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

Assessing engineering teams

As engineering managers, we need to be able to accurately and consistently assess our teams. This is necessary to support and grow our engineering team’s output, but also critically important to be prepared for times when the team’s performance comes into question by others. When your stakeholders or company leadership question your team’s performance, having a deep understanding of your performance trends and the data to support that will make your job much easier. Instead of reacting with uncertainty, maintain a working knowledge of team performance.

Assessing engineering teams comprehensively is hard to do. We may have gut feelings, the opinions of outside stakeholders, or raw measures such as lines of code written, but each of these can turn out to be poor indicators of team performance. In the search for an understanding of team performance, it is easy to go down the wrong path and arrive at the wrong conclusions. To avoid this...