A Practical Approach to Engineering Leadership

September 21, 2020

#3 – September 21, 2020

this week's favorite

In a small startup team, you don’t really need a lot of these things explicit. The goals, actions, and rewards are mostly shared across the team, and everybody contributes where they see a need. The entire team has the same priorities, the tradeoffs are decided upon continuously, and changing course is done quickly.

One of the biggest difficulties in transitioning from a software developer to a manager is coming to terms with the realisation that producing code is no longer your primary objective.

Senior technology leaders and CTOs need to analyse technological options, align them with short and long-term commercial business objectives, and translate and communicate these recommendations to non-technical peers and stakeholders, among a myriad of other responsibilities.

For software development, quality should be a foundational step in building a company’s core product. For any company, quality must be a shared understanding across product, business and engineering. It is more important to focus on whether the customer outcome and business impact were clearly delivered upon, not just releasing bug-free code.

An age old question leaders face is how to create new leaders within their organization, ones that could take over the reins someday. Today’s organizations have never been more complex, nor have there ever been more moving parts involved with creating software products. Structures vary in shape and size, each team morphing and sharing responsibilities as opportunities and challenges arise.

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