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

Retaining Talent

Once you are comfortable with the day-to-day work of leading your team, as an engineering manager, you begin to look more to the future. As you implement the strategies from this book and your leadership efforts evolve from big changes to small improvements, your focus shifts to how to retain what you have built. In Part 5 of the book, we will look at the work of engineering managers over a longer time horizon and begin by exploring long-term strategies to retain talent.

As software development is a type of knowledge work, much of the value we add to our projects stems from the collective knowledge of our team members. For that reason, as managers, our task to preserve what we build necessitates retaining these valuable individuals within our teams. Great engineering managers need to know how to retain their team’s talent. Compensation may initially hook talented engineers, but it is often not enough to retain them when other offers come along.

In this...