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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
