Team & Project Management

Coaching Your Direct Reports

This article discusses the approach to coaching taken by the author, which is focused on outcomes and helping reports reach their goals. It outlines the steps taken to achieve this, including inquiring about the personal vision of the report, developing a plan to get there, and providing skill-building and personal coaching. The article also emphasizes the importance of being passionate about people, not just work and products.

Staying Technical While Growing As a Manager

The engineer in this article emphasizes the importance of staying technical as a manager. He recommends blocking off time in the calendar to perfect and propel technical skills, and getting into the trenches by participating in design and brainstorming sessions. He also encourages intellectual engagement with the team, such as discussing and exchanging arguments, in order to stay technical. Ultimately, the engineer emphasizes that staying technical is essential for a well-rounded manager, and will earn respect from the team.

Helping Your Team Understand Its Scope

The team was managing a large scope of analytics and machine-learning products, leading to ownership-related issues. To address this, a Service Catalog was created as a registry of all software assets, with meta-data such as location, purpose, wiki page links, and support level. The scope was broken down into smaller functional domains and team ownership was made explicit. The Catalog was used to identify people who had knowledge of the service and to give them a feeling of ownership. This process highlighted the importance of documenting software assets and creating a Service Catalog in a parsable format.

Reorganizing the Geographically Split Teams

This manager inherited a team that needed to scale quickly, but the organizational structure was hindering progress. To solve the problem, the manager restructured the teams to be self-sufficient and enabled them to autonomously build one section of the website. Additionally, the manager implemented a cultural intervention to restore trust between the teams in different geographies. The lessons learned from this experience were that teams should be given autonomy and product managers should be included in any restructuring.

Losing a Feature as a Leader

In a company, a team was tasked with developing a feature, but it was unsuccessful after a year of work. To ensure the team could move forward, the leader communicated their struggles and understanding of the leadership's perspective. It was realized that lack of communication and alignment between teams was the main reason for the failure. To ensure success in the future, the leader emphasized the importance of communication and staying motivated despite failure.

Managing vs. Contributing as an IC: The Train/Canoe Mindset

A former manager shared their thoughts on the differences between working as an individual contributor (IC) and a manager. They used the analogy of train work and canoe work to explain the differences. Train work requires a lot of work to get the train moving, but it can take people far. Canoe work is done alone and can get going quickly, but will never reach the same speed as the train. When considering a career in management, it is important to remember that the day-to-day will be different and to consider one's motivation. Canoe work is energizing and allows for craftsmanship, while train work requires a more deliberate way of thinking and takes longer to see the results.