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

Prioritization

As we plan and negotiate complex workloads, we attempt to solve decision problems with prioritization. It aims to answer questions such as, what features should we build? What should we do first? What tasks can we defer if we run out of time or resources? In Chapter 5, we introduced prioritization as an important step in overall project planning, but we did not broach areas such as the different methods, the pitfalls of prioritization, and how to choose the right method.

Prioritization in itself is a deep topic, with scores of competing approaches and decades of research examining its conditions and practices. While we cannot cover all that there is to know about prioritization, it is useful to understand some of the trade-offs as a foundation for managing shifting priorities. With that in mind, let’s start with a survey of common prioritization methods.

Methods of prioritization

Methods of prioritization range from simple to complex. Regardless of the...