Category: management
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What’s Your Job as an Engineering Manager?
As a manager, maybe you start your day looking at your calendar, or the pings that are already piling up. It can be easy to get caught up in what people are asking of you – but your job needs to look beyond the requests and into the causes underlying them. Here’s what I think…
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Announcing: The Engineering Manager Survival Guide
One of the biggest issues I saw running remote teams for the past decade+ was the lack of good engineering manager training. With a global team it’s harder (and more expensive) to get everyone in the same place at one time. With a small team, the cost of doing anything custom is infeasible. To help…
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Scaling Teams: People, Projects, and Process
Scaling teams is one of my favourite things to do – probably because it’s where people meet systems, with ever-changing questions about what makes teams effective and how to balance now versus next. Sometimes this gets presented in a pure numbers way, but I like to come at it from a systems perspective: Engineering teams…
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Getting More Strategic
Strategy – how to be strategic, and how to be seen as strategic – is one of my ongoing obsessions. Years ago, I read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, and it’s guided my thinking ever since. One of the things that book helps clarify is that being strategic and being seen as strategic can work against each…
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Podcast: The Confident Commit on Strategic Career Decisions
I had a great time recording this episode of the confident commit, and you can listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Things we covered:
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How I’ve Been Using AI
I feel like the whole AI conversation is dominated by two extremes. Those who believe in AGI, and AI skeptics. I’m trying to approach it as a tool that may or may not be useful. Here are some things I’ve found so far. Useful as an editing partner. For things where I have a clear…
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Decisions
Recently, someone asked me for my “Leadership philosophy”. My initial reaction was to panic, but after taking a deep breath and a bit of time to think, I came up with this answer: “My job is to make it easier for people to make good decisions.” What does that mean? Firstly – that my job…
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Questions for the End of a 1:1
I have a set of questions I ask in some variation at the end of my 1:1s. What are you taking away?What was most useful to you? These two I got from my coach and I use them both at work and in my own coaching. The concrete questions are useful, but it can also…
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What Makes a Good Team?
No team is perfect, but I think it’s often kind of obvious when a team is bad – there’s usually a level of chaos or drama, a sense that they can’t be relied on or don’t really deliver the value that the organization needs. I think it’s also quite obvious when a team is good,…