“How to take great Engineers & make them great Technical Leaders” by Courtney Hemphill

Company Greatness Needs Great Management

Successful projects needs good general management, not just the obvious funding, tech, data, etc.

“Successful companies are built by great teams. Vision may come from one bright individual but the effective execution of that vision comes from great general management skills.”

Complications

• Experienced, highly skilled managers are rare
• Degrees like MBA guarantees nothing
• Hard to determine during hiring process
• Engineers don’t stay at the same company long enough
  • Individuals feel they can’t develop leadership skills due to lack of internal resources
• Microservice architecture forces teams in microservice teams
  • Team independence and numerosity means more leadership positions are needed

Gap

• Great engineering skills doesn’t mean management skills
• Not all engineers want to manage
  • Allow for promotion without implicit management

Management Patterns and Optimizations

Communication: Pyramid Principle (Barbara Minto)

1. Written or oral: state conclusion first
2. Deliver supporting evidence
3. Deliver further details on that supporting evidence as needed

Communication: Storytelling with SQCA

• Situation: get buy-in on the current situation
• Complication: known or unknown, the crux of the problem
• Question: frame a question to solve the complication
• Answer: work to get it or present a solution with supporting evidence

Communication: Goal Setting (OKRs)

• Effective but needs entire leadership buy-in
• Set objective, set measures of success
• At company, team, individual levels
• Few goals but ambitious: 70% accomplished is good
• Never tie-in to bonus or compensation
  • Otherwise, kills risk-taking

Culture

“Great products are to customers as great cultures as to employees”

Toxic culture can kill a product

Culture: Psychological Safety

Google surveyed what makes great team i.e. great successful products
Findings showed importance of
Psychological Safety: 1. autonomous teams 2. shared intra-team accountability 3. learning culture

Culture: Mentorship using Pairing

• Journeyman - Apprentice
  • sharing one-way, one-on-one
  • Helps mentee develop, keeps learning culture
• Driver - Navigator
  • Sharing across, networking
  • Finding peers to explore problems
• Apprentice - Journeyman
  • Sharing up, mentee
  • Keeps mentor connected to the reality of the team

Culture: Authenticity e.g. Radical Candor

• Be human, be authentic
• Need a good amount of caring for the person & challenging them

• Leadership means feedback, means challenging others to improve
  • Despite social niceties and discomfort

Culture: Retrospectives

Team retrospectives, frequent (e.g. weekly) feedback on team culture, progression, issues; to course-correct

Culture: Paths

• Allow non-management progression of carreer
• Keeps people in company, grows mentors