The output of a manager is the output of the managers team.
Plus the output of the organization that they
influence. Hey everyone.
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Every week for today's episode. I am excited to share my
conversation with James. Stanier.
James is the S VP of engineering at Brand watch.
And the author of the book titled become an effective
software engineering manager. This book is one of the great
resources that I've read that provides guidance for
engineering managers or people who aspire ER to become
engineering managers. In order to become more
effective and make great impact in engineering teams.
James also writes frequently on his Blog, the engineering
manager.com in which you can also find more of his writings
about this topic. In this episode, James shared
with me, his insights on becoming an effective software,
engineering manager and how we can build and run effective
engineering teams. We started off by discussing
why. The tech industry is facing a A
crisis because of the inability of many managers to manage
people, effectively, and the challenges faced by many
Engineers when transitioning to become managers.
We then dive deep into the best practices to become an effective
manager, such as how to get oriented delegating effectively
letting go of control and nurturing one-on-ones with your
team members. James also pointed out the
hardest things that engineering managers have to deal with,
which are dealing with projects and humans towards the end.
We then wrap up with James tips on how a manager should handle
failures and move forward from them.
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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the package.
You know? Today I have with me someone
who's an author of the book called becoming an effective
engineering manager. So, I read this book actually.
It's one of the rare books that I find covering topics about
engineering manager. I find it quite interesting, the
way, He actually narrated the story from joining a company as
a manager, new manager going through your first day and going
through projects working with people and things like that
until at the end, thinking about the future.
But the person should do which I think is quite interesting and
just going through all the chapters one, by one, actually
brings us in. The manager's point of view, the
difficulties the confusion sometimes on what you can do, or
what you should do. I think it's really really
crucial. So, I'm very happy to actually
meet James Tanya. Welcome to the show.
James. So first of all, James for
people who don't know you yet. So maybe you can introduce
yourself. Yeah.
She thinks my name's James. So I will be labeled.
And I've been both president of engineering.
I'm senior vice president now for quite a few years.
And I guess I didn't really intend to do this as a job.
And I'll be honest with you, straight up.
My career has taken a whole bunch of twists and turns and
various kind of things. I've tried and failed and so on.
And if you're interested I can give you a little bit about the
journey I've been on. So it's interesting to your
listeners. Yeah.
Sure.
Certainly, you can mention your highlights.
Your turning points should think so.
Initially like when I went to universities do computer
science, you know, I was really, really intent on becoming a
compiler engineer. That was my initial passion.
It was one of those things where I did the compiler modules
during the piece size, like this is so cool.
I never knew anything about this.
And as fascinated, it was like a lovely balance between
programming and theory and also just like magic.
So my project at University, as an undergraduate was compiled.
Colors. And then, as I was finishing up,
my supervisor said, hey, there's some PhD funding for doing a
pilot project. Yes.
I'm doing that. Okay, I'm PhD students.
So I did a PhD and again, it was a compiler.
So there's a theme, certainly at the moment and all throughout my
PhD, I was absolutely sure that I was going to go and do a
postdoctoral research may become like a lecturer or researcher in
compilers. But as I was finishing my PhD, I
was interviewing in a few different places for positions.
And there weren't many at the time.
This was like 2010, 2011, and it I mean clear that either, I'd
have to move halfway across the globe to do.
One of these research positions, or should probably try and do
something different. So, I went to a few interviews.
I narrowly missed out on a few slots and then there was a
start-up in my town time, which was Bryson in the UK on the
south coast. They just raised some seed money
and they're looking for people and I must admit I wasn't
looking to work there and I was kind of hesitant if only a few
times. I was like, I'm not really sure
I want to do this. I was actually in the interview
process for Google at the time as well.
And I was like, that sounds way better, but actually I I went
into met this startup and it seemed really interesting and
then I was back in the engineer. So at number of years doing
that, at the start of the world and we raised several rounds of
venture capital funding which in turn grew the company, which
then meant that we were needing to have our first managers.
And that's how I got into it. Really.
How do we actually structure teams?
How do we run teams? Could I do that?
Oh, okay. I guess I could do that and to
nearly 10 years later by senior vice president.
So I guess that kind of worked out.
So it was kind of an accident, kind of an opportunity and kind
of it. Arrest who rolled into one.
I don't write any compilers anymore, unfortunately, but it's
a journey, right? Well, instead, you write a
compiler for managing people, you know, so I know this is like
sometimes for us. It's kind of like accidental
Journey. We intend to do something, but
in the end we work on something else.
So for you, how hard is it being like strong Academia kind of a
background going through post, doctoral degree and things like
that and then switching to joining a start-up which I think
to me is a big major. Turn in your career.
So how did you analyze looking back?
It was tricky. I found one thing, I had to
completely change my own perspective of what mean being
valuable was. The academic world is very much
about publishing papers. It's about going to the
conference who is talking a conference to his.
I felt that I had to sort of cling to this.
Like, I'm not just an engineer. I'm also like a researcher.
This is important, and they have to hold on to this, but actually
as time went on and as a start-up started doing well, I
really enjoyed being able to build things with people
building things. Uses.
You like the product who then pays more money to get more
users and then we harm will be what it was a virtuous cycle.
And I think that was the one thing I did realize in Academia,
was that it's fantastic. You work with some very, very
smart people, but the outcome is a paper or the outcome is a
talk. And I never really experienced
that whole thing of really building for lots of users
before and as soon as I had experienced it.
So actually, this is way more fun.
I really enjoy this. So, let's go through why you
decide to write this book about becoming an effective software
engineering Her what kind of problem did you see during that
time? So the beginning it was my
website. We just discussed before we
started recording you're doing these weekly recordings for your
podcast. I set myself a similar challenge
a few years ago, which was I really want to write an article
a week on the management subject just because I felt like I had
to learn a lot of stuff by trial and error.
If I could at the very least, just write it up for myself even
those on the internet that we call.
