Improve in engineering leadership?

From Self-evaluation and improvement in engineering leadership

• How manage a remote/distributed teams?

  • Communication is the key.
    • TODO: setup regular communication channel.
  • Knowing the ppl you are working with, the methods of communication they prefer.

• Peer support for growing as a leader?

  • It’s a lonely road, unlike engineering, there is not much sharing between peers. And different managers may have totally different problems.
  • TODO: peer support group. Or if you are a manager of managers, sharing between your staff is important to improve their performance, maybe yours as well.

• From IC to manager, what don’t you expect before the transition?

  • Managing up is more important than managing your own group
    • Manage the expectation from manager or peers
  • When working aspect grows bigger, learn how to working with different functionality of groups is important.
    • Different teams have different triggering point and different assumption, which are always implicit and hard to guess.
    • Test drive your presentation with 1-1 meetings, and ask for inputs and feedbacks.
    • Be explicit about your expectation of outcomes of meetings/discussions.

• Suggestions to junior managers

  • Constantly evaluate your mental happiness with your new role
  • As IC, the problems are more immediate. But as first line manager or even higher level, you are trying to find the patterns of problems/solutions that can apply to broader aspect.

• “How to fail when you are used to winning?”

  • Writing helps your thinking process, when encountering fails
    • Personal post-mortem is helpful
  • Own the failure, share your experience

• “Giving up your legos”

  • Let go of the technical details, so that you can go ahead and focus on new interesting projects
  • Delegate base on how ppl want to grow individually
    • For works no one wants to do, make sure the person picks it up knows that it’s temporary, and automate/document the job so that other ppl can pick it up afterwards easily.

• How important it is to stay technical?

  • Senior ICs guide the process of technical decisions instead of managers
  • Learn from ICs technically. Also a good way to keep ppl moral up
  • Missing the moment of debugging issues, but have more time to focus on steering the ship
  • Do more PRs (pull request) to stay in the loop

• Encourage ppl who don’t want to go into ppl management

  • Manager is not the only way to move up anymore
  • Encourage ppl to try it out for a certain amount of time
  • As IC, going up the ladder, mentoring is also very important