It’s winter season and am getting close to a year of full-time engineering management. So, I’m listening to some jazz house music and reflecting on what I have learned.

While I have done tech lead roles before, this is the first role I’ve been doing people management full time, i.e. not doing the tech myself.

This role is not about the tech. It is also about the tech. It is primarily about the people.

I used to remind myself of this everyday, first thing in the morning, for the first six months. I took it so much to heart that I actively avoided any coding, which was a stark contrast to me writing Erlang/Elixir code a few days before I started at my current job. I was actively avoiding doing the thing that I’ve been doing full-time for the past 13 years.

I was fighting my instincts. But I wanted to learn how to do this thing right. My puzzle was no longer technology. My puzzle was humans. I had to switch from “ignore-the-human, solve-the-problem” approach to “solve-the-human, ignore-the-problem” approach. So I reminded myself to trust my reports that they will solve the tech, the tech is not my job any more.

Caveat is that I reserved the right to veto anything or mandate anything that I felt was necessary. For example, yes, we are going to spend the time to upgrade our Python codebases to Python 3, it is necessary. But how are we going to architect this new microservice? That’s the teammate’s job. My job is to ensure they are unblocked in every step. My job is to combine my engineering experience with people-oriented focus to make the team more effective and productive, not do the engineering itself.

Remember, remember, management is not a promotion, it is a career change.

These are the fundamentals. Everything else is a distraction.

Results means ensuring projects are delivered on time and deliver the desired results, e.g. increased revenue for the company.

Retention means ensuring that teammates are engaged in their jobs, are unblocked in performing their tasks, and that they have challenging projects and career growth.

Retention also means hiring and expanding the team. What I wish I knew much earlier was that this should take up a lot of my time. This includes so many things such as capacity planning for next year’s projects, getting approvals for additional roles, actively reaching out to prospective candidates (not always possible), following up with internal recruitment team to make sure we are moving fast and discussing salary ranges and compensation, ensuring candidates are engaged during the interview process, if a good fit was found, ensuring candidates are engaged after the interview process, and so on.

From Liz Ryan :

Of course, there is a balance to be maintained between ensuring results and ensuring retention, that’s part of the challenge of the job.

I find a lot of good inspirations in engineering for a management role, it’s easier to relate to bottlenecks, for example, parallelization means more throughput, and so on.

My favorite engineering management framework (a.k.a. mental model) so far has been Modern Agile by Joshua Kerievsky. It most closely resembles my working style:

Learn more in this quick video:

Another way of explaining Modern Agile:

I have read and listened a lot to get a handle of engineering management:

There’s plenty more to read!

Some of my favorite learnings are from avenues such as Twitter meetup on Engineering Management and True University. There’s a lot to unpack from just these two events, let alone the books above, maybe that’s a blog post for another day.

I was able to collate many of these ideas and put the frameworks into practice by writing and referring to my own Commonplace book 😄

Remember, the whole point of learning frameworks / mental models is to setup repeatable healthy processes, i.e. good habits!

Communication is the hardest thing in our careers. Just accept it!

Other things to keep in mind is:

I strive to encourage specific questions and actionable discussions. But communication is hard. Sigh. Accept it.

As you can tell, I adore the Manager Zine by Julia Evans. Go buy it.

In engineering, DRY is valued. We talk about it in many different names – modularity, reusability, microservices, etc.

In engineering management, the opposite is required – CRY (Continuously Repeat Yourself). Keep repeating yourself, because it takes reinforcement learning for humans to change their habits.

This was one of the hardest things for me to learn.

From “The Manager’s Path” book, chapter 8 – The Big Leagues:

There has been many a time that I need to jump in to nitty-gritty tasks.

I ensure that I’m never writing code for the critical path of projects (that’s the team’s work).

But I do jump into tasks such as anything that is important for other teams but does not warrant disturbing focus of my team, such as writing a data export job.

I’m the “odd job janitor” in the team. Surprisingly, I’m comfortable in this role.

Phew!