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

Communicating with your leadership team

When we think of communicating upward to the senior leaders in our companies, we often focus on providing timely and accurate progress updates. While these updates are important day-to-day information, there is more to effective leadership communication. In addition to awareness of our progress, we need our leadership to be aware of our challenges and our value beyond particular deliverables.

Since executives and senior leaders have many demands on their time, they are interested in getting to the gist of communications. Our direct managers often have more appetite for and ability to digest the nuances of our day-to-day work, but with busy executives and senior company leadership, we can communicate effectively by focusing on the story of our team and its broader value, and reducing uncertainty for them.

Telling a story

Storytelling is a powerful means of communication. As humans, our brains are wired to seek and follow plausible storylines...