Unicorns&Cookies

At 360Learning, as a truly full remote company, we organize events to get together and build up team spirit. One of those is the monthly Beer n’ Tech for Engineering, Product & Design. To begin the year, we wanted to make something special, bigger, better.

At the same time, we just went through a major shake-up in the organization of the Engineering team. From one global Engineering Manager with 80 developers, we have moved to 15 squads, each with a dedicated Tech Lead. This is a new role, for the company, but also for most of the new Leads. This pivotal job is very different from a Senior Software engineer position that most had before and with a high potential of messing up both oneself and the whole team.

Those two situations gave us the idea of organizing a very special Beer n’ Tech, one where we could ask our peers from other, maybe more mature companies, to come to share with us what the job of Tech Lead could bring, what organization challenges they face and in general, how to make an impact as a tech in the company.

So we reached out to our network — and asked for quotations from different bakeries.

Julien

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julientanay/

Julien is an Engineering Manager in the “Engineering Enablement” department of Doctolib. Doctolib distributes an online appointment booking service for patients in Europe. Julien supports diverse teams of SWE and SRE in charge of everything related to developer happiness and productivity, from their local dev env to their CI platform, from reusable code bits to shared and/or automated workflows.

Julien invited us to rewind together the last couple of years, across different companies and cultures, when he traded technical leadership for people management. He learned more about the job — and himself — in 3 years than in his entire career and, plot twist! He’s going back to an Individual Contributor track this year.

First, he introduced us to how Doctolib is organized with teams of 4–6 Fullstack devs, 1 Engineering Manager, 1 Product Manager, 0.5 UX Designer, and 0.5 Product Data Analyst. He highlighted the two different tracks between full-time management and ICs, where no hybrid role exists.

After highlighting the huge difference between technical leadership and engineering management, he shared different solutions for the organization to prepare people for their transition from tech expert to full-time managers:

• Raise awareness about the EM role and create a plan for aspiring EMs
• Create and maintain your career framework, and define boundaries
• Support the “EM team” through regular trainings and reflection groups
• Provide HR support

But most importantly:

• Tell everyone it’s ok to go back from full-time manager to tech expert

Management is a very different job and people can discover it’s not made for them. They shouldn’t feel stuck in it. It will also reassure everyone who aspires to become EM.

It was refreshing to attend this rare presentation about moving back from management. Thank you Julien for genuinely sharing your own experience!

Simon

https://www.linkedin.com/in/simondolle/

Simon is an Engineering Manager at Contentsquare, a French unicorn that helps businesses optimize and improve their users’ digital experience.

Simon shared with us the challenges of growing engineering teams and how they’ve been iterating on their organization to face these challenges. Some notes from Simon’s talk:

Engineering teams at Contentsquare are composed of tech leads and a manager and have rituals such as dailies, sprints, and retrospective meetings.

But as the teams started to grow, certain rituals required modification, like the division of daily meetings, and the introduction of new ones, including tech leads meetings and cross-department/R&D meetings. They also established a “CTO Office” to ensure Transversal synchronization.

These changes didn’t entirely resolve certain issues such as the management of inter-team dependencies. To combat this “dependency hell”, Simon advocates for larger and mixed teams.

His final takeaways:

• Organization depends on company scale and business
• Skills barriers add a lot of friction
• Alignment requires a dedicated organization

Thank you Simon for openly sharing the struggles you’ve been through — there were great lessons for us to learn from. And we were absolutely captivated by the illustrations in your presentation slides!

Hugo

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugolassiege/

Our most famous speaker had a global presentation on how a software engineer should make an impact on their company. Too often important discussions can be done between top managers — without the tech in the room. (Personal note, I have definitely observed that, especially in companies where technology is not in the DNA, where it may have been introduced a couple of decades ago as a follow-up to industrialization). Getting into leadership is a way to make sure that we are in the right place.

There were a lot of insights to unpack. I won’t do a catalog, you can check Hugo’s resources, here are some of my favorites:

• Create friction, but be the problem-solving person
• Inclusion: it should not be an us vs them mentality.
• Climb up the ladder by having an impact on a bigger range: your squad, several, the whole team, the company, the industry!

I especially liked Hugo’s vision of having tech people as CEOs, not “just” CTOs. Tech companies would profit from having tech people making the biggest decisions.

The event

In the end, we had:

• Great speakers,
• Great attendance: Despite the holidays, we had ¾ of the engineering team show up, so the subject did not interest only the Tech Leads,
• Great cookies and apéro,
• And a great time! We’ll do something like that again next year, you still have time to join us for the second edition!

Written by Fabrice Gaudin, Guillaume Vibert and Marie Douriez.