Professional blocker, tackler and cheerleader

Lessons from an engineering manager

“What’s your management philosophy”, I was asked the other day. Holy Moly, what a question. That question is on par with asking what’s my raison d’etre or what constitutes great code. I can easily imagine a naive recruiter ask me this management question. I state ‘naive’ as anyone who has been a manager of any size team knows that there is no quick answer to that question. There are so many aspects to being a manager.

I find being a manager is difficult. You are leaving your engineering problem solving skills behind, and have unknowingly entered the soft science of people management. Part of your role is being a shrink: listen, ask a few questions and listen some more. You fight back the urge to make strong personal judgements, and instead try to put yourself in the person’s shoes.

I haven’t formulated a single management philosophy yet. I doubt I can. There are a few rules and management practices I work by.

• Let’s start with my unofficial job title. My real title may be that of a VP of Engineering, I consider my day to day role one of coaching, blocking, tackling and cheerleading. Coaching is all about motivating and enabling folks to be able to do the best they can. Sometimes that requires me to be a strong office linebacker, blocking distractions, removing obstacles, and allowing real artists to ship. On occasion, I play defense and tackle for the team. As it comes to cheerleading, I can’t get the picture of a young George W. Bush out of my mind (what a scary thought), and imagine myself holding a large bullhorn cheering for my team. Of course men can be cheerleaders. However, use the bullhorn wisely! Avoid the temptation to commandeer.
• Managing is a physical activity. You must walk the hallways and visit folks’ offices and cubes. I also take folks on walks for their weekly 1-1s as much as possible. Such meetings are much more collegial, less adversarial (with each of you on one side of a table), and allows me to reach my 10,000-steps-a-day goal without much trouble. When talking to remote folks, the activity becomes often more sedentary as I am tied to a Skype or Google Hangout video conferencing link. However I did learn that video is key here. You must be able to see each other and get a sense of each other’s emotions.
• My project management days have taught me that No good deed goes unpunished. This is my most depressing rule. How can this be inspiring to a team you ask. Merely communicating the rule must be creating a negative and counter productive culture, right? I don’t believe so. This rule helps me to not be taken advantage of. Any visionary tale needs an execution plan which is achievable. I am no Steve Jobs who could dazzle and inspire while simultaneously bully folks into doing unimaginable things. I am much more pragmatic in nature and like to define an aggressive plan, rooted in some level of realism. On several occasions, when trying to do a special deed, I learned it is exactly those things which will bite us in the butt when it comes down to schedule, or technical feasibility. This rule doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do any good deeds. Good deeds are great, and create a great deal of trust. The rule reminds me to pay extra attention when being asked to do a good deed: do we have a plan to implement it, what can go wrong and did we account for those risky items. A good partnership always has shared risk.
• No unwritten assumptions. Great plans are hatched starting with “let’s assume … “. We spend all our energy and dreams on what comes next, and don’t go back questioning the original assumption. Thus I made it a practice to always pause and write down those assumptions on the whiteboard. I make sure we later on go back and question or validate the original assumptions. It is also a good general risk management technique.
• Participation is not optional, it is mandatory! … and silent dissent after we commit is treason. We make the best decisions when everybody on the team is actively involved in the discussions. I don’t have the magic eight ball. I do value lively discussions and opposing viewpoints. We make better decisions that way. Notice how I stated “We make”. I am not saying that to escape my responsibility. If a decision is to be made, I have no issue making it. Sometimes, it may be even the right one. Truth be told is that I do not get to make that many decisions. And that’s a good thing. It means delegation works (including decision making and ownership). Most of the time, I get to break tie-breakers. A good team comes to the right answer together and that requires participation. Don’t mistake this set up for decisions-by-committee. I haven’t seen those work well at all. Seek input, make sure people are ware of a topic being discussed, but then be decisive without appeasing to the plebs.
• Ownership == commitment. You probably heard the story about the pig and the chicken about commitment. The pig is committed. You can not manage a team or be on the team unless you are committed, and that means you own something. There is no Monday night quarterbacking, or sailors standing ashore. You are either in it and own something, or you don’t get to play.
• Quality matters. It is in my genes to build and buy quality products. I despise products which cut too many corners. Call me from a generation, much older than I really am: I value a good craftsman. Don’t ask me to ship something before it works.
• Be relentless restless and yet allow things to take its course. This seems contradictory, doesn’t it? The first part is all about not being satisfied too quickly. Things are never quite good enough. The second part is about the fact that change takes time. If you make a change in how the team works, or how software gets build, you need to stick with it to see some results (and potentially tweak things along the way). A healthy dose of both paranoia and patience does wonders.
• Hire the best folks, and don’t be threatened about folks who are better than you.
• Work yourself out of a job. If your mindset is such to work yourself out of a job (in a positive sense), you will always have a job. If you are all about job preservation, there will likely be no job to preserve. A good example of working yourself out of a job is to automate mundane tasks so you have more time to be creative, or to create an online FAQ to making answering customer support email more efficient.
• Do not blame those who left. This Medium story about Why your previous developer was terrible, and why your current one seems so amazing is a good reminder that it is too easy to blame the previous guy or gal.

I am sure I’ll get to define a few more of my management rules, as I fail and stand up every day.