- Leadership in Tech
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- What you give up when moving into engineering management
What you give up when moving into engineering management
#78 – February 28, 2022
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this week's favorite
Moving into a management role may be a rewarding step in your career, but you should know about the things you're leaving behind.
My buddy is an electrician and told me a few months ago that he always leaves the screws in a vertical position on jobs as a sign of craftsmanship. Been thinking ever since what my “vertical screws” equivalent is for product design.
My product leader coachees and I sometimes do calendar reviews. We look at their chock-a-block schedules, and talk about the struggle to address important things when faced with 7+ hours/day of meetings. We often feel a lack of agency (control), where our jam-packed calendars drive us from one discussion to the next — with no time to catch our breath or complete action items from the last six meetings.
In physics, momentum is a quantity that captures the tendency for a moving object to remain in motion. Once something gets moving, it takes energy to slow it down, and the forward motion often becomes the new default state.
You may have seen this wild story from Ask A Manager a week ago: the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed. If not, take a minute to read the story; it’s quite a ride. In short: the company interviewed someone, hired him, but when he showed up for his first day of work … it was a totally different person.
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