And if there's a few other people, maybe people that I work
with who could read it as well and find some you soon at the
next. Cool, that'd be great.
So that was the original goal. I was like, I saw this blog and
I'll try and write something once a week and see how it goes.
I just got into this nice Cadence with that.
We're not only did I feel that people were actually reading it
which was cool. People came to the website and
the traffic kept growing. I had a few front pages on
Hacker News and things like that, and that was really cool.
But I found that writing something once a week was just a
really great way of me better understanding the subject
myself, because all of these ideas are kind of complicated
and by actually focusing on writing them down, you really
start to To explore the idea and then you come away going.
I to understand that better. Now that I've actually tried to
process it, somebody else, when you teach something you feel
that, you understand it better. So the site was the beginning
about 10 years ago. When I was starting to read
about management, this was before there was this little
explosion of engineering manager type books.
A lot of the books that I bought at the time were either like
very business ebooks. Like McKinsey consultant talks
to you about Management in Fortune 500 company.
There's bits in here that I relate to but there's also bits
in our video. There was one book, but I did
read that I thought was fantastic, which was high output
management by Andy Grove. I mean, lots of people know him
CEO of Intel engineering background, kind of Silicon
Valley, Legend person book for people that don't what was
really nice about him as the CEO of Intel is that, he is an
engineer at heart. So he thinks about things in
very engineering ways that I can relate to.
He ran a humongous company doing incredibly complicated things,
but he wrote this fantastic book.
Yes, I would. It's like mid 80s, but there
were so many things in there as I ask.
He's really thought about this messy human thing and managed to
sort of put a process around it, that makes sense to me.
He talks about these anecdotes of like running a cafe, and then
it's not okay, boiling eggs, and like making toast and employing
people, and then he's like that because this is hard, is this
people management problem? And you like?
Oh, wow, he really is, I can relate to that.
So, that was my first experience of this one book that I read.
I felt like, I've learned four years, five years of doing this
job, by just reading this one book.
So I thought there's a gap in the market here.
It feels like this. Exist, that's why I started the
site and then after writing for several years, I thought I've
got at least a books worth of material as you mentioned at the
beginning. There are other management books
out there and they were brilliant ones.
There's managing humans. There's managers path is an
eloquent puzzle. There's lots of other management
books out there. So I'm not saying that mines the
best, but in the same way that there's loads of different books
on learning to program, different authors have different
takes on the same material and I think sometimes it's really
useful to have different perspectives on the same thing.
So I wanted to write something. That was kind of if I just
started my job as an engineering manager.
Now. If someone put this book on my
desk and said, hey just like, have a read of that.
Then I want to structure in such a way that maybe they could read
a chapter, every few weeks and then it would kind of unfold as
they were doing their job and then they could refer back to
it. So that was kind of a handbook.
I wanted to put together. Yeah, so when I read it
definitely it's like a manual. So it's like when you are on
board it as a manager, you can literally read it one chapter a
week, probably and you can relate with so many things that
you They're either like the own productivity hiring working with
people, influencing other people and things like that, but I want
to start with one first interesting point of view that
you have in the beginning of the book.
So you mentioned that there's a skills crisis in the technology
industry due to the ability of many managers, not able to
manage people. And I mean, if I can see these
days technology Industries are really booming, they are more
and more people being involved in the technology.
So why do you start with that? Kind of Statement.
This is something I've experienced myself is the in
order for people to get into technology, especially software
Engineers. They've often had a hobby in
childhood. Maybe they've been really good
at certain subjects at school. They learn to program the
practice for years that may be done a degree.
They've done all this work in order to get where they are.
If you end up working for a company, that doesn't have very
clear career progression. I mean, you work for a company
that's got very clear tracks and progression.
And as, The other big technology companies know everywhere does.
So, unfortunately, I think a lot of software engineers and up a
bit stuck in their progression. They think, how do I earn more
money or how do I get a promotion, or how do I progress
and often people who maybe don't want to be managers, end up
going for managerial roles? Because they see it as a way hit
grossing. So, we end up with people who've
never done it before going into these engineering manager roles,
and they have very little support and how to do that job
properly, because it's a different job fundamentally.
It's a different job. It's Still has the same context
of being an engineer. It still has the same company
and domain but the skills are totally different and I was
teaching them to you and I think, unfortunately, by
nobody's fault. It's meant that a lot of people
become managers that didn't want to be or didn't realize what the
job entailed or just fundamentally.
Don't even know how to do a good job.
Give them the software industry is growing all the time.
We always in legal managers, but it doesn't feel like the support
network for them is really there.
So I thought, could I write something that could at least
give people that friendly helping hand through the first
six to 12 months. Job.
So in your opinion, do managers need to start as an engineer in
the first place or anybody, as long as they have a good
management skills can become an engineering manager.
It's a really good question. And I think maybe there's two
sides to it. So, I would say you don't have
to be an engineer for sure. People who are fantastic
managers, could do a good job, but it really helps to
understand how to shape and release code how to work with
other engineers. And also unfortunately, there is
a respect element as well. If you are an engineer near
knowing that you report to someone, who has been an
engineer, really greatly helps because you can offer that
technical supports them as well as a manager.
You can help them think through problems.
You can have your past experience to help them through
things. So in theory, you don't have to
be an engineer to be an engineering manager, but in
practice really it's super helpful to both sides.
So I also realized this kind of pattern in the industrial like
what you mentioned, right. A lot of these Superstar
Engineers or developers. The one who are really, really
strong. Technically they can go from
high level low level. Whatever.
Level coming up with great design of scalable system.
Once they reach a certain number of years.
Then people just want to promote them to become a manager.
Not knowing probably that person doesn't want to do that.
But the progression like the benefits, the money, and all
that only comes by being a manager.
Some companies do have progression for individual
contributor, but I think many in the industry student.
So how do you see we can solve these kind of problems.
A strong individual contributor, but he doesn't want to do any
management role. Yeah, it definitely requires
change on the Please part one of the latest chapters in the book
goes through this exercise of defining, the to Career track.
