The output of a manager is the output of the managers team. Plus the output of the organization that they influence. Hey everyone. My name is Henry Surya Barragan. And you're listening to the tekhelet Juno, the show will be bringing you the greatest technical leaders practitioners and thought leaders in the industry to discuss about their Journey ideas and practices that we all can learn and apply to build a highly performing technical team and to make an impact in your personal work.
So let's dive into our Journal. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another new episode of the technique Journal podcast. I'm always excited to be back with a new episode every week to share with all of you. My conversation with another great technical leader in the industry. Thank you for tuning in and spending your time with me today, listening to this
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No dot f / Patron. I highly appreciate any Kind of support from all of you and your contribution would definitely help me to build sustainably producing this show. Every week for today's episode. I am excited to share my conversation with James. Stanier. James is the S VP of engineering at Brand watch. And the author of the book titled become an effective
software engineering manager. This book is one of the great resources that I've read that provides guidance for engineering managers or people who aspire ER to become engineering managers. In order to become more effective and make great impact in engineering teams. James also writes frequently on his Blog, the engineering manager.com in which you can also find more of his writings
about this topic. In this episode, James shared with me, his insights on becoming an effective software, engineering manager and how we can build and run effective engineering teams. We started off by discussing why. The tech industry is facing a A crisis because of the inability of many managers to manage people, effectively, and the challenges faced by many Engineers when transitioning to become managers.
We then dive deep into the best practices to become an effective manager, such as how to get oriented delegating effectively letting go of control and nurturing one-on-ones with your team members. James also pointed out the hardest things that engineering managers have to deal with, which are dealing with projects and humans towards the end. We then wrap up with James tips on how a manager should handle failures and move forward from them. I hope that you will enjoy this great episode.
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Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the package. You know? Today I have with me someone who's an author of the book called becoming an effective engineering manager. So, I read this book actually. It's one of the rare books that I find covering topics about
engineering manager. I find it quite interesting, the way, He actually narrated the story from joining a company as a manager, new manager going through your first day and going through projects working with people and things like that until at the end, thinking about the future.
But the person should do which I think is quite interesting and just going through all the chapters one, by one, actually brings us in. The manager's point of view, the difficulties the confusion sometimes on what you can do, or what you should do. I think it's really really crucial. So, I'm very happy to actually meet James Tanya. Welcome to the show. James. So first of all, James for people who don't know you yet. So maybe you can introduce
yourself. Yeah. She thinks my name's James. So I will be labeled. And I've been both president of engineering. I'm senior vice president now for quite a few years. And I guess I didn't really intend to do this as a job. And I'll be honest with you, straight up. My career has taken a whole bunch of twists and turns and various kind of things. I've tried and failed and so on. And if you're interested I can give you a little bit about the journey I've been on. So it's interesting to your
listeners. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Certainly, you can mention your highlights. Your turning points should think so. Initially like when I went to universities do computer science, you know, I was really, really intent on becoming a compiler engineer. That was my initial passion. It was one of those things where I did the compiler modules during the piece size, like this is so cool. I never knew anything about this.
And as fascinated, it was like a lovely balance between programming and theory and also just like magic. So my project at University, as an undergraduate was compiled. Colors. And then, as I was finishing up, my supervisor said, hey, there's some PhD funding for doing a pilot project. Yes. I'm doing that. Okay, I'm PhD students. So I did a PhD and again, it was a compiler.
So there's a theme, certainly at the moment and all throughout my PhD, I was absolutely sure that I was going to go and do a postdoctoral research may become like a lecturer or researcher in compilers. But as I was finishing my PhD, I was interviewing in a few different places for positions. And there weren't many at the time. This was like 2010, 2011, and it I mean clear that either, I'd have to move halfway across the globe to do.
