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

Managing Risk

In striving to produce great outcomes, engineering managers must work to avoid disaster scenarios that could arise for their businesses or teams. The practice of avoiding or minimizing disaster scenarios is called managing risks.

Risks are any factors that have the potential to lead to failures. In other words, risks are threats to projects and products. For example, a common risk for software development teams is having a lack of redundancy in staffing or in systems that makes the team vulnerable to sudden loss of knowledge or data. Risks may not always materialize into real problems, but to be prepared for when they do, it is good to develop an awareness of risks. The term managing risk describes both identifying and responding to risk.

Risk management is its own field of study, so there is a broad body of accumulated knowledge, books, research, and methodology in existence. For our purposes, we will cover basic concepts and ideas applicable to engineering managers...