So it starts with shared competences of just very general
things that are increasing the time in terms of responsibility
and expertise and skill and output who does make a
distinction between having a management track in an icy
track. And really what companies have
to realize is that they are two separate jobs.
That's the thing. People can move between them.
People also can act as a hybrid. So there are definitely people
who can be strong Engineers, but also can manage Small team, but
it's really making the distinction.
I mean, two things one. Is that the higher part of the
management track really if you're doing that job well and
you really are being an excellent manager and you're
managing a large division. For example, you don't have the
time to do any good programming and even if you did what could
you do? It's like.
Oh, yeah, I'll do that one point.
Ticket to like fix that one bug is not the best use of your time
but conversely as well to say that.
Hey, you like not only can we go from The Graduate engineer to
senior engineer, but then one of our positions like staff
engineer principal engineer, Really promote those as ways
forward as well. We're going up on the icy track
to say hey, there are ways if we frame these roles as less about,
you just need to write the code, but it's more about.
You can build consensus, you can inform design.
You can really make impactful engineering decisions that
affect the bottom line of the business.
You could propose a re architecture of the system that
saves half of the money that you are spending before or make
something twice as fast or more efficient.
Those is framing the impact of those roles at the higher end of
the IC scope. So, these are the things you
should be thinking about. So I read your book is very
interesting how you structure. So called the big sections.
You start with what you call getting oriented as a manager.
Which to me sounds like you want to focus as an individual person
right now, like, improve yourself, being highly effective
and things like that. And I like the things when you
mention about getting organized, they are four different tools,
which I find quite relevant. Even though you are not a
manager. Can you cover a little bit?
What are those? Four tools?
Yeah, sure. Background on the beginning of
the book. Actually.
I was thinking about Crossing At first.
I kept thinking, hang this. This stuff too simple.
This needs to be just like somebody's to go getting things
done or like some organization book, but then from experience.
I know that one of the real superpowers you can have as a
manager is, if you're just organized.
This is like really basic stuff, like organizing your time and
your tasks, and your input messages and things.
If you can just get a handle on all that and have a process, the
sorts through it, then you actually realize how few people
do that really? Well because all of a sudden you
can reply to people quite quickly, you can put something
on your to-do list and then you can actually You do it, and then
someone said, something you fold it up and like, why do you
actually followed up on that thing?
I was talking about you like, of course.
Yeah. So there's these four tools that
I talked about and I tried to sort of unpick some of the bad
habits of people have fundamentally organization of
your time, is your calendar and your calendar is really, really
important. As a manager.
You've got limited time, often. You have more meetings as a
manager and you just have to be very strict with your time.
In order to be effective. Those are organizing, your tasks
is surprising. How few people have to do lists
in just as a kind of, like, cross-section of NG to peers and
people I know just having a to-do list and having a nice
simple routine just to keep it organized.
You prioritize those incredible things not just in terms of you
actually being able to execute what you say you're going to do,
but just keeping things out of your brain.
There's only so much working memory that you have as a human
and it's always taken up by stuff all the time.
It's very easy to get distracted.
So, having a routine with a to-do list, we can write things
out. Forget about them.
Fantastic without really, really owed you.
This next week's fairly opinionated, personally.
I think that given how many different platforms work.
Did communicate on from slacked to various DM applications to
emails to GitHub to everything. I really doubt you're saying
route, everything through your email, inbox have email
notifications, everything all rooted to one place and the
natural canonical view of the world.
So you can actually triaging and go from there.
And then all those three tools is one other which is just a
place to capture information when you're not near anything
else. So this could be, if you're in
an office physically, it might be you just carry a little
notebook with your phone around with you just to jot things
down, or If you're at home, just piece of paper on your desk or
something Post-it notes because you always hear something
interesting, there is worth following up, or finding out
more about us. Just getting in the habit of
like that. I'll just write that down and
then it's out my brain. And it's, there is really
useful. So I like the Simplicity of
these four tools, one of the challenges, of course, like we
all know these days information comes from everywhere, like you
have so many devices, you have so many tools within your work.
You have casual conversations. You have so many maybe
newsletter that you read. I think people are sometimes
overwhelmed on how they can actually start to The nice days.
Although it sounds simple right? Executing it and having a
discipline to actually put everything in this for.
I think that is self is Pretty Tough.
Start. I would say.
What do you think about that? I think is true.
It is tough. And it does require a lot of
self-discipline, but I think when you give it a go and I'm
not saying that my solution is the best solution.
There are other ways in which you can organize things.
But when you do have a routine and you do make it a habit where
you actually forget about the process, you would just
automatically doing these various little Cycles every day
of gathering information. Ian and putting them in one
place and then executing through them, you do it without thinking
after a while. And actually, you then have all
these moments. Just as I mentioned earlier,
where someone will thank you for following up on something
because they expect you to do it or someone mentioned, some it to
you last week. And then you actually went to
sort it out for the new, go back to the movie closer in, like you
actually did this, you get all these nice little kind of
reinforcing positive behaviors. That having this habit Loops is
a good thing. Actually.
I think I would feel really lost if I didn't have my habit Loops.
Now, I find it really, really hard.
I'm lost. Don't want to do this just
because I rely on it so much. So, as you mentioned as a
manager, most likely you'll be in meetings, a lot of meetings
meeting a lot of people discussing a lot of things.
One of the biggest challenge, as Junior manager.
So, to speak, right? Is to become effective and
productive manager without thinking, like, oh, why do I
waste so much of my time? Going into meetings talking to
people, I don't produce any code.
I don't write any design, dog, and things like that.
So how do you navigate yourself throughout this chaos and
somehow? Assume productivity that you
think are satisfied for you. Here's a good question.
I mean, the initial thing, people struggle with is just how
you judge your output as an individual contributor is so
different. Like, there's an icy.
It's like our today's been great.
I pushed through things to production.
I've worked out what that bug was.