One of these research positions, or should probably try and do something different. So, I went to a few interviews. I narrowly missed out on a few slots and then there was a start-up in my town time, which was Bryson in the UK on the south coast. They just raised some seed money and they're looking for people and I must admit I wasn't looking to work there and I was kind of hesitant if only a few times. I was like, I'm not really sure
I want to do this. I was actually in the interview process for Google at the time as well. And I was like, that sounds way better, but actually I I went into met this startup and it seemed really interesting and then I was back in the engineer. So at number of years doing that, at the start of the world and we raised several rounds of venture capital funding which in turn grew the company, which then meant that we were needing to have our first managers.
And that's how I got into it. Really. How do we actually structure teams? How do we run teams? Could I do that? Oh, okay. I guess I could do that and to nearly 10 years later by senior vice president. So I guess that kind of worked out. So it was kind of an accident, kind of an opportunity and kind of it. Arrest who rolled into one. I don't write any compilers anymore, unfortunately, but it's
a journey, right? Well, instead, you write a compiler for managing people, you know, so I know this is like sometimes for us. It's kind of like accidental Journey. We intend to do something, but in the end we work on something else. So for you, how hard is it being like strong Academia kind of a background going through post, doctoral degree and things like that and then switching to joining a start-up which I think to me is a big major. Turn in your career.
So how did you analyze looking back? It was tricky. I found one thing, I had to completely change my own perspective of what mean being valuable was. The academic world is very much about publishing papers. It's about going to the conference who is talking a conference to his. I felt that I had to sort of cling to this. Like, I'm not just an engineer. I'm also like a researcher.
This is important, and they have to hold on to this, but actually as time went on and as a start-up started doing well, I really enjoyed being able to build things with people building things. Uses. You like the product who then pays more money to get more users and then we harm will be what it was a virtuous cycle. And I think that was the one thing I did realize in Academia,
was that it's fantastic. You work with some very, very smart people, but the outcome is a paper or the outcome is a talk. And I never really experienced that whole thing of really building for lots of users before and as soon as I had experienced it. So actually, this is way more fun. I really enjoy this. So, let's go through why you decide to write this book about becoming an effective software engineering Her what kind of problem did you see during that
time? So the beginning it was my website. We just discussed before we started recording you're doing these weekly recordings for your podcast. I set myself a similar challenge a few years ago, which was I really want to write an article a week on the management subject just because I felt like I had to learn a lot of stuff by trial and error. If I could at the very least, just write it up for myself even those on the internet that we call.
And if there's a few other people, maybe people that I work with who could read it as well and find some you soon at the next. Cool, that'd be great. So that was the original goal. I was like, I saw this blog and I'll try and write something once a week and see how it goes. I just got into this nice Cadence with that. We're not only did I feel that people were actually reading it which was cool. People came to the website and
the traffic kept growing. I had a few front pages on Hacker News and things like that, and that was really cool. But I found that writing something once a week was just a really great way of me better understanding the subject myself, because all of these ideas are kind of complicated and by actually focusing on writing them down, you really start to To explore the idea and then you come away going.
I to understand that better. Now that I've actually tried to process it, somebody else, when you teach something you feel that, you understand it better. So the site was the beginning about 10 years ago. When I was starting to read about management, this was before there was this little explosion of engineering manager type books. A lot of the books that I bought at the time were either like
very business ebooks. Like McKinsey consultant talks to you about Management in Fortune 500 company. There's bits in here that I relate to but there's also bits in our video. There was one book, but I did read that I thought was fantastic, which was high output management by Andy Grove. I mean, lots of people know him CEO of Intel engineering background, kind of Silicon Valley, Legend person book for people that don't what was really nice about him as the CEO of Intel is that, he is an
engineer at heart. So he thinks about things in very engineering ways that I can relate to. He ran a humongous company doing incredibly complicated things, but he wrote this fantastic book. Yes, I would. It's like mid 80s, but there were so many things in there as I ask. He's really thought about this messy human thing and managed to sort of put a process around it, that makes sense to me.
He talks about these anecdotes of like running a cafe, and then it's not okay, boiling eggs, and like making toast and employing people, and then he's like that because this is hard, is this people management problem? And you like? Oh, wow, he really is, I can relate to that. So, that was my first experience of this one book that I read. I felt like, I've learned four years, five years of doing this job, by just reading this one book. So I thought there's a gap in the market here.
