THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE
At work, do you need to be a stronger weightlifter to outdo more senior guys? Not necessarily. The difference lies in learning.
You will come to a point where knowledge gathering from more senior peers becomes less enriching. While reading, you might stumble upon an article describing an obscure tool or innovative technology that could solve your product’s issue. In two days, you’ll come up with an integration of the new cloud service mentioned in ThoughWorks radar as a working prototype. Meanwhile, the more experienced developers suggest implementing a solution from scratch, estimating two months.
After some time, people come for advice, a senior manager asks for your opinion. Fast-forward, you end up in a software architect role.
Turn your learning into a routine
In the beginning, the challenging thing is to get organized. …
Great people are active in self-learning
Top picks of Engineering Management and Leadership
- https://www.platohq.com/blog about tech leadership and product management
- https://www.mironov.com/ about engineering and product management
- https://marcusblankenship.com/ about engineering mostly
- https://getnave.com/ about Kanban methodology
- https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/ about tech and leadership
- https://linearb.io/ about tech metrics
- https://lethain.com/ about tech structure and management
- https://cutle.fish/ about to make product management right
- https://bloggingfordevs.com/engineering-management-blogs/ about tech
- https://poddtoppen.se/ and https://soundcloud.com/agileamped about the process flow and agility
- medium.com and hbr.com with leadership tag
For a Software Developer, it can feel unrealistic to think of being the Engineering Manager of, say, dozens of people in the future.
Time passes by. The future turns into the present.
One day you realize that being a manager has the potential to dramatically increase the influence you have. Together with your teams, you can achieve much more compared to working on your own.
I believe the set of principles below will help you to become a leader worth following in a shorter time frame, particularly in the Software Engineering world.
1st principle: Make changes happen
Stay focused and invest your time into improvements of a bigger scale. Don’t stay at the level of resolving small daily issues, which results in hundreds of items in your Trello to-do list. …
In engineering management, my vision is to create a productive software delivery environment that developers are proud to work in, with a focus on tangible outcomes across the company.
It’s a system with the proper guidelines and the right level of automation, so standard development work gets done seamlessly. That’s why, in the engineering department, we implemented real-time team health boards. It gave us back some precious time to focus on systematic process improvements.
To fulfill such ambitions, the standard set of predefined methodology (Scrum, for example) and the ticketing system won’t do the trick out-of-the-box.
Measure What Matters Most: Roadmap Focus
The problem I struggle with most is the gap between software development ticketing tools and product management solutions. …
My humble effort to put the topmost indicators of what defines great software companies in the first place.
Do I trust the Product?
It is the Product which matters, not the technology.
Are you fully on board with the Product`s vision? Alternatively, I like to judge the Product`s impact via its simplicity: Is the Product simple enough you can explain the point in 15 seconds? That signals the Product can make it to the top and take you there as well. Simplicity sells ideas. Does the Product aim to cut its piece out of the market without a WOW! feature or a differentiator, compared to other competitors? Is the company focused on making the Product grow or does the company live out of inertia, doing mostly support and sustaining at the end of the Product`s life? …
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