I've tied off that feature. It's like all these hand.
Dribble things are happening or it's like I did this stuff and I
can point to that stuff and go that was done and that was done.
So this actually isn't my idea of to worry about these things
from Andy groans book by upper management, but He did, which
really opened my eyes because he categorized for different
activities, which you can kind of bucket your time into as a
manager. One of them is information
gathering. The second one is
decision-making. The third one is nudging and the
fourth ones being wrong and those four things start to
frame. How you can be effective even in
the most boring meeting ever. Like, someone's invited you to
this meeting. Like 15 people.
You're like, oh my God, why am I in this meeting for two hours?
It starts you like, this is going.
To be awful and you can sit there and you can get frustrated
and you can feel you, clenching your fist, one of these
somewhere else, but actually, if you think about it, it's
definitely an information-gathering
opportunity. You could be looking at that
meeting. Hey, is there anything here?
That's being said that. We really interesting for my
direct reports to hear. Well, maybe some of my peers to
hear you've also got the opportunity to make decisions as
a manager. People will ask you to make a
decision. That's pretty straightforward.
The more subtle and interesting thing is nudging, and the way I
negro frames nudging, is he says that anytime anyone really asks
your opinion is because Probably respect you, they think that
you're knowledgeable and they'd like some input.
So, you have an opportunity. When someone speaks to you to
say. Well, actually, I really think
we should do this, and that's an impactful thing to do.
If you classify those kinds of conversations, I managing things
in a direction. I think it's positive things to
be doing, then that's a good use of your time.
And then even if you have absolutely no opportunity to
impact anything whatsoever, then just to think, how can I act at
the moment in a way? That is a behavior, like, other
people to emulate. So could I be in this?
Really frustrating meeting. But listen, very attentively.
Agree with people. Offer my opinion and do things
in a really good way that you'd expect others to emulate than
even. That is impactful because as a
manager, especially as, like senior manager, if you let CTO
or the CEO, for example, people look to you as a role model to
be like, how should we be in this company?
What are the values that we embody and how should I act?
So just by being a good human being and doing a good job.
You can have a positive impact as well.
So you have these four different buckets or activities like you
said, but again, Okay, you may be cut the grass your time.
Where do you spend most of your time?
And then what's the equivalent formula to actually say?
Okay, if I spend time, equally, maybe or maybe one is more than
the others. How do you actually come up with
the effectiveness of productivity score?
So to speak for many years? And it was one of the things I
originally wrote the song of my career.
So he says the output of a manager is really the output of
the managers team. Plus the output of the
organization that they influence.
Now, sounds really straightforward.
Would you like? Okay.
Yeah, but actually is kind of deep two things.
One of them. How do you as a manager best
impact, the outcome of your team and actually who come up in
loads of practical situations. So one thing you see with new
engineering managers is like they've got less time because
there are more meetings. Sometimes they fall into this
kind of like janitor role where it's like the team is working,
all this stuff and the managers got less time.
So what they'll do is they'll try and still do some Icy work,
but they'll do like the stuff that no one else wants to do
like, oh, yeah, I'll do that like little ticket or there's
this like really annoying. Do that.
But none of that that's not your job to like sweep up after
everybody. You really should be think about
the output of the team's spend time on making sure that the
priorities are correct. So the people watching on the
most impactful stuff and maybe make sure that people that need
mentorship are getting mentorship so that they can get
better because that in turn makes the team better.
So it's not framing the activities in that first part of
the equation. And then the other bit, which is
talking about the organization that you influence, there is
something I would naturally think about, but it's actually
really interesting building your network.
At the company that you're in, increases your influence, so
that the more people that, you know, the more things you can
affect and that isn't meant to sound, like some kind of like
political bad thing is more. Like, if you see that things
could be better. How can you build a network with
other people to help make things better together, the more people
that you're connected to the wider?
The organization is that your influence?
Therefore you have a good reason to network and get to know lots
of people because your influence then spreads and gets bigger.
So it's like fixing your team, making them impactful.
Enter more people, building connections building
relationships with people so that you can influence more
people. He see it any company you work
for. There's always a few people who
just like, why do I always hear about this person?
And like I always see their work and like they're always involved
in everything and it's not because someone is asking them
to it's just because they're really mastered this way of
being like really helpful, really useful and being really
influential with people. So I chose.
This is also a good segue, moving into like working with
individuals because obviously as a manager, like you said, you
want to increase the output of your team.
And for that you need to work with individuals.
First of all, I think this is one of the key thing as a
manager or any kind of leadership, right?
How do you delegate effectively? And, again, coming from an icy
background? I think, for someone who has
been doing things solo individually, inside outs from
start to end. It's very hard to actually
sometimes delegate to other people, especially to someone
who is more junior or less experience or someone who don't
even come from the same domain, as what he has been doing for
many, many months for many years.
So, how Actually be able to delegate to other people.
Well, yeah, that's a really good question.
And I think also manages struggle with her.
Hence, the janitor things like I'll just sweep everything up
after you. So firstly it's not a Boolean
thing of like I do it or you do it.
That's the first thing to sort of look at it's not either/or.
It's actually kind of a spectrum and it very much depends on the
task that you're delegating. But one end of the spectrum
where you don't delegate anything at all.
You do it yourself. It makes sense.
Right? It's like I'm doing this myself.
I'm not delegating anything and then at the the other end of the
spectrum, I'm completely delegating this.
So you are doing it and those are the two ends.
One thing that's important. Is that even if somebody else is
doing it, a manager shouldn't delegate.
The accountability for that thing to somebody else.
Fundamentally the manager, still accountable for everything
that's happening. The best way to explain that is
like if it all went wrong, who's to blame in a way, and I don't
mean this in a negative way, but who does the buck stop with is
the manager. They are accountable for getting
the team's work done. However, what you can delegate
is the responsibility for doing the task.
That's it. Thing.
