management

Have you ever heard a saying that stuck with you for days? Those short, snappy phrases our grandparents used to say, filled with years of wisdom?

In this post, I’m diving into a fun experiment. I’ve picked a bunch of classic sayings and I’m going to twist them a bit. Let’s apply these timeless nuggets of wisdom to our everyday hustle in the tech world.

Why? Because sometimes, the best way to look at our modern challenges is through the lens of age-old wisdom. Plus, it’s a fun way to see how these universal truths hold up in the fast-paced, ever-changing world of technology. So, let’s get started and see what these sayings can teach us about coding, leading, and innovating in tech!

Hey there! In this post, I want to chat about something that doesn’t get enough airtime in the software engineering world: the importance of saying “no.” It might sound simple, but it’s one of those skills that can make a huge difference in your career and your team’s success.

When we say a developer has impact, we generally mean their work creates meaningful change. The end result of a developer’s work could be a feature that significantly improves user experience, or an innovative piece of code that makes the system more efficient. The question is then: how can one correctly assess this impact?

You work on a dev team that owns a slice of a product at Unicorn Ltd 🦄. Your Product Manager / Owner has reviewed the latest batch of user research and she found out that a statistically significant amount of customers would be very interested in feature X. How do you go about it? Chances are you need a project.

Managing managers is a common step in any Engineering Manager’s career path. As a mid-level manager, your main focus has probably been to execute through others. Once you get to a senior level, you are expected to lead through others. I have been reading about this topic lately, so here is a recap of what I learned.

If you want to improve, you need to measure how you are doing. You need data. This is typically one of those things organisations get wrong from the get go, meaning:

• not enough data is being captured,
• the data available is useless,
• or worse, the data available is harmful.

As an Engineering Manager, I am accountable for the delivery of my team as well as the growth and wellbeing of each of my reports. Throughout the years, however, my day to day hasn’t always been the same. This is mainly due to the fact that the expectations for the EM role differ greatly between organisations.

A few weeks ago, as part of my regular 121s with the team, I decided to ask them the question “What advice would you give to a younger version of yourself trying to get to where you are today in half the time?”. Now, this is typically a question that I would ask a mentor of mine, not that my mentor would ask me. However, I decided to try this question as a self-reflecting question for a change, and the results were pretty amazing as you will see.

Creating a roadmap can be a challenging task. I can’t really say I am an expert on the matter, but have done it a couple of times. The most recent one, I put together a workshop that got fairly positive feedback and so I’m sharing it for the benefit of anyone interested.

This post was originally intended as a compilation of suggestions to promote a “one remote, all remote” approach to meetings. That is, instead of using room equipment that can make the experience less than ideal for remote attendees, if one person joins remotely, everyone does.

During COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve confirmed with my team that all of these apply to a full remote setup as well.

Also, as we start going back to “normality”, some people will return to the office from day one, while others will stay home for a bit longer. As a result, hybrid team configurations, like the one this post was originally intended to address, will be very common for a while. Now more than ever, these tips might be relevant to you too.

Have you ever struggled evaluating the performance of your direct reports? Or have you been surprised in your performance evaluation meeting with your manager? In this post I’ll explain a different approach and will give you some tips and guidelines to implement it yourself.

Following up from the last article about managing low performers, this time I will talk about the other side of the coin, high performers. But first, we need to understand what they are.

It’s annual performance review time, and even though for most people this is a smooth and straightforward process, from time to time managers need to deal with some not so pleasant situations. Managing low performers is all but straightforward, so keep reading for some tips on how to deal with it and start the year off on the right foot.

At work, great communicators have an advantage. They know how to have great conversations. Personality helps, but this is a skill that anyone can learn. Here I explore a few tips to improve your conversational skills.

A job pays the bills. But if that is all it means to you, it will be hard to feel inspired. It is not unreasonable to expect a job to excite you and provide you with a higher sense of purpose.

Purpose is feeling that your time is being well spent and your work is adding value to something that matters. For some people it is easier to feel purpose, and also some vocations are simply more likely to help you feel purpose e.g. teachers and healthcare professionals are frequently included in this category.

But most people are not wired to feel purpose that easily and most jobs are not clearly fulfilling in that sense. You, as a manager, have to effectively lead those people. What can you do?

Even people that work in great high-performing teams can sometimes experience excessive stress and burnout. Burnout is about mental and physical exhaustion, caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands.

As you look at your team, check whether you have seen any of these signs.

As a manager I like to follow what I call “my 7 management principles” when I work with my team. Sometimes we find ourselves overwhelmed and under pressure. Having a set of clear principles that are easy to remember can help us, managers, get back on track quickly. Mine are based on my own experience and have helped me in the past in numerous occasions.

The 7 principles are the following.