The Manager's Path

IT management basics, useful to understand how my managers think. Found on Hacker News, one of the most recommended.

Not very suitable in my situation since I do not manage anyone at the moment, but I liked it to understand a few things about what being a manager is like. I found it a bit vague around the VP Engineering role, but those are highly specific situation, hard to explain. Mostly I got a sense of what they expect.

Management 101: what to expect from a manager

• A good manager helps me grow with 1-1s, feedback, and coaching
• Golden rule: criticism in private, praise in public
• Training: the manager is responsible for finding resources for your training
• Happiness at the workplace is your responsibility. You set the tone for the relationship: understand what you need, be accountable for your work, and choose well the manager you work with

Mentoring

• First step toward management, generally with an intern, who are often underappreciated
• Golden rule: give them something meaningful to do, do not leave them there wasting time, lost
• Also because a happy intern will spread the word, and may want to work at the company
• The best mentor-mentee relationship evolves naturally, usually one-on-one and gradually
• Watch out for Alpha Geeks, people great at their work but not yet as managers. Mentoring is a good way for them to start building management skills

Tech Lead

• It is a technical and managerial position, where they are expected to code a bit less and delegate more to a team of 4-5 people
• Also manages progress, splitting tasks, requirements, people, and deadlines
• Best place to try some management and eventually return to a technical role
• Bad sign: meetings without participation
• Key point of what your manager expects: Your manager trusts you to proactively deal with all those important but not urgent things before they become urgent, and especially before they become urgent for your manager.

Managing People

• When you start managing, you deal with people, who are very different from machines
• Build relationships of trust and respect by communicating and understanding reports’ needs; it is the best way to spot root problems
• Create a 30/60/90 plan, you need long-term vision
• Communicate your expectations clearly, especially what they should provide (e.g., reports, 1-1s)
• Take feedback from new hires; they often have different perspectives
• Keep doing performance reviews; you must detect problems before they happen, which means talking a lot with your reports

Managing a Team

• Engineering Lead type, a largely administrative role
• You need to create a low-conflict environment, which requires some hard choices, like not relying on consensus but sometimes trusting the experts, or stepping in quickly to prevent issues. Find a standard to evaluate decisions (e.g., the shared end goal)
• Watch for team destroyers, like the Brilliant Jerk (ego-driven, you need to scale them down fast), the Noncommunicator (hides, you need to speak to them directly), and the one who lacks respect (avoid)

Managing multiple teams

• Delegate, delegate, delegate. You will never have time to see everything and you must trust your leads
• Remember the diagram → Simple and Frequent tasks, delegate. All complex ones, delegate to teach. Do only Simple and Infrequent yourself since it is faster than explaining to everyone

Managing Managers

• Introduces the idea of skip-level meetings, discussing reports of reports. The goal is to get a sense of the team’s health
• Do not be a people pleaser; learn to say no, and underpromise and overdeliver rather than the opposite
• Watch new managers, make sure they are up to the role, and support them as they take their first steps
• Managers create the culture; support them in that and guide where they will go

The big leagues

• At the CFO level and similar, you have an overall leadership role, setting the direction for managers and everyone under them
• To set strategy you will do a lot of research and preparation, since your choices affect everyone
• Also, you must be impersonal since you cannot play favorites
• Final chapter: create a ladder, so everyone knows what is expected of their role and what it takes to move up
• Assorted tips for the big league:

I said earlier that the CEO sent back many of my attempts to get this work done. Really, she rejected two things. The first was an underdeveloped strategic plan that was almost entirely about system and architectural details and had very few forward-thinking ideas beyond the next 6 to 12 months. It certainly did not attempt to address the business drivers that were critical to the team’s success. The second was my slide deck. As a speaker, I’ve been trained to make slide decks that are sparse, in support of an audience that listens closely. This board needed a deck that was very dense with information