Because if you gotta get away with the accountability, then
you basically abdicating saying this is my problem, and that's
not a good thing because you have are not in control and then
it's a spectrum. So it isn't just, you do it or I
do it. Fundamentally there is a scale
and that scale, dictates how often you check in with people
when they're doing things. How much mentorship they need.
How much of your time need to sit with them while they do it
or give them clear instructions. And it's the manager's job
effectively, for whatever is being done to work out.
Who's there? A person and then also, where do
they sit on that scale? So this task that is really easy
for this senior engineer to do. I can pretty much just hand it
over to them. They need just let me know when
it's done or actually, is that an opportunity for a less senior
engineer to learn, and I could delegate it to them, but then
I'll spend more of my time with them because maybe we need a
program. They will need to look at it
together or from just talk through the one other thing to
unpack from. There is there's this education
Theory thing called the zone of proximal development, which is
quite interesting. The idea is it comes from kids
in schools, which is that you should always be trying to teach
interior with two children. That's like just one step
outside of their comfort zone because there's this zone of
proximal development where people really learn quite
quickly with assistance. I mean, we've all seen it, like,
when we were in school, you could give them stuff, is too
easy. It's just like boring, you don't
learn anything. If you get give us something too
hard, you just get totally lost. But if the teachers are able to
kind of identify material to give you this, like you built up
some scaffolding. And then the thing that you're
learning next is like The next thing on the scaffolding then
it's like, okay, I'll get that I can build on what I know and I
can learn that and then what, you know expands.
So as a manager, it's like identifying things for people to
do where it's kind of things that just challenge them in life
that they're able to learn and they're interested and that's
also part of the delegation things.
I how can you give things to people to do?
That's interesting. The Mixing Bowl and the
challenges that because in a sort of a silly example, you
could have like a senior engineer and a junior engineer.
You okay? We're like the senior engineer
gets all the hard stuff to do. Engineer gets all the easy
stuff. And then you have two people
that just get bored and then they don't really progress.
But if you mix it up enough, everyone has a mixture of work.
I get challenged as mentorship opportunities.
So yeah, it's a Continuum and you have to pick her up place.
So let's say imagine you are manager of number of people,
right? How do you track all these
different delegation or do you work in a project management
style? Or do you keep track?
Like again, coming back to your to do this or calendar?
How do you actually keep track of each of these delegation and
the Spectrum? Which makes it even more
variable like a lot of these things.
How do you actually check in back about the status of the
project progress and things like that?
Yeah. We tried not to use any
additional methods or tooling really is kind of just a mindset
that is liked into how we think about how the world extending
your team using it just as a check.
Like when you say, for example, are you doing a Sprint planning
and people are sort of saying? Oh, yeah.
Well, I think I could do that and they always been that you
could talk about who my best work or more.
To better improve the output of the team in the future.
If you see that, there's a junior engineer about do
something that's quite difficult.
Can you as a manager identify that ahead of time?
Oh, hey you, like let's sit down.
You do that together to being with us a program that because
you can identify that maybe if you sat with them and you give
them some more mentorship and they would progress quicker.
So it's less about having the spreadsheet and like each task
to each person, but it's more just the way that you think
about the worst getting done every day.
So another thing that is quite important for me personally,
right? I've been also, Not enough to
experience this. There's a good amount of
spectrum of one on once between different manager and it's
somebody named. So I've experienced like a
weekly Cadence kind of one-on-one.
There are times where I don't have any one-on-one, except
maybe quarterly or maybe during performance review, or maybe
just casual chat during lunch and dinner or whatever team
activities in your book. Actually, you Advocate having
one-on-ones quite frequently. If not weekly.
So, what is the reason the main motivation behind that?
This is your question. So I mean, I think it's less to
do. The output of the one to work on
or like the exact what you're doing, but for me is the more
human personal reason? You're dedicating like some time
every single week with one of your staff just in front of is
it shows that you care? It's also a safe private space
where you can talk about anything.
You will have 12 ones where you don't even talk about anything,
super important, but the whole point is you're giving
opportunities to get to know each other better and to build
trust because that's the foundation that all the
important stuff, bill on. I think also having that Weekly
Cadence as well one. One is just nice to have habit
and routine again. You get it in the calendar.
You get it in to-do list, you forget about it just happens,
you know, after rather explicitly, but there's just so
many things when it comes to people and these can be Career
Development conversations. These can be little frustrations
that are building up with time. If all of these things sit for
too long without any attention, they always boil up into
something that's just way bigger than it needs to be.
So if you don't have one to ones with your staff at all and your
staff really feels that they're underpaid or they really
frustrated. Job, or they really annoyed
about their colleague and they just not got an opportunity to
talk about it. Then what could be?
Just like you have a little chat about it and it takes 10 minutes
and say okay. This is much problem.
Don't worry. We'll sort it out over a quarter
could become like I'm going to quit my job.
If that person says that one thing once more with these
things can really buckle up. So they just give that nice
opportunity for someone to just really continually unload their
thoughts. And you can unpack how they're
thinking going back to the manager.
Productivity thing. Like, you've got loads of
opportunities to help make decisions, too.
To gather information to manage their thinking about.
How are you working on that problem?
So yeah, so I think probably going to store that data in
radius and like, I think that probably a good way in order to
get like, good cache, hit Ray and you so yeah, the right way.
Do you know, maybe what about this thing?
And it gives you a chance to nudge every decision that
they're making as well and have a lot more impact.
So you measure about safe space. That sometimes is a bit tricky.
Like how do you actually cultivate a safe space during
the one-on-one? Like for example, you mention
about somebody who is Not happy about the situation or somebody
and maybe they express that as a manager.
You listen to that, how to build that kind of safe space.
Because of course, you want to take action about it, right?
You don't want to just be a channel where they just say
something, but nothing is being done.
So, what's the balance here? How do you create this safe
space? So mean perhaps cool stuff is
like making sure you have anyone to ones in front room or if your
home just in a zoom meeting somewhere, where you can't be
heard and fundamentally, both of you can talk in confidence with
each other, but one of the things I talk about in the A
book is this exercise called Contracting which is quite
useful. So usually you do it.
