Leadership Roles

Taking care of your direct reports’ career growth.

This story is about a manager who had an engineer in their team who had been at the same level for a long time. The manager took action to help the engineer realize they needed to focus on their career growth and gave them a project to prove themselves. Through this experience, the manager learned the importance of being proactive and providing clear expectations to ensure the engineer can focus on their challenge.

Be Upfront About Product Delivery Constraints

The CTO of Paypal Credit was under pressure to scale a successful proof of concept product, but needed to replatform, restructure and rewrite it first. He had a one-on-one with the business owner to explain the situation and then went to the President of the business unit to get permission to spend nine months on the replatforming. Despite engineers not liking the fixed timeframe, the product launch was successful and the business leader was very complimentary. The CTO learned to start conversations with business leaders earlier to avoid difficult conversations.

Lessons From Allowing Remote Work

This article discusses the lessons learned from two cases where employees whose performance was unproven wanted to work remotely. Ultimately, it was agreed to, but the employees ended up parting ways three to six months later. It was difficult to determine whether the employees were producing productive code, but it was noticed that those who were underperforming never produced much code. The article concludes that remote work works well for employees who have already been working well in the office, as they know what quality work looks like, have relationships with others, and can easily communicate with others.

Experimenting with management

An engineering manager needed to promote someone to add structure to his team, but none of his engineers were interested. He found a woman with a combination of technical and soft skills who was already acting as a mentor, and convinced her to take on the role on an experimental basis. She was well-received by the team and stayed in the role full-time at the end of the experiment. The lesson learned is that it is essential to find a way to get somebody to step up without hurting the team, and framing the role as an experiment is a great way to go.

Being direct during performance management

After a new hire on a product team at Lyft was not meeting expectations, the manager took steps to identify the issue and have a direct conversation with the employee. Through an honest and empathetic approach, the manager was able to build rapport and reconcile the situation. The lesson learned is that termination should be a last resort, and that communication should be honest and transparent while also retaining empathy.

Helping a Good Developer Become a Legitimate Manager

When a talented engineer was promoted to a manager's position, they lacked experience and were not seen as a legitimate leader by their peers. To help them skill up, they were paired with an experienced engineering manager. After five to six months, the new manager was acknowledged by the team as a legitimate manager and had made a mindset switch from a "dev who manages people" to "a manager knowing stuff about engineering". This showed that pairing new managers with experienced ones can be an effective way to upskill them.