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

Lingering questions

In this handbook, there is a broad range of information to help engineering managers do their best work, but there are a few topics not covered in previous chapters. Along with team design questions, you may have a few more lingering questions, which will be addressed here.

What are squads, chapters, guilds, and tribes?

If you have heard these terms used in the context of team design, you might have heard them in reference to the Spotify model. In the early 2010s, Spotify wrote extensively about its team design approach and popularized a structure consisting of a product aligned organization with formalized communities of practice, as shown in Figure 16.5:

Figure 16.5: The original Spotify model of team design

Figure 16.5: The original Spotify model of team design

In the Spotify model, a squad is a cross-functional team working together on a specific product area. A chapter is a small community of practice with a narrow area of focus. A guild is a large community of practice that...