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

Project delivery

In project build phases, an engineering manager’s focus is on maximizing the healthy productivity of their engineering team. In other words, you want to help the team move quickly while taking action to prevent burnout. In this section, we will learn these two aspects of project delivery: techniques for moving quickly and techniques for avoiding burnout. These goals can share the same solutions or complement each other, so they are interleaved through the following delivery topics: project kick-off, good user stories, and removing friction.

Project kick-off

The project kick-off is how you initiate your project. It is often a meeting or a series of activities to announce and begin work on a new project. For engineering managers, project kick-off is an opportunity to set up the project for success by aligning the team and creating some excitement about the goals.

Whether or not you are tasked with organizing the kick-off activities yourself, your aim...