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

How to structure your communication

As engineering managers and team leaders, our communications may take many different forms. We may divide our time across informal chats, ad hoc updates, emails, structured written updates, meetings, presentations, and other channels of communication. Since we spend so much time acting as information conduits between individuals and groups, our goal is to make our communications as efficient and effective as possible. We want to deliver the right information in the right way so that we can keep everyone moving forward and avoid confusion, mistakes, and misunderstandings.

As we learned in the previous section, the best way to deliver information is with an audience focus. With that as our goal, let’s go through the steps of how to think about structuring our communications. To determine the right approach for an audience, we will think about the format, duration, depth, and urgency.

Format

The format or method of communication is what...