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Mistakes I've Made as an Engineering Manager
#26 – March 01, 2021
this week's favorite
I’ve been a manager for many years at companies of different scale. Through these experiences, I’ve done my share of learning, and made some mistakes along that way that were important lessons for me. I want to share those with you.
Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep. They can also be T-shaped—knowing a lot about a little and a little about a lot—but in this metaphor, that’s a compromise. After all, even a T need not have a 1:1 aspect ratio.
As a company scales to more people and more technology, it becomes important to have an engineering vision and a strategy to get there. In our experience, as you get to a size of greater than ~40 folks in an engineering organization, it becomes critical to have an engineering vision.
Last year during a retrospective, one of the engineering teams I lead acknowledged that making decisions felt like a slow and often inconclusive process.
Strategies for nurturing that feel-good sense of accomplishment when doing largely invisible work.