When you first start managing somebody it gives you just a
bunch of questions to work through as manager.
But also as a direct report to really talk about what does
meeting up once a week me? Well, what sort of thing is
you're going to talk about. I want things might need help
with, where might there. Be some frictions between both
of you and your personalities. But then also what's important
is you can say what's the confidentiality of what we
talked about and just being able to do that explicitly is really
powerful because if you've Christy told each other, but
hey, I everything we talked about in our meetings, totally
confidential. And even if you come in here one
day and you're so angry about the way that your colleague
constantly does this thing, honestly, just vent, it's cool
that you can vent about it. I'm not going to say anything.
It's safe. It's all cool.
Being able to establish those boundaries ahead of time, just
makes the whole thing much better.
And I think it just builds that report.
A manager can also do a report that, okay, every week when we
meet you always like bring up this particular thing that's
happening. There's this really broken
process. That's just be infuriating.
You Or like you keep saying that the CI builds are slow, but you
know, that you can't do that much about it.
Should we actually do something here?
Like, how can I help you? And I think he's just always
putting yourself forward as I will help you and support you in
whatever you're trying to do. Just let me know how I can do
that. So, another challenge as a
manager, right? If let's say, we are doing this
one on one very, very frequently.
You will eat up a lot of your time.
More meetings meeting, everybody either like 30 minutes 1 hour,
right? If I say you reach 20 people
under you, that's like 20 hours gone.
Just having this one on one from the week.
So is there any limit on how many a manager should have this
one-on-one? Yeah, I mean, I guess I could
reflect it and say I think there's a limit to how many
people you can have reporting to you and still be effective.
I've heard people who've got like 50 direct reports.
It's like really do you actually spend good time with each of
those 50 people. How many hours a day do you
work? So I've always said somewhere
between it depends on the person.
I usually kept it as if I had to do, everyone's 12 ones in one
day, ideally one. Day of the week would be what it
would take up and it can depend on maybe you manage someone you
only need like half an hour a week with them.
Or maybe you only speak once every two weeks.
But really I still tried to stick to that weekly hourly
cones, even if you don't use the time and that's cool.
If you don't use the time but really sticking to managing
seven people ish plus or minus 1 or 2 is about the limit.
I think my experience because anymore I don't think you can do
a good enough job of working with each of those people and
also maintain the balance of taking part of doing the work
with your And being a part of the wider department, so if
you've got 20 people reporting to you, maybe talk to your
manager and say hey, we really promote somebody like another
manager. So also don't forget you are
having one-on-ones with your subordinates, but you also
should have a one-on-one with your own manager.
It's like chain on the top. You have more and more
one-on-ones down to the bottom. You mentioned a lot of things
about individuals. So now let's go to the bigger
picture. There are two things that I
notice you say is hard in the book which are projects and The
humans, I know like these things might sound easy to figure out
their heart, but why specifically working with
projects and humans are hard? Like, maybe you can tell some of
the things that you find. Interesting.
We are sure some of these churches kind of just have a
whole bunch of different so experiences and also just even
like, behaviors or various things.
You see all the time. We all know that estimating
software is hard. I how long is it going to take
to do this? You only really knowing when
it's done. I tell you when it's done
because then I'll just tell you how long it took, but that's not
good enough. Doing software project.
Well is difficult and you could write an entire book on that.
But I just wanted to sort of highlight some of the techniques
really that as a manager, you could use to help you with your
prioritization to help you work better with your product owner,
product manager to talk about. Also the way in which people are
motivated, you know, the kind of like, don't use the whip to get
people to do things. Don't be like, crunch time.
Let's get stuff done. You need to motivate people with
the car, instead. Where do people think about
their autonomy and Mastery and purpose and so on.
How can you really Give people the skills to get interested in
what they're doing to really want to achieve.
And then the work is a side effect, really those two parts
are different scenarios that I think people will experience.
And one of the ones in the humans are B.
Is this Mount stupid concept, which is article on my website
that gets the most hits I think because it's the first hit in
Google from that stupid, but it's just this phenomena of a
combination of impostor syndrome, which I think many
people experience. So you have these wonderfully,
talented people but because either because I knew we had,
they're doing some the first time they're not vocal enough.
They don't speak up enough because they feel like an
impostor and then almost the inverse of that problem as well,
which is the very senior people who are nowhere near the actual
day-to-day getting things done. Think they know everything and
this is horrible combination of these two things.
At the same time. That means it's just, everything
always goes. Well, you've got it, the
executive who ends up putting the deadline on a project.
Even though is the engineers, you should come up with a
deadline because they do it, but it's really unpacking a lot of
These scenarios in like motivation of people, common
themes, and fallacies in projects and just trying to give
the person reading the book. Like these are things, you'll
notice, don't worry. This is normal.
And here are some ways that you can tackle, any good tips and
tricks from all your career experience so far on, what maybe
is framework strategies that you can use to manage project?
Well, is it like the a gel thing or is there any other thing?
The best advice I can give is, it depends?
I mean, that's the answer to any complicated question is, it
depends? I mean, I've Seen what in what
ways he was abused scrum and it's what fine, but they've also
use scrum and it's worked terribly.
I've seen people use canva brilliantly.
I've seen the music terribly. I've seen people who literally
do know planning at all and do amazing work and those that do
know planning at all when you terrible work, so there's no
answer to this but really where it comes from it's just like
understanding people understanding the type of work
and then just trying to pick some way of getting things done,
the fits that particular projects and that particular
people But I think as soon as you start to Force One Way,
everything it starts to break but I mean, I can see these
tendencies in any team any company's first of all, I don't
know why they seem to like buying like Enterprise project
management tools from the whole company.
Everyone is just using that. Is that such a good idea or is
it better to have the team actually decide what tools they
want to use the last year is beneficial, but you can also
sometimes see why people might want, everyone's work the same
way. Let's consider this.
