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

Setting the stage for planning and delivery

In Chapter 4, we learned how engineering managers can assess what their work environment does and does not provide, fill in the gaps left by that, and set the stage for good architecture. Project planning and delivery are similar in that engineering managers can begin in the same way.

Depending on your work context, project planning may begin before, in parallel to, or after technical design work. The advantage to having technical design prior to project planning is that you can benefit from the discovery and information gathering already conducted. If planning occurs prior to technical discovery, only high-level planning can be done due to the lack of detailed systems knowledge.

To set the stage for planning and delivery, we will begin by assessing the environment and your role in that environment, as we did in the last chapter. From there, we will look at project goal orientation. Let’s get started.

The environment

Engineering...