This series of posts is focused on the processes and techniques to help you manage a team of Engineers. And by manage, I mean “to work together with Engineers to help them succeed and thrive”.
To Manage, Start with the Objective
As you have seen in the Introductory Series, I am a big fan of starting from first principles and that often starts from trying to understand the objective. So what is your objective in managing Engineers? I personally believe that that question needs to be moved up a level to [...]
Drilling Down into Development
Now that we understand the primary objective of managing Engineers, let’s understand a little about the insides of the Development Team. I picture this by relating it to the Customer Membrane in this post and breaking out the three main elements of the Development Team. The three main building blocks [...]
Managing the Garden
Through most of my management career, I thought of managing Engineering teams as akin to managing a sports team. As I pointed out in my columns on analogies (here and here), sports is one of my two “go to” analogy categories. This comparison works pretty well, as there is an [...]
The Importance of Hiring
To build a great Engineering team, you have to hire great Engineers. Given that many of you will already have a team that you have built or inherited (or a bit of both), the details of Recruiting might not be vital to you at the moment. For those that [...]
The 10x Developer
Before I talk about the stages of building a great Engineering team, I should mention one thing that is not well-known by non-technical people (and possibly not even realized by technical ones): some Developers are ten times more productive than others. Let me restate that: An exceptional Developer can outperform [...]
Nurturing Your Team
Given that the primary objective of Engineering is to efficiently deliver valuable functionality and the statement in an earlier post that People (i.e., Engineers) are the most important part of the delivery of same, we need to pay a lot of attention to hiring and nurturing great Engineers. To understand [...]
What Are You Capable Of?
In the previous post, we looked into the foundational character attribute of our Engineers: the Personality Layer. The next layer, the Capabilities Layer, adds to the foundation by layering in the Engineer’s abilities. Put mathematically, Personality + Capabilities = Engineer. With that said, let’s dig into the next cross-section… The [...]
No Time Like the Present
The previous post focused on the Capabilities of the Engineer. This article will layer on the final aspect that defines the environment of an Engineer – what is happening right now. Keep in mind that we can’t change what happened in the past and we can only promise what [...]
It’s All About Performance
In the previous three posts, we covered the layers that define an what an Engineer brings to the job on a daily basis – Personality, Capabilities and the Present. Now, we close the loop by talking about what those three layers unite to deliver: Performance. The Performance Layer is where [...]
Room to Grow
We’ve analyzed several cross-sections of an Engineer in trying to better understand how we can better understand them. There is one final aspect missing – we’ve looked at their past (experience and skills), their present (environment and performance) and now we need to look at their future, which I [...]