Like your See and you're like, okay, so I want to really
understand what's going on in the whole software part of the
business. So what if everyone uses Euro
and everyone does two-week Sprints and everyone reports in
the same way, then surely that means that someone could write
some wizard, your SQL thing, but every two weeks would deliver
this amazing dashboard of the bundles of every team and I what
was achieved and then we can roll that all into the release
list. I get that.
But does that ever work? I don't know and again, it
depends. And I can see why people do it.
And sometimes people spend money on tools when actually, what
they should be spending time with his working, with the
people themselves to say, how can we work better?
It's very interesting that you say that because a lot of
manager, probably. I mean, I don't know if maybe
the traditional manager mindset is like they want
predictability. The reason why they want all
these analytics dashboards and things like that, if they want
to be able to predict, which I think, again, coming back to
software industry. It's sometimes difficult to
predict part of this also is like you mentioned in the book.
Letting go of control, right? Like probably you'd predict so
much things will probably happen in the right way anyway in the
end. So how can a manager?
Let go of control? This is I think one tough part,
especially if you are still accountable for what people are
producing, you know, there's a problem.
With the German thing that always works is how do I deliver
value quickly? If you're able to coach all of
your staff, all of your team's to be like, whatever problem
you're working on as long as you're thinking about, what's
the highest impact thing that you can do in a short space of
time, the doesn't obviously create like, A huge mountain of
technical debt and horribleness as well.
That's a general good indication of where you should be going and
if you can release frequently, that's great.
That's like the agile thing at a super high level cool.
But the letting go of control thing is interesting.
I didn't use to have to worry about it so much when I was
managing one team, but as soon as I started managing multiple
team, so I was managing managers, you get this strange
feeling that, Hangar s, if there's 20 people reporting up
into me in some way. How do we even know what's going
on? And you're like a mime.
To know what's going on. Well, maybe and am I doing a
good job. I don't know.
This starts to get really difficult and then you think,
okay. Well, I what is this mean?
How does like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company?
Feel when they've got 10,000 staff?
And they don't know what any of them are really doing and it's
like yeah, this is weird. So it's kind of building on that
delegation thing of if you're able to really accurately Define
what it is that you're accountable for.
Then you've got a framework for delegating the responsibility
for all of the different parts, the different people and then
you You can feel comfortable with it.
As long as you're delegating. Well, some people who are doing
a good job. Then you can feel comfortable
with letting go of all the control of what's Happening you
instead. Just have to set really clear
expectations for this is what it means to do a good job.
And this is how we want to work together and go and then you can
just manage your productivity things, nudging, people making
decisions gathering information and just being comfortable that
it's okay to not have to know exactly what's going on.
And then what's really nice actually, is that the more that
Delegate way, not only does that allow people to grow more, you
then free up more of your own time to do stuff.
That's even more impactful and my role, for example, I worked
really closely with the CTO in sort of department-wide strategy
stuff. So it's like, look, if all my
stuff taken care of by my team's.
Then, can I help make our performance review, process
better? Can I make our process better?
Can, I spend time getting better benchmarks on pay, so that we
can make sure that we're paying people fairly.
Like, that's where you can then turn your attention to.
It's like you free up time to do stuff.
That's really impact. But yeah, for me personally,
those things are really, really one of the blind spot of a
manager, especially coming from an individual contributor,
especially as an engineer, where you probably have a good input
and the good output and in between you kind of know like
where things go wrong or go, right?
So as a manager sometimes we don't know what's a good input.
What's a good output? So it's really tricky and
difficult especially coming from Individual contributor and the
letting go here is like okay accountable for what people are
producing so I think I see mindset here is really, really
tough. Any tips on how these ICS can
learn or can read or whatever that is to start having this?
Let go mindset here. I used to do with just being
really clear. What a success is, whatever it
is that people are working on, but they're not getting so
caught up on how people get their.
Everyone works in different way if you like super controlling
and like right, you know, so we need to build this API and then
as soon as people start working on, so no like you need to
extract your controllers, in your repository, is your middle
way. No, no, this way you need to let
go of that. It's like we need to do this API
and it needs to work this way. Work it out.
Let's go and do it. Let's just get on with it.
See what happens because people will take their own path to the
outcomes as long as you decided, what the outcome is, and is
clear and how to measure it, then just let people get their
their own way. And that's actually a way better
thing because actually you learn more you find that some of your
team do something in a completely different way than
you expect. Wow.
That's way better than how I would have done it.
This is great. Nothing goes really positive.
And as I said, it just reduces your own.
Anxiety over control and it allows you to spend more time on
impactful stuff as well. So what kind of balance do you
have personally on spending time on the day-to-day stuff as a
stinking, the things that you can improve, like what you
mentioned? Improving calm improving, how
you hire people, what kind of balance for a manager?
They should spend their time. I would say, what works for me.
I can't say what works for everybody.
But usually if I back together, once ones, with my direct
reports, it's about day. I don't actually do them all in
one day because I think I'd probably pass out if I I do them
all back to back. There's our one day, a week is
spent a month. Once I say, maybe half a day to
three quarters of a day. A week is on various kind of
like group meetings. Like, the rmd leadership group
that meat is like an engineering leadership group, and various
kind of actions of things. Come out of that.
I try and block out like at least two days worth of time in
my calendar, for doing stuff and that can change from week to
week. If it's the end of the year,
you're writing performance reviews.
It could be that you're reviewing pull requests.
It could be that, you're writing some documents up and designing.
I knew it could be that you're writing up something as you say,
you do Campo en crisis and so on.
So I try and have two days a week that I have for that and
then the rest of it, I try and keep free.
And then it's just kind of flex time for.
Okay. Well, I can work with people
closely on something. I can ask some questions.
I also try and once a month meet with some of my peers just have
a. Once one of my peers and also
just some other people in other parts of the business that I
know, provide really interesting information.
