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

Team Design and More

Over time, engineering managers have opportunities to reshape their engineering teams, reconsidering how they are organized and oriented to their work. This reshaping might be gradual, as managers work to guide engineers and influence their team climate and emergent states, or it may be sudden in response to organizational change.

Engineering team design refers to how you structure your engineering team, its roles, and how those roles operate. Team design optimizes productivity and other success metrics, such as efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation. You might have an opportunity to design your team from scratch during an organizational change event, but more often, team design involves incremental changes to solve team problems that crop up in day-to-day work.

In this chapter, you will learn the foundational concepts in designing engineering teams. You will learn about team structures and characteristics and revisit Conway’s Law. You will receive...