It feels like this. Exist, that's why I started the site and then after writing for several years, I thought I've got at least a books worth of material as you mentioned at the beginning. There are other management books out there and they were brilliant ones. There's managing humans. There's managers path is an eloquent puzzle. There's lots of other management
books out there. So I'm not saying that mines the best, but in the same way that there's loads of different books on learning to program, different authors have different takes on the same material and I think sometimes it's really useful to have different perspectives on the same thing. So I wanted to write something. That was kind of if I just started my job as an engineering manager. Now. If someone put this book on my desk and said, hey just like, have a read of that.
Then I want to structure in such a way that maybe they could read a chapter, every few weeks and then it would kind of unfold as they were doing their job and then they could refer back to it. So that was kind of a handbook. I wanted to put together. Yeah, so when I read it
definitely it's like a manual. So it's like when you are on board it as a manager, you can literally read it one chapter a week, probably and you can relate with so many things that you They're either like the own productivity hiring working with people, influencing other people and things like that, but I want to start with one first interesting point of view that you have in the beginning of the book.
So you mentioned that there's a skills crisis in the technology industry due to the ability of many managers, not able to manage people. And I mean, if I can see these days technology Industries are really booming, they are more and more people being involved in the technology. So why do you start with that? Kind of Statement. This is something I've experienced myself is the in order for people to get into technology, especially software Engineers. They've often had a hobby in
childhood. Maybe they've been really good at certain subjects at school. They learn to program the practice for years that may be done a degree. They've done all this work in order to get where they are. If you end up working for a company, that doesn't have very clear career progression. I mean, you work for a company that's got very clear tracks and progression. And as, The other big technology companies know everywhere does.
So, unfortunately, I think a lot of software engineers and up a bit stuck in their progression. They think, how do I earn more money or how do I get a promotion, or how do I progress and often people who maybe don't want to be managers, end up going for managerial roles? Because they see it as a way hit
grossing. So, we end up with people who've never done it before going into these engineering manager roles, and they have very little support and how to do that job properly, because it's a different job fundamentally. It's a different job. It's Still has the same context of being an engineer. It still has the same company and domain but the skills are totally different and I was teaching them to you and I think, unfortunately, by
nobody's fault. It's meant that a lot of people become managers that didn't want to be or didn't realize what the job entailed or just fundamentally. Don't even know how to do a good job. Give them the software industry is growing all the time. We always in legal managers, but it doesn't feel like the support network for them is really there. So I thought, could I write something that could at least give people that friendly helping hand through the first
six to 12 months. Job. So in your opinion, do managers need to start as an engineer in the first place or anybody, as long as they have a good management skills can become an engineering manager. It's a really good question. And I think maybe there's two sides to it. So, I would say you don't have to be an engineer for sure. People who are fantastic managers, could do a good job, but it really helps to understand how to shape and release code how to work with
other engineers. And also unfortunately, there is a respect element as well. If you are an engineer near knowing that you report to someone, who has been an engineer, really greatly helps because you can offer that technical supports them as well as a manager. You can help them think through problems. You can have your past experience to help them through
things. So in theory, you don't have to be an engineer to be an engineering manager, but in practice really it's super helpful to both sides. So I also realized this kind of pattern in the industrial like what you mentioned, right. A lot of these Superstar Engineers or developers. The one who are really, really strong. Technically they can go from high level low level. Whatever. Level coming up with great design of scalable system. Once they reach a certain number of years.
Then people just want to promote them to become a manager. Not knowing probably that person doesn't want to do that. But the progression like the benefits, the money, and all that only comes by being a manager. Some companies do have progression for individual contributor, but I think many in the industry student. So how do you see we can solve these kind of problems. A strong individual contributor, but he doesn't want to do any
management role. Yeah, it definitely requires change on the Please part one of the latest chapters in the book goes through this exercise of defining, the to Career track. So it starts with shared competences of just very general things that are increasing the time in terms of responsibility and expertise and skill and output who does make a distinction between having a management track in an icy track. And really what companies have to realize is that they are two separate jobs.
That's the thing. People can move between them. People also can act as a hybrid. So there are definitely people who can be strong Engineers, but also can manage Small team, but it's really making the distinction. I mean, two things one. Is that the higher part of the management track really if you're doing that job well and you really are being an excellent manager and you're
managing a large division. For example, you don't have the time to do any good programming and even if you did what could you do? It's like. Oh, yeah, I'll do that one point. Ticket to like fix that one bug is not the best use of your time but conversely as well to say that. Hey, you like not only can we go from The Graduate engineer to senior engineer, but then one of our positions like staff engineer principal engineer, Really promote those as ways
forward as well. We're going up on the icy track to say hey, there are ways if we frame these roles as less about, you just need to write the code, but it's more about. You can build consensus, you can inform design. You can really make impactful engineering decisions that affect the bottom line of the business. You could propose a re architecture of the system that saves half of the money that you are spending before or make something twice as fast or more efficient.
Those is framing the impact of those roles at the higher end of the IC scope. So, these are the things you should be thinking about. So I read your book is very interesting how you structure. So called the big sections. You start with what you call getting oriented as a manager. Which to me sounds like you want to focus as an individual person right now, like, improve yourself, being highly effective
and things like that. And I like the things when you mention about getting organized, they are four different tools, which I find quite relevant. Even though you are not a manager. Can you cover a little bit? What are those? Four tools? Yeah, sure. Background on the beginning of the book. Actually. I was thinking about Crossing At first. I kept thinking, hang this. This stuff too simple.
This needs to be just like somebody's to go getting things done or like some organization book, but then from experience. I know that one of the real superpowers you can have as a manager is, if you're just organized. This is like really basic stuff, like organizing your time and your tasks, and your input messages and things. If you can just get a handle on all that and have a process, the sorts through it, then you actually realize how few people
do that really? Well because all of a sudden you can reply to people quite quickly, you can put something on your to-do list and then you can actually You do it, and then someone said, something you fold it up and like, why do you actually followed up on that thing? I was talking about you like, of course.
Yeah. So there's these four tools that I talked about and I tried to sort of unpick some of the bad habits of people have fundamentally organization of your time, is your calendar and your calendar is really, really important. As a manager. You've got limited time, often. You have more meetings as a manager and you just have to be very strict with your time. In order to be effective. Those are organizing, your tasks
is surprising. How few people have to do lists in just as a kind of, like, cross-section of NG to peers and people I know just having a to-do list and having a nice simple routine just to keep it organized. You prioritize those incredible things not just in terms of you actually being able to execute what you say you're going to do, but just keeping things out of your brain. There's only so much working memory that you have as a human and it's always taken up by stuff all the time.
It's very easy to get distracted. So, having a routine with a to-do list, we can write things out. Forget about them. Fantastic without really, really owed you. This next week's fairly opinionated, personally. I think that given how many different platforms work. Did communicate on from slacked to various DM applications to
emails to GitHub to everything. I really doubt you're saying route, everything through your email, inbox have email notifications, everything all rooted to one place and the natural canonical view of the world. So you can actually triaging and go from there. And then all those three tools is one other which is just a place to capture information when you're not near anything
else. So this could be, if you're in an office physically, it might be you just carry a little notebook with your phone around with you just to jot things down, or If you're at home, just piece of paper on your desk or something Post-it notes because you always hear something interesting, there is worth following up, or finding out more about us. Just getting in the habit of like that. I'll just write that down and then it's out my brain. And it's, there is really
useful. So I like the Simplicity of these four tools, one of the challenges, of course, like we all know these days information comes from everywhere, like you have so many devices, you have so many tools within your work. You have casual conversations. You have so many maybe newsletter that you read. I think people are sometimes overwhelmed on how they can actually start to The nice days.
Although it sounds simple right? Executing it and having a discipline to actually put everything in this for. I think that is self is Pretty Tough. Start. I would say. What do you think about that? I think is true. It is tough. And it does require a lot of self-discipline, but I think when you give it a go and I'm not saying that my solution is the best solution. There are other ways in which you can organize things.
