Starting in a software engineering leadership role

In the last few years, I have started in various software engineering management roles in different product and technology domains. Below, I have gathered the strategies, recommendations, and suggestions from books (especially The First 90 Days), articles, talks, mentors, and lessons learned on how to ramp up in a new management role.

1. Your focus for the first 90 days should be to build a strong foundation (including relationships) and depth on the business, product, and technology. Everything below is in service of that goal.
2. Draft a plan for the first 14, 30, 60, and 90 days incrementally. At the end of each period, review a detailed plan with goals and actions for the next period with your manager.
3. Spend your first 60 days or so in listening, learning, and understanding. As you go towards 90 days, switch to taking stands/positions to see how they resonate and to get feedback on your thinking.
4. In your first 3 to 6 months, any task — even menial — is an opportunity to observe how things work in your new environment.
5. After 3 to 6 months, focus on identifying and executing high-leverage tasks that maximize or accelerate your learning and impact.
6. Build relationships. Start small with an introductory meet-and-greet. Offer to help with something. Schedule recurring time for coffee/lunch.
7. Get used to mistakes, failures, and not knowing things. And the ensuing awkwardness. Don’t try to protect your ego. Instead, embrace this phase and focus on learning.
8. Don’t try to find an optimally sequenced path for learning and contributing early in your role. It can be more productive to randomize and then linearize in your onboarding.
9. Maintain a document to record all the learnings, observations, questions, and action items to track and build context around your work.
10. Be as open and transparent about what you’re thinking as quickly as possible with your team. You may not know your strategy, but you can talk about your values, priorities, and observations.
11. Read every email/thread you get. If you can’t, cut down on the emails/threads you are getting notified for. Keep the amount of incoming signals low as you ramp up so you don’t feel overwhelmed in your focus.
12. If you choose to go above and beyond from the start, do so selectively and strategically. You want to make sure you’re devoting energy to the highest impact areas. Figure out your manager and org’s goals and expectations and then align your efforts with those top priorities.
13. Ask your manager to describe their explicit expectations for you. Ask, “what will success look like for my role and team?”.
14. Be proactive in negotiating with your manager to establish realistic expectations, build alignment, and secure resources. Figure what decisions your manager wants you to make and inform them about.
15. Get in the trenches where you can to build a first-hand understanding of the challenges your team experiences in their work. It also helps for the team to see you get down to the trenches. This can be any number of things — pushing out a fix for a small but pesky bug, providing context and guidance on a design choice, fixing a project prioritization mess, brainstorming mechanisms to prevent recurrence of an outage.
16. Earn trust by showing warmth, being principled, and doing your work with rigor.
17. Take ownership of some component or program even if it is small. Do this early and it will broaden your interactions and speed up your assimilation.
18. Be willing to change your mind often as you learn deeper, see new data, and understand how things work.
19. Some of your early wins should be in service of advancing longer-term goals and the principles you want to instill in your team. This means you may have to go higher in where you are channeling your team’s focus and execution.
20. It can be tempting to try to change several things at once in your team. This can fail for several reasons including building solutions for problems that are not consequential. As the saying goes — think evolution, not revolution.
21. Strive to create low-stake learning situations (e.g., such as shadowing, presenting an early draft to your manager) where your mistakes are not catastrophic and you can get critical feedback on your understanding and performance. (See this TED talk by Eduardo Briceño to learn more on this)
22. Be decisive. Once you have a good lay of the land, explicitly lay out your vision and the plan for your team to execute towards it.
23. Build a tight partnership with product management. Make sure you understand the product priorities and the product manager understands engineering tradeoffs. Work together to define a set of processes (e.g. weekly reviews) and artifacts (e.g. quarterly roadmap) to continuously keep updated.
24. Find how to query business analytics to understand your team and org’s business metrics. You should be able to pull data to research contributing factors behind trends and patterns that look interesting.
25. Here are some documents to contribute as part of learning and sharing your observations: (a) Plans for the year describing the problems to solve, opportunities, challenges, the capacity needed, and the milestones, (b) Technology strategy, (c) Organizational processes — many processes are undocumented outside of the minds operating them. Write down the processes that you run into.
26. It takes time in building trust and for you to be able to produce impactful work in a new environment. Be patient and persistent.
27. By your first 90 days, make sure you have learned the following:

• Customer experience: read support tickets, shadow customer calls, observe focus groups or user testing.
• Communication paradigms: how do people communicate with one another? Do relationships get established first before communications happen on crucial matters?
• Information presentation: are formal presentations or written narratives used to share information? Or is it by freestyle brainstorming and debate?
• Decision-making: is there a bias for action or a bias for thorough analysis and consensus in reaching decisions?
• Metrics: What are the internal measures tracking execution/innovation and external measures of impact to the company/business?
• Determine what you can challenge in the culture, and when you should do so. Can you be a highly assertive champion of new ideas and change, or do you need to invest in relationships and consensus-building first? Start with a few trusted people to test your ideas.
• Recruiting and hiring: Shadow existing interviews, debriefs, and recruiting calls. Make sense of how the hiring and interviewing process works. Use this to build a hiring pipeline and define interview loops for the core competencies you have identified for building your team.