We can do that in both ways. One of my colleagues, heads up
all of the measurement of all of our naturalism product metrics
and business. So he has an amazing view on
revenue and churn. And it's like, what if I meet
once a month this guy he's talking about what's going on
was like, wow, that's great. I really understand all these
Frontline problems with the business and how we selling it.
So, yeah, it's a mixture of those things.
So, another classic thing for individuals to think about going
to this managerial role, right? There's this startup forces
Enterprise and there are so many startups these days.
There are so many also, a big Enterprise, some startups do
turn up into a big Enterprise as well.
So, how should someone Actually way the dead decision whether to
join as a manager in a start-up or to join as a manager and the
price. That's a really good question.
Yes, again, from my experience working in a larger Enterprise
is a great way of hopefully, it's a good Enterprise.
Having a whole bunch of support around you from the start.
So if you join us and I see big tech company, you're probably
have established career tracks. You're probably have a good
manager already. You'll be on that team.
You'll have good colleagues. There's a whole lot of processes
and things that have already. Even works out and hopefully
they're good. Where if you just want to learn
and also get compensated. Well because if you join a big
company, usually they pay higher that starts to, it's a good
place to learn the ropes. However, there are downsides, if
you join a very large company, then sometimes progression is
difficult, especially, if you want to become a manager and go
down the management track because you're one of many, many
people. And if it's a large company
depends, how quick it's growing. Maybe the opportunities don't
come up too much, but then if you are for taking a bit more
risk and maybe the upside of that risk is Foster personal
development, then it starts up. Could be really good.
So, that's where I think I was fortunate.
I joined the startup. It was very little people, but
then as the funding rounds came in and we hired lots of people,
suddenly, it was like, okay, we need teams.
We need lots of teams. We need managers, those teams.
We need managers and managers. And like suddenly all of these
career progression things where I never done them before, but we
were kind of figuring out as we went along.
So I got the opportunity to try these things for the first time.
If I was probably applying for that job at a larger Enterprise
said, oh, yeah. I want to do director of
engineering. Cheering and I like, well,
you've only got like a couple of years experience as an AM.
We could just hire a more experienced director, from
somewhere else. You have a better chance of
experiencing those things for the first time, it starts on.
So I didn't bother and question. As a manager is that not every
manager is successful on everything they do, right?
Sometimes they will find failures a project failures
people quitting on them. Good, great people quitting on
them, maybe not to say that they are doing bad stuff, but it's
just happened. Like the good people have better
opportunities. So, how would you advise these
managers on handling failure? What kind of mindset that should
bring in order to, you know, overcome those failures?
Yeah, firstly, I never take it personally.
It's hard, especially if you care a lot about your work and
you're really invested in your work, especially if you've got a
really good person on your team. They leave, you can't help but
take it personally, might just be that they want to do
something different. Maybe their partner is got a job
somewhere else, and they're going to move.
So many reasons why someone might leave is rarely ever about
you. So it's rolling in that kind of
letting go of feeling personally, responsible for
everything stuff happens and you just have to Deal with it really
if you just always use every opportunity to learn something.
So if a project is a complete disaster that although like
three to four things that you now know that if you did it,
again would never happen. Most probably and then bring
those into the next project, if somebody is left particular
reason, is there something that you can learn from their
departure that can make it better for everybody else.
Is it because they were really frustrated about their pay for a
year or two years and they never talked about it.
Well, okay, that's a shame that happened.
But next time with all of your existing.
Of talk about the time, ask them.
What do they want to own in? The future?
Was the routes for them to get there?
Make sure that all the tasks frustrations and failures are
things that you can roll into improvements to the Future, for
sure. So James, thanks for spending
your time. So I have one last question
which I normally ask for all my guests.
Would you like to share the tree technical leadership wisdom from
all your experience, your career for us to learn from you can
try. So I thought about this when you
asked me before and three, I came up with the first one and I
think is especially true. Ooh, for management is the many
people experience a gap between their own personality and then
their work personality. So, like the personality of the
manager or the leader. Like, I got to be this person.
I've got a pretend to be this person and that just causes you
pain realizing that if you are able to get an engineering
manager, or that's because you can do it.
So, just be yourself. You don't have to pretend to be
some manager person, or team leader person, just be you.
That's the best thing you can do reduce the gap between your
personalities because it's Always, that's the first bit of
wisdom. This is the kind of
self-awareness thing. The second thing is, if you find
yourself unable to justify something, then always
questioning companies, people teams projects all contain many
bad decisions rarely because people are being silly or rarely
because they're doing a bad job. It's just all the sauce really
complicated. So I think always questioned
things that you don't understand or don't make sense.
And if you have any kind of bad smells, like if there's a
decision that just seems a bit weird follow up.
And find out. Why?
If there's a piece of infrastructure, we've got some
be distributed system like once a week.
It goes down for half a second. Don't ignore that 12.
That bad smell is probably something weird that you want to
check out. So always kind of like question
things and follow your nose. And then the last thing I think
is even though software is really hard and people are
really hard fundamentally. Everything can always be solved
by first principle was asking questions and Common Sense and
working together. I don't care how hard something
is. You can always draw a little box
diagram, this Narrows the explains the process and It
becomes more simpler that point and you're able to talk to
people about it. So nothing is ever as complex as
it seems. And there's always a way
forward. Thank you so much for sharing
those wisdom. So games for people who would
like to know or contact you further when I can find you.
Sure. So on Twitter is Jason, ESS jst.
Am I ER? I also run the engineering
manager.com., So one word, the engineering manager, and on
those links to pretty much everything.
I try and write every couple of weeks and there's a whole bunch
of stuff on there and looks the book.
And so I do highly recommend your book.
So for people who either like they are engineering manager,
now or aspiring to be an engineering manager, so please
check out the book. I think it's really cool.
I like it when I read it. It's really, really fun, and I
can put myself in the shoes of the actor.
The figure inside the book, which is really fun.
So, thanks again, James for spending your time.
It's really great, and I wish you good luck in your career.
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