What is the role of an Engineering Manager regarding team Productivity

Productivity is about sustainable pace, setting the right expectations and delivering consistently.

One of the most critical things to do, in order to set the right expectations is to form a super close partnership with your product counterpart in order to leverage technology to become more productive rather than being constrained by its limitations.

What are the Goals of an Engineering Manager in this context? I thought about it, and the best way to describe this, was to list some questions that would help the manager to think about how to balance all those aspects.

Projects are prioritised well (including what not to do)

• What is the 6 / 12 months vision for your team? What are you executing in the next 3 months? Do you have the right short term / long term balance?
• How do you balance delivering business value vs paying back tech debt vs investing in new technologies that allow you to become more productive? [1]
• What is really important? How do you prioritise? [2]

MVP is considered, context is taken into account [3] [4]

• What are you trying to achieve and at what scale?
• What is best case and worst case scenario?
• Who is your audience?

Dependencies, primarily internal ones, are minimised and managed effectively

• What are your dependencies?
• Who do you depend on?
• Can you minimise these dependencies up-skilling people or removing technological dependencies

Team processes ensure continuous improvement

• What are your team ceremonies?
• Is it documented so that everyone know why you are doing what you are doing?
• What questions are you asking to get people to think deeper or wider, and generally outside of the box? [5]
• Have you made significant changes to your processes, people, technology, based on learnings?
• What are the last 3 things you have improved, and the next 3?

Waste is kept to a minimum — projects seldom get cancelled, fires and hotfixes are very infrequent, projects progress continuously and with little interruptions, uncertainties and risks are tackled early

• Discovery is about tackling the following risks:
• Will the customer choose to use it? ( Value Risk )
• Can the user figure out how to use it ( Usability Risk )
• Can we build it? ( Feasibility Risk )
• Does this solution work for our business? ( Business viability Risk )
• Do you have or need a risk register for non product risks?
• Is your Product counterpart aware of all risks?
• If you don’t feel like what you are working on is of any value due to new informations and learnings, how are you refocusing your team in a timely manner?

Individuals are set up to be productive — onboarding is fast and effective, interruptions are minimal

• Do you have a clear on-boarding plan?
• Do you have rules and principles for how to take in new work, or is it ad-hoc and people jump to it straight away? ( Feature Requests, Bugs, Emergencies, etc…)

Team keeps track of tech debt and keeps it in check

• What are your top 5 tech debts?
• How much does each one cost you weekly ( in terms of loss of speed, distractions, etc… )
• What are your major blockers / slow downs in terms of tooling and dev environments?
• Can the team solve some of those issues themselves prioritising this work?
• If not, have those issues been communicated clearly to the person you expect to solve this problem for you and do they have a plan to help you?

Tips & Tricks

There is no magic trick. Read, learn, reflect, improve, test, fail, but, above all, try to understand really, deeply, what you can do to make things better. Be pragmatic: not everything can be fixed or done straight away, don’t get annoyed by small issues, focus on impact.

I suggest a simple PLAN, TRACK, MONITOR framework. You should have documents detailing each one of these aspects:

Interesting Books to read regarding this topic:

Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?: Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday…

This motivational and autobiographical book tells the story of an ordinary person in an ordinary team who achieved something pretty extraordinary.

Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results

This book is useful, actionable, and actually fun to read! If you want to get your team aligned around real, measurable goals, Radical Focus will teach you how to do it quickly and clearly.

INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers LoveHow do today’s most successful tech companies — Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla — design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love — and that will work for your business.