In this document I describe my philosophy as an engineering manager. It is meant to be a living document, and in service to my first core value (transparency) I am making it publicly available. This includes all of its revisions over time - so anyone can see how my management philosophy has evolved over time.
My role as your manager is to help and support you, to set context for what you’re working on, and to advocate for you and the team with the rest of the company.
In fact, these responsibilities are explicitly called out in the description of the engineering manager role in the organization:
- Celebrate individual wins
- Make sure each team member feels appreciated and valued
- Provide career growth guidance
- Provide timely feedback, and do not avoid hard conversations
- Advocate for individuals requests and needs
- Ensure that each team member has clear context and direction
- Ensure that the status and progress of team with respect to goals and commitments is clear and visible
All engineering managers have the same responsibilities, but how I choose to fulfill them in practice may vary from what other managers do. In this section, I highlight some of my core values - or some of the things that are most important to me in our relationship.
Working on a distributed, global team means that our work doesn't always happen synchronously and it is important for us to adopt strategies and tools that allow us to communicate effectively.
Within the team, we can have technical discussions openly and leverage tools like Slack threads and Google docs to maintain a record of our conversations that other teammates, other engineering teams, and our future selves may find useful. We can share draft PRs, use Jira / GitHub to track our work and maintain a record of incremental changes, and share design documents for early feedback. We can have conversations as much as possible in the open so that our teammates don’t have to be present in the moment to participate in a conversation.
As your manager, I will continually look for opportunities to amplify the work of our team across the broader organization. I will also give you personal feedback on your career growth, your progression toward goals, and potential areas of improvement. I will be happy to give you praise and credit for your achievements, as your individual successes often enrich the whole team. As your liaison with the larger organization, I will try to be as open as possible about what’s going on with our team, department, and the company.
I believe every individual has their own unique perspective and can contribute to the overall betterment of our team. I LOVE when people are proactive and come with their own creative ideas. Do you have an idea, but you're not sure if it makes sense or how it could work? Do you see something that's not working as well as it could? Let's talk about it! I believe we work the best as a team when everyone can contribute their own unique ideas, skills, and vision; I am here to support you in finding and using your voice.
As an engineer, I valued it highly when my manager trusted that I was capable of doing good work and gave me the autonomy to choose how to do that work well. As a manager, I choose to interact with you this same way. We hired you because you are smart and capable, and I trust that you will be able to complete your work with minimal direction from me.
That being said, everyone needs help from time to time. I trust that when you run into issues you will know when to ask for help, and will do so before it becomes too frustrating. Working autonomously means that you are capable of deciding for yourself how to conduct your work - it does not mean constantly working alone, or avoiding asking for help when you need it.
I value the work we do as a team and really want to do it well, but we all have lives outside of work. We have friends and families and hobbies, and it's important for a healthy balance to make time for these as well. If I see that you are working longer hours than required, I will mention it. If I notice that you haven't taken a vacation in a while, I will encourage you to do so. Work is important, but it is (I hope) only one aspect of your life.
Personally, I try not to respond to e-mails or slack during off-hours and under no circumstances expect you to, unless it’s an emergency.
We're always getting new information and sometimes that's going to make us rethink a decision. It might lead us to a new feature design, a new product architecture, a new subject to learn about, or even a new career path. As your manager, I am going to encourage you to stay open to the possibilities. I would like to hear from you about new opportunities that you think might benefit you or our team, even if they're different than things we would usually do. I enjoy thinking about things that might be "outside the box", and I love to hear about other people's ideas for such things as well; when possible, I will be glad to help you advocate for something with the larger organization.
In addition, I really value personal growth and learning new things. If there is anything you are curious about, I am going to encourage you to learn more about it. If there is a way that I can help you learn more about something that you are interested in that relates to the work that we do, I will make sure to do whatever I can to help you.
If you're my direct report, we'll meet regularly. We'll decide the cadence together but it will not be less than every two weeks for 30 minutes.
In these meetings, we'll work from a shared document that has the following sections:
-
Professional Growth & Career Goals
In this section we will work together to define your high level professional goals. This section is at the top so that it’s easy for us to regularly reflect on, to make sure that your professional goals still make sense and that you have the support you need to make progress on your goals.
-
Topics for Discussion
This is the place to note items that you think of between 1:1s to discuss at these meetings. We'll generally start the meeting by working through the items on this list.
-
Action Items
Any action items that come up in the course of a 1:1 will get added to this section. At each 1:1 we'll review any outstanding items in this section to ensure that progress is being made. Once an item is complete, it will be deleted from this list.
One on ones are for you. You will set the agenda, and we'll spend most of each meeting talking about what you feel is important. At times I will have things to discuss with you at these meetings, but the meetings will always start with the items you've highlighted to discuss.
In general, 1:1s are not for status updates - they are an opportunity to reflect on whether your work is helping you toward meeting your career goals, and that can easily get lost if we spend time on project updates in these meetings.
I am available on Slack or cell for any urgent issues that come up. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you don't feel like it can wait until the 1:1. I trust you to know when something can't wait.
This section is a little thin right now, which is less a reflection of a lack of personality quirks and more a reflection of my lack of understanding of which quirks will be important to you :)
-
Given new information, I often need to reflect on it before coming up with a response. Sometimes this will mean you come to me with an issue and I won't immediately have a response, but I will listen and note an action item, and return with more information when we meet next (which doesn’t have to wait for the next regularly scheduled meeting).
-
I generally try to think positively and stay open to the potential for positive change, so it can at times be hard for me to acknowledge when I realize something is not going well. Providing timely feedback is incredibly important to me, however, so I work hard to provide gentle and honest negative feedback when appropriate, and in a timely manner.