Help yourself to better 1:1s
This is the first article in the series “Effective 1:1s” by carwow engineering.
One-on-One meetings (1:1s) are a critical part of running healthy engineering teams. For Engineering Managers, they’re the most important meetings of the week, uncancellable time slots dedicated to listening to engineers on their teams. While there is a lot of literature on the internet about how to run good 1:1s for managers, there seems to be little emphasis on the fact that 1:1 meetings are actually engineer driven. This time setup every week is your time as an engineer to broach critical topics for conversation. Here are some tips on how you as an engineer can make these conversations valuable, help your manager better recognize their value, and help yourself to perform better.
Bring an agenda
I cannot stress this enough. As with any meeting, it’s important to come to a 1:1 with a pre-planned agenda. A good way to do this is to maintain a shared Google Doc with your manager and pre-populate it with the agenda you want to broach in the next meeting As you go through your week, write down things you want to discuss in this sheet so you don't have to scour for topics last minute. If it’s still empty before your next 1:1, maybe it’s a great opportunity to talk about career progression, growth and giving feedback to your manager. Which brings us to:
