Thoughts On
Engineering Management

After years of delivering software as an individual contributor, I embarked on a journey into Engineering Management.

My team was acquired over two years ago and we needed someone responsible for the peoples’ wellbeing and to maintain the culture we had developed over the years. If you’ve ever gone through an acquisition then you’ll understand some of the complexities when merging two cultures.

Being a senior member of the team with a deep understanding of the product, I decided to be that person and so my function changed exposing me to a new world. I deeply care for the product and the team supporting it so henceforth I was the Engineering Manager of the GatherContent team. There were many uncertainties but I never let that stop me before.

I went into the role to mould it into something suitable for both myself and the team. I never saw it as a promotion but as a means to shape our future.

Drives & Fatherhood

What drives you as a manager? Is it the quality of the product or perhaps the speed of delivery? Understanding what gets you energised is critical when undertaking this role but it may not be so easy to identify, so dig deeper. For me, it was something far more personal.

I reached a milestone in my life. My second son was born and his older brother was starting school that year. What unforeseen challenges will arise and how will my character be impacted? How will I change as a father?

The shift to Engineering Management is often filled with dread around having to manage something far more complex than any software you can conceive…people. Each person brings their ups and downs and I’ve had numerous people tell me that our 1:1s are more effective than therapy. It’s a humbling and tiring experience and one I wasn’t ready for.

At the beginning of the process, I was filled with emotions of all kinds but remained grounded in that drive of fatherhood. Later that year, Charity Majors would write about “Becoming an Engineering Manager and Relationships” which resonated strongly.

My character has grown substantially and thankfully I’ve become a more present and loving father because of the experiences I’ve encountered.

Dig deep and understand your drives. Lean into your doubts. Even if it’s frightening, embrace the unknown and turn it into something that’ll change your life.

Centred Perspective

There are many aspects to engineering management, so prepare as best you can. When we fail (and you will) you’ll be affecting people more profoundly than you ever have before.

For reading materials, I recommend:

I also recommend engaging with other inspirations to support your preparation, here are a few of my personal favourites:

I cannot stress how important this process was and I centred myself multiple times throughout my first year in management and after 6 months some interesting developments appeared. People in the team were beginning to shine and it wouldn’t be till the following year when I would come to understand that one key factor was my approach to management.

In hindsight, I don’t think I would have approached management in my own way if I hadn’t taken the time to ground myself and appreciate the shift I was undertaking.

Read plenty and centre yourself.

Async, Trust & Culture

I'm a lucky dude, my team rocks and there are many reasons for that but primarily it’s due to culture. In my 8 years at GatherContent, culture is one of our outstanding achievements:

David Farley couldn’t say it any better:

One of the strongest predictors of success in software development is team culture, but that is such an ephemeral idea that it can be hard to nail down what we mean when we say one development team has a strong culture and another doesn’t and it can be even more difficult to work out how to change something as broad as “team culture” for the better.

As David suggests, it’s hard to understand how to improve culture so I’ll share some “simple” recommendations that I live by:

  • Remain as asynchronous as possible.
  • Respect people’s time and personal lives.
  • Be transparent and lead by example.
  • Trust is paramount. Without it, everything breaks down.
  • Value personal reflection and enable people to centre themselves.

With this focus on trust, we have developed a culture where we feel safe to discuss topics that normally wouldn’t be shared across teams such as drives and personal objectives. It’s inspiring when you see people grow through supporting others.

Because we’ve been a remote first team for so long we’re masters of async practices across all aspects of our work. Projects have dedicated async processes, groups have their areas to collaborate and because we have extensive experience, we understand where sync practices are useful (e.g. pairing, mobbing and even fun activities to build relationships).

We don’t even bother with stand-ups anymore instead, our commitment-based process for managing projects has removed the need for any “alignment” meeting, which is a huge win.

If you want to build something in your team, make it a safe space to develop a culture that suits your team. A great culture ripples through every process, line of code and emotion expressed within the team.

Continuous Alignment For Progression

I prefer to keep things small and manageable (e.g. pull requests, releases, commits, pivots) so I’ll never understand processes like performance reviews that require people to reflect on months of effort, with some processes requiring a year of reflection.