But when you do have a routine and you do make it a habit where you actually forget about the process, you would just automatically doing these various little Cycles every day of gathering information. Ian and putting them in one place and then executing through them, you do it without thinking after a while. And actually, you then have all
these moments. Just as I mentioned earlier, where someone will thank you for following up on something because they expect you to do it or someone mentioned, some it to you last week. And then you actually went to sort it out for the new, go back to the movie closer in, like you actually did this, you get all these nice little kind of reinforcing positive behaviors. That having this habit Loops is a good thing. Actually. I think I would feel really lost if I didn't have my habit Loops.
Now, I find it really, really hard. I'm lost. Don't want to do this just because I rely on it so much. So, as you mentioned as a manager, most likely you'll be in meetings, a lot of meetings meeting a lot of people discussing a lot of things. One of the biggest challenge, as Junior manager. So, to speak, right? Is to become effective and productive manager without thinking, like, oh, why do I waste so much of my time? Going into meetings talking to people, I don't produce any code.
I don't write any design, dog, and things like that. So how do you navigate yourself throughout this chaos and somehow? Assume productivity that you think are satisfied for you. Here's a good question. I mean, the initial thing, people struggle with is just how you judge your output as an individual contributor is so different. Like, there's an icy. It's like our today's been great. I pushed through things to production. I've worked out what that bug was.
I've tied off that feature. It's like all these hand. Dribble things are happening or it's like I did this stuff and I can point to that stuff and go that was done and that was done. So this actually isn't my idea of to worry about these things from Andy groans book by upper management, but He did, which really opened my eyes because he categorized for different activities, which you can kind of bucket your time into as a manager. One of them is information gathering. The second one is
decision-making. The third one is nudging and the fourth ones being wrong and those four things start to frame. How you can be effective even in the most boring meeting ever. Like, someone's invited you to this meeting. Like 15 people. You're like, oh my God, why am I in this meeting for two hours? It starts you like, this is going.
To be awful and you can sit there and you can get frustrated and you can feel you, clenching your fist, one of these somewhere else, but actually, if you think about it, it's definitely an information-gathering opportunity. You could be looking at that meeting. Hey, is there anything here? That's being said that. We really interesting for my direct reports to hear. Well, maybe some of my peers to hear you've also got the opportunity to make decisions as
a manager. People will ask you to make a decision. That's pretty straightforward. The more subtle and interesting thing is nudging, and the way I negro frames nudging, is he says that anytime anyone really asks your opinion is because Probably respect you, they think that you're knowledgeable and they'd like some input. So, you have an opportunity. When someone speaks to you to say. Well, actually, I really think we should do this, and that's an impactful thing to do.
If you classify those kinds of conversations, I managing things in a direction. I think it's positive things to be doing, then that's a good use of your time. And then even if you have absolutely no opportunity to impact anything whatsoever, then just to think, how can I act at the moment in a way? That is a behavior, like, other people to emulate. So could I be in this? Really frustrating meeting. But listen, very attentively.
Agree with people. Offer my opinion and do things in a really good way that you'd expect others to emulate than even. That is impactful because as a manager, especially as, like senior manager, if you let CTO or the CEO, for example, people look to you as a role model to be like, how should we be in this company? What are the values that we embody and how should I act? So just by being a good human being and doing a good job. You can have a positive impact as well.
So you have these four different buckets or activities like you said, but again, Okay, you may be cut the grass your time. Where do you spend most of your time? And then what's the equivalent formula to actually say? Okay, if I spend time, equally, maybe or maybe one is more than the others. How do you actually come up with the effectiveness of productivity score? So to speak for many years? And it was one of the things I originally wrote the song of my career.
