Book Image

Engineering Manager's Handbook

By : Morgan Evans
Book Image

Engineering Manager's Handbook

By: Morgan Evans

Overview of this book

Delightful and customer-centric digital products have become an expectation in the world of business. Engineering managers are uniquely positioned to impact the success of these products and the software systems that power them. Skillful managers guide their teams and companies to develop functional and maintainable systems. This book helps you find your footing as an engineering manager, develop your leadership style, balance your time between engineering and managing, build successful engineering teams in different settings, and work within constraints without sacrificing technical standards or team empathy. You’ll learn practical techniques for establishing trust, developing beneficial habits, and creating a cohesive and high-performing engineering team. You’ll discover effective strategies to guide and contribute to your team’s efforts, facilitating productivity and collaboration. By the end of this book, you’ll have the tools and knowledge necessary to thrive as an engineering manager. Whether you’re just starting out in your role or seeking to enhance your leadership capabilities, this handbook will empower you to make a lasting impact and drive success in your organization.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Case for Engineering Management
5
Part 2: Engineering
9
Part 3: Managing
15
Part 4: Transitioning
19
Part 5: Long-Term Strategies

Demonstrating cross-functional leadership

For cross-functional teams, project and product success is defined at the team level, not at the functional level. In other words, engineers cannot be successful without their cross-functional teams. Where software development is a team activity, we must take a whole-team view of performance and success. As engineering managers, we may tell our teams this with our words, but the best way to impart the idea is by demonstrating it with our own behavior.

If we tell our engineering teams that cross-functional partnerships are important but we consistently place engineering priorities over those of our partners and don’t make time for them, our engineers will see this and come to believe those partnerships are not actually that important. If we rely on lip service and good intentions rather than concrete actions and compromise, our engineering teams will do the same. Their relationships and product outcomes will suffer.

Leading great...