Four Important Engineering Management Lessons That I Learned From Home Gardening
A few months after Covid-19 burst into our lives, I found myself working in my home garden growing many different types of plants and vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, red chili pepper, passion fruit, red pepper, even mushrooms.
Now I know that many people worldwide have started home gardening lately. Still, it was different for me :). Agriculture always made me curious in the past, I had many unsuccessful first attempts, but I learned a lesson from each one. This time was successful. I started with one mint plant and ended with 30 different types of plants.
In this article, I would like to share my home gardening journey and the resemblance that I found to Engineering Management. I hope that by reading this story, you will be better home gardeners and maybe better managers.
1. Environment
Plants need water, soil, fertilizers, and sun. The balance between those components will determine how healthy and fast your plant will grow. e.g., I had a chili pepper plant, which I planted in 3 different places. Each location had different sun exposure. You can see in the image below that each one of them grows at a totally different pace.
It reminded me of a story about a developer that I worked with a few years ago. When I joined the team, my colleague was very shy. He was doing his tasks and gladly helping the others when he was asked to, but he never did more than that. He was very passive. One day our manager offered him to join me in developing a new product from scratch.
After a few weeks, the guy totally changed. He was full of energy, full of ideas and suggestions to improve the product or code. In his free time, he was investigating new technologies that might be in use. He became an active developer.
What changed for my teammate? Same as my chili pepper, the environment changed. The same guy with the same skills but with a new challenge and a new team, that’s what he needed to grow.
Your team members will eventually grow even if you won’t do anything. But if you will give extra care by providing a good environment, they might grow faster.
What is a “good environment” for software engineers? There is the common stuff like challenging tasks, positive and fun work environment, autonomy, continuous learning, and more. But as the “gardener,” managers need to be aware and flexible in finding what their team members require most at any point in time.
Sometimes a relatively small change like assigning a new task or switching teams can make a big impact.
2. Pollination
If you succeeded in creating a good environment for your plants, you should start to see some seedlings and, after several weeks, some flowers blooming.
It took two weeks for my cucumbers until some flowers started to grow; however, only one flower transformed into a cucumber. The same thing happened to my tomato. I had a nice and healthy plant but no fruits for almost 3 months (usually it should take between 1–4 months). Simultaneously, my chili pepper plants were very fruitful, yielding a dozen-plus of red hot chili peppers.
So I googled it and discovered that although cucumber & tomatoes are bi-sexual plants, they still need some help with pollination. For cucumber, you will need to find the male flower (stamen) and take out the petals, then put them into the female flower (pistil). You can also do it with a small paintbrush. It is much simpler for tomatoes since the stamen and pistil are the same flowers. You need to shake the plant.
This process reminded me of the mentoring process, which I am doing with different team members. My focus is on how to use our 1:1 meetings better to help my team members bloom. Engineering managers need to be aware of what kind of mentoring we should give to each team member.
Those three different vegetable treatments reminded me of the “treatments” needed in the developers' career life cycle. We all started as “cucumbers” who need external help and guidance to bloom. We needed to be guided by a strong mentor that will walk with us for some period. If you identify a developer in this phase, give them this tight mentoring. It could be you, and it also can be someone else from your organization. for guidance in detail, I found that providing a list of knowledge to acquire and a list of tasks to accomplish can be handy.
The second phase is the “tomatoes” phase, we needed someone to “shake” us and show them where to focus, and we knew how to proceed. If you identify a developer in this phase, you would need to focus on highlighting blind spots, provide guidance on where to find knowledge to grow, push them to take more responsibilities, and to invest in self-development.
The last phase is the “chili peppers” phase — after a few years in the field, we have become independent, self-developed programmers. Those team members are great to manage. They already know what to do. You can trust them to complete any mission. In the 1:1, you need to listen and learn, and let them grow and shine, provide them the opportunities to share their expertise.
My point is that if you want to grow a good team, intervention might be required but in a different shape for different phases.
3. Pruning
Pruning is the act of cutting away unwanted parts of a plant for more fruitful growth and shaping it. Pruning will also improve the airflow through the plant and encourage better branch distribution, resulting in a healthier, more vigorous plant that is more disease tolerant. Post-bloom pruning maximizes the blooms for the following season. I discovered that pitching my basil’s head made the bush thicker and stronger. Removing dead leaves made the plant focus on the healthy branches and yield bigger leaves.
As Engineering Managers, we must prune all those bad branches that defocus or disrupt our team. It could be a time-consuming mission that could be automated. It could be a bad process that doesn’t accomplish its objective. It could also be a bad team member that has a bad influence on the entire team. It could be how your team is sitting in the office, any activity that you can think about that is disrupting your team focus. It’s important to identify those disrupters, but not less important is how you deal with them.
Pruning is hard. In gardening, we observe, and when you see the bad branch, we tear it. Sometimes it hurts. However, it forces the system to rethink and change direction from its comfort zone.
It’s a bit different for development teams. First, you need to observe and identify the problem; however, dealing with a problem must be done with collaboration. Take into consideration that it might not be easy for your team to accept the change. You moved the cheese and cut an important leaf. It is important to understand it. But as in gardening, this activity will eventually lead to growth. You should take the time to explain the change. The reasons and benefits of the change, listen, debate, think together. Cut the leaf together.
Like in gardening, engineering management grooming is an activity that you need to review every period of time to ensure a healthy growing team.
4. Harvest Season
For any farmer, the harvest season is a reason to celebrate. After months of hard work, farmers can enjoy the fruits of their work. In almost all cultures around the globe, you can find big festivals around the harvesting season. In India, you can find 18 different festivals across the country. In Israel, we have “Shavuot” — the religious harvest festival. In Indonesia, there is the rice harvest festival around. My experience as an amateur gardener, there is nothing more joyful than preparing a vegetable salad out of your own homegrown vegetables, and there is nothing tastier than your homemade pesto.
For software development teams, the biggest accomplishment is to make a feature reaches production successfully and is being used by customers. This is our harvesting season.
As farmers, it should be celebrated. This celebration is significant. It’s an opportunity for engineering managers to show recognition to all the teams involved.
It’s also an opportunity to connect everyone to the purpose and the shared values of the company. One important tip that I can share is to make this celebration genuine. If you celebrate every small feature or unsuccessful feature, you are risking losing your team’s trust.
The end of the season is also the time farmers start planning the next season. They inspect the quality of the crop, the quality of the ground, and the market needs. Based on that, farmers decide what will be the best fit for the next season. Not doing this planning can end up in a big loss to the farmer. Once you planted a seed not easy to go back. Sounds familiar? To me, it sounds very similar to any agile cycle you probably encountered in recent years. At every end of sprint or quarter, take the time to learn what was done well and where to improve. Analyze the feature and market carefully, and only then plan, design, and develop.
Summary
Gardening and management have much resemblance. Those are the four managerial lessons that I learned from my home gardening. I believe that in a few months, there will be a vaccine, and most probably, I will have less time to take care of my garden. That can be a great opportunity to test my garden durability without my “intensive care.” I am quite confident that it could be a 5th managerial lesson.
