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

Improving team performance

In this chapter, we have learned powerful techniques to focus your efforts and work toward ideal outcomes as an engineering manager. Along with your success definition, performance targets, and desired emergent states, you need ways to motivate, mentor, and coach your engineers.

Motivating your team

In Chapter 6, we introduced the importance of motivation in doing our best work, but only in the context of supporting production systems. Maintaining and encouraging motivation in your team is helpful in all aspects of their work, so let’s look at motivation more broadly now.

If you believe that workers are inherently lazy, then you have what Douglas McGregor dubbed a Theory X management style. McGregor’s hypothesis calls managers Theory Y if they make positive assumptions about their teams, believing they are genuinely interested in and committed to their work. Theory X managers make negative assumptions, viewing their team as self-serving...