Any person in my team has the space/time to:

  • Journal per day/week to deepen their understanding, which is often shared with me improving our relationship and alignment.
  • Deliver feedback and reflect on feedback received. I seek feedback from the team to reflect on my management style.
  • Progress their personal or team objectives.

A manager should strengthen the belief that these tasks are just as important as “normal” work. From experience tunnel visioning away from these processes can lead to a short-sighted mentality. Objectives are often aligned with pain points within the team so ignoring them often causes future complexities.

Those in my team who conduct these processes achieve a state of flow more often and generally feel positive about their progression. If you have people in your team who aren’t accustomed to creating their objectives then you can always add objectives for the outcomes they are producing but ideally, people need to own their progression.

I’ve often witnessed collaboration across the team to achieve as many personal objectives as possible, where people recommend approaches to team dynamics to enable the opportunity for people to grow. This type of culture is rare in the industry but it is possible to achieve.

There are situations where the collaborative style may not work effectively. For example, if you’re forced to pitch people against one another for a promotion then collaboration is more challenging to manage. However, I don’t agree with those competitive approaches (for most cases) so I would never apply that style of management.

It takes time to apply this approach but once established you’ll see huge improvements culturally and in company-wide processes like performance reviews. For example, we’ve completed review processes that normally take 4+ weeks in under an hour, the team respects the dedication to their development and it creates a lasting team that wants to succeed together.

Align frequently and develop the skills necessary for your team to reflect. Give your team space to understand themselves, offer support to others and achieve a heightened sense of fulfilment.

Acknowledging Your Value

After a year I began to reflect and plan for the future. Did I want to remain in a management position or focus on being a contributor again? Then I received an award for my efforts in coaching and mentoring from my team. I never imagined that I’d receive such recognition, especially as the award was voted by peers across an organisation of 500+ people.

Then it dawned on me, that I hadn’t understood how to measure my value as a manager until that moment. So how do we measure ourselves as managers?

  • Establish and maintain a culture. Have you witnessed the team living the culture?
  • Treat each person equally. Did you provide the same level of support to everyone?
  • Seeking feedback is your most powerful tool, especially if it leads to change.
  • Lead by example using the same personal development model as your team. If you struggle to understand your value, then chances are your team does too. Iterate when required and show continuous improvement as a cornerstone of the culture you’re trying to establish.

Even though I still contribute code to the team, that isn’t the main purpose of an Engineering Manager. One of the best things about being a manager is the perspective you gain, especially around the culture and no one is better positioned to facilitate that culture. Understanding team dynamics, business alignment and continuous improvement is your responsibility and there’ll be other responsibilities like delivery management but for me, these were the topics that enabled me to shape the culture.

Understanding your value can be challenging but the solution can be as simple as using the same process you ask your teams to use. Understand the superpower of perspective and use that to shape the culture.

My Future In Management

It’s been a great 8 years at GatherContent and every story has an end. Going from a Software Engineer to Team Lead (functioning as CTO for years) and then shifting to Engineering Manager during the acquisition.

Would I recommend Engineering Management? Absolutely.

  • It’s a real honour to support people and witness their growth.
  • It reinforced how much I love people.
  • It’s the first role where I felt like I had an impact on people’s lives. Shipping code is cool, but helping someone overcome a professional (or personal) challenge is a great feeling.

Would I do it again? Potentially, it all depends on the problem to be solved. My ability to adapt is probably my strongest attribute and it’s why I love our industry.

The new problem I face is that my journey is diverging from that of the team. What I am going to do after GatherContent? I’ve given it a lot of thought and I’ll be doing one of the following:

  • Building product(s) of my own.
  • Supporting startups getting to market.
  • Joining an inspiring product team. They’ll need to be the best in the game though, after GatherContent I have high standards 😄

Conclusion

At one point I was questioning my choice of shifting to Engineering Management and then my friend, James Peacock sent me this video and said “This is you”.

I can’t thank him enough as he helped me when I didn’t see the role for the amazing experience that it was. The truth is, his simple but effective way of telling me that I was doing a good job is the reason why I wrote this post.

If you’re ever in doubt, look back at your journey and I hope you’ll start feeling a little better. I hope my thoughts resonate with the importance of developing a safe space for your team and I wish you every luck in creating your own culture.

Good luck 🤞