The information must flow!
Occasionally I get asked, “So what does a Manager of Technology actually do?”
Apart from looking rather dashing in a kilt (which isn’t mandatory), there’s a few things. A bunch of regular management stuff around being available, setting the overall vision, supporting your team, enabling autonomy, supporting experimentation, promoting fairness, growing talent, motivation, team culture amongst so many other things and finally, actually delivering products people will use!
Each of which is an article in itself. For today, I’m going to talk about why the information must flow.
In any organisation, no matter how large, but especially so in a large organisation as Hotels.com (and with us working so closely within the Expedia group), every engineering team has dependency and communication needs with other teams. An amazing engineering manager helps mediate that information flow between their team and everyone else. Note the word “mediate”. Not control! Never control.
Those of us who code, know how much an interruption can hurt the flow of getting software built.
A lot of what an Engineering Manager does is to shield their team from being distracted. Keep the meetings to a minimum, having the business come to you instead of the team for regular day to day items like project status reports. Letting the team deliver against clearly understood goals! Staying out of the way of your team to let them deliver, but knowing when you need to step in.
Sometimes we think the only sources of those interruptions of being poked in the middle of writing code, but the interruption of not having the information you need at the time to build is just as bad. An Engineering Manager should also be able to facilitate external communication with other teams. If for example your team is deploying their first application in Kubernetes, they should know which teams have done this before and be able to help out. Or the fun of building a Styx plugin for the first time. Or even to get access to that one environment that they need. And a great Engineering Manager should be lining this up well in advance of you needing that information (something I’m still learning myself!) and also make sure those teams are onboard to help their team out.
Even while writing this article I got asked by two different people who they could go ask to get an answer about something. A lot of my job is knowing who has that information and then facilitating that communication path if needed. Again, major emphasis on facilitating. The goal is not to limit who an engineer can go talk to, or stopping them from being autonomous. The goal is for the manager to use their connections and knowledge to help their team achieve the results they need. A Engineering Manager should know who to go to talk to for that information their team needs, and with a company as large as Expedia, every single day I learn about a new source of information.
What’s the other part of external communication and information that is rather important? Meetings with upper management and performance reviews. A great Engineering Manager is making sure that the impact of achieving their teams goals is known amongst the company. The team itself should be focused on the very tactical day to day implementation of the larger strategy, and the managers jobs is help facilitate that information both ways. Translating the greater longer term vision of the department to the team and communicating the implementation of that vision back. An Engineering Manager needs to constantly be driving alignment between these two visions, so that the engineering team can autonomously be making informed technical implementation decisions. On performance reviews, that’s also information that needs to be mediated! You’ve done some great work, you need the feedback and that feedback needs to be communicated to the right people at salary review time. So you get your promotion or your pay bump! Or if you’re looking for a new challenge, they know which teams are hiring and would be a good fit for you, either temporary or longer.
There is a large amount of information that different teams do need. An Engineering Manager will spend a lot of time in meetings so that their team doesn’t. Then they work out what parts of that information flow are needed by their teams. Think of it as a filter to keep the irrelevant parts from distracting the team. Often though, something that is mentioned in a meeting 6 months ago, becomes relevant in the present, and a great Engineering Manager’s job is to be able to remember what that was!
So that in a nutshell is part of why “The Information Must Flow” and what an Engineering Manager does to help facilitate it.
