritized to-do list and an optimistic outlook in the morning, only
for all of that to be steamrolled. Let's see if we can improve the quality of our game.
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