The motivation letter.
Who am I?
My name is Andrei.
I’d like to share what I’ve seen and learned from the IT industry during my career as Software Engineer and Team Leader. And why after a decade of software engineering I’m going move to Engineering Management.
You know the excitement of joining a new company, starting a new project, mastering a new technology, and meeting new people. But why do we have a feeling that excitement just wipes out too fast?
One day you may find yourself bored by the routine. You’re trying to find an excuse not to go to the office and keep your laptop shut. You may change a technological stack or a project, or even a company just to bring your curiosity and excitement back. Finally, the cycle repeats.
Mainly, because you want to do meaningful work, but this feeling becomes lost someday. Probably due to the lack of information about why the business pursues particular goals and why those goals are important.
I’ve experienced that, unfortunately, several times.
Why I’m trying to find myself in Engineering Management?
I believe the best solution for a technical problem is a solution without a single line of code.
I believe the best way to find a solution is to ask questions and to know where to find extra information and expertise.
I believe the best solution for a problem is a solution with follow-up is written, shared across the company, and made available for the community.
I believe the best solution for the company is people keen to grow and inspire, mentor their colleagues, and the company helps them to develop this attitude.
I believe the organization should help individuals and teams to form and to retain the meaning of the work.
I believe sustain improvement is the key to success for the individual, the team and the organization.
I discovered that my beliefs are aligned with Engineering Management. And I want to help people improve and do work that means to them and to the company.
How can be sustain improvement achieved?
Growing autonomous teams is an answer. Autonomous is not equivalent to isolated, rather opposite.
The team should participate in defining and adopting the communication protocol. The protocol must be simple to understand and to follow. It should describe a process of communicating the vision, business goals, the progress, and achievements.
The team should be trained to investigate opportunities, analyze them, make decisions, and take ownership of their work. It should follow the protocol and communicate their progress back to other teams and to the business in order to keep efforts aligned.
For example, if the significant change in technology, organizational structure, or business goals is required, the team should be ready to pitch the change and lead it.
But where should we start? — First, observe. The organization needs to explore bottlenecks in their work and uncertainty in their business. Bottlenecks should be eliminated one-by-one, for example, by applying plan-do-check-act iterative technic. Uncertainty should be reduced and carefully managed to avoid extra costs. For example, by validating hypotheses continuously and frequently.
Autonomous teams are the right ones to help your business with that improvements. Engineering Manager is the right person to grow those teams.
What requires our attention?
Teams coordination
Business is transforming every day. The company needs to be sure that teams efforts are aligned. In the worst case, each team will be pulling in their own direction. Those directions may become orthogonal to the vision and goals. This will lead to a conflict of interests and to the stagnation of the company.
Bidirectional communication through simple and agreed protocol should be established first. Each team needs to be educated, trained and facilitated to use this protocol to gain information about vision, process, and technology, to raise and to discuss questions through it. This will help the organization to see the lack of understanding between teams much earlier and avoid a conflict of interests later.
In team-to-team communication similar protocol should be used to highlight dependencies, find the best solutions, align efforts and share agreements between teams and within the company.
The organization must help teams to develop those habits.
Team development
What does make the team capable of being autonomous?
The team has to have a deep understanding of the goals (vision).
The team has to have a deep understanding of the technology they are using to achieve goals.
The team has to have a deep understanding of the process, when and what should be delivered and the way to communicate the progress.
It is very important to make progress visible within the organization and to visualize achieved goals. This helps individuals and teams avoid burnout and appreciates their contribution.
Team and organization health must be monitored as well. Progress tracking, achieved goals visualization, highlighting bottlenecks during retrospectives, one-on-one meetings with engineers, performance reviews, all-hands meetings are crucial procedures of health monitoring. Those procedures help to make sure that efforts of teams are aligned, and the organization is ready to pursue new goals.
In some cases, team and company need a transformation to explore and exploit new opportunities, for example, rotate engineers between two teams, bring a new employee to the organization, terminate the employment relationship. This automatically triggers performance downgrade and requires extra time to back to the desired level of performance. The organization’s main interest is to reduce the negative impact and to help a team get back on track faster. This is where onboarding comes handy.
Onboarding
It is also known as organizational socialization, according to Wikipedia. It refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors in order to become effective organizational members and insiders.
This mechanism can be applied not only to new employees but to the current as well. For example, when members of two teams need to be swapped the rotation process takes place. The mechanism includes an introduction to the team, documentation review, training, and mentoring program for newcomers. This helps them get familiar with the company’s culture, processes, and people.
Onboarding takes time for the newcomer and for the rest of the team. The organization should make the process more efficient. It needs to take less time without loss of quality.
More effort must be applied when the team grows. A 4 person team has 6 communication channels when a 5 person team already has 10. This is more than a 50% increase what means more time required to communicate ideas within a team.
All efforts, finally, can become a waste of time when we fail to find the right people for the right team.
Hiring
It is a complex process of discovering and communicating with talents in order to make them part of the company. They are the source of the expertise and the long-term investment into sustain improvement. The organization needs to be the right place for talents it seeks.
In the first place, we need to have a good network of talents. Second, we need to be in touch with them and set up good relations. Third, we need to improve our presence in local communities, support meetups, and conferences. Speak there about who we are and what the company is about. Fourth, help our employees to prepare and participate in those gatherings.
Your employees are the best advocates of the company’s culture. They can help you improve the position of the company and increase talents’ loyalty.
Resume
What is the mission of the Engineering Manager? — Help employees improve their attitude to learn and to contribute. Help the company achieve sustain improvement and success.