So he says the output of a manager is really the output of the managers team. Plus the output of the organization that they influence. Now, sounds really straightforward. Would you like? Okay. Yeah, but actually is kind of deep two things. One of them. How do you as a manager best impact, the outcome of your team and actually who come up in loads of practical situations. So one thing you see with new engineering managers is like they've got less time because
there are more meetings. Sometimes they fall into this kind of like janitor role where it's like the team is working, all this stuff and the managers got less time. So what they'll do is they'll try and still do some Icy work, but they'll do like the stuff that no one else wants to do like, oh, yeah, I'll do that like little ticket or there's this like really annoying. Do that. But none of that that's not your job to like sweep up after
everybody. You really should be think about the output of the team's spend time on making sure that the priorities are correct. So the people watching on the most impactful stuff and maybe make sure that people that need mentorship are getting mentorship so that they can get better because that in turn makes the team better. So it's not framing the activities in that first part of
the equation. And then the other bit, which is talking about the organization that you influence, there is something I would naturally think about, but it's actually really interesting building your network. At the company that you're in, increases your influence, so that the more people that, you know, the more things you can affect and that isn't meant to sound, like some kind of like political bad thing is more. Like, if you see that things
could be better. How can you build a network with other people to help make things better together, the more people that you're connected to the wider? The organization is that your influence? Therefore you have a good reason to network and get to know lots of people because your influence then spreads and gets bigger. So it's like fixing your team, making them impactful. Enter more people, building connections building relationships with people so that you can influence more
people. He see it any company you work for. There's always a few people who just like, why do I always hear about this person? And like I always see their work and like they're always involved in everything and it's not because someone is asking them to it's just because they're really mastered this way of being like really helpful, really useful and being really influential with people. So I chose.
This is also a good segue, moving into like working with individuals because obviously as a manager, like you said, you want to increase the output of your team. And for that you need to work with individuals. First of all, I think this is one of the key thing as a manager or any kind of leadership, right? How do you delegate effectively? And, again, coming from an icy background? I think, for someone who has been doing things solo individually, inside outs from
start to end. It's very hard to actually sometimes delegate to other people, especially to someone who is more junior or less experience or someone who don't even come from the same domain, as what he has been doing for many, many months for many years. So, how Actually be able to delegate to other people. Well, yeah, that's a really good question. And I think also manages struggle with her. Hence, the janitor things like I'll just sweep everything up
after you. So firstly it's not a Boolean thing of like I do it or you do it. That's the first thing to sort of look at it's not either/or. It's actually kind of a spectrum and it very much depends on the task that you're delegating. But one end of the spectrum where you don't delegate anything at all. You do it yourself. It makes sense. Right? It's like I'm doing this myself. I'm not delegating anything and then at the the other end of the spectrum, I'm completely delegating this.
So you are doing it and those are the two ends. One thing that's important. Is that even if somebody else is doing it, a manager shouldn't delegate. The accountability for that thing to somebody else. Fundamentally the manager, still accountable for everything that's happening. The best way to explain that is like if it all went wrong, who's to blame in a way, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but who does the buck stop with is the manager. They are accountable for getting
the team's work done. However, what you can delegate is the responsibility for doing the task. That's it. Thing. Because if you gotta get away with the accountability, then you basically abdicating saying this is my problem, and that's not a good thing because you have are not in control and then it's a spectrum. So it isn't just, you do it or I do it. Fundamentally there is a scale and that scale, dictates how often you check in with people
when they're doing things. How much mentorship they need. How much of your time need to sit with them while they do it or give them clear instructions. And it's the manager's job effectively, for whatever is being done to work out. Who's there? A person and then also, where do they sit on that scale? So this task that is really easy for this senior engineer to do. I can pretty much just hand it
over to them. They need just let me know when it's done or actually, is that an opportunity for a less senior engineer to learn, and I could delegate it to them, but then I'll spend more of my time with them because maybe we need a program. They will need to look at it together or from just talk through the one other thing to unpack from. There is there's this education Theory thing called the zone of proximal development, which is
quite interesting. The idea is it comes from kids in schools, which is that you should always be trying to teach interior with two children. That's like just one step outside of their comfort zone because there's this zone of proximal development where people really learn quite quickly with assistance. I mean, we've all seen it, like, when we were in school, you could give them stuff, is too easy. It's just like boring, you don't learn anything. If you get give us something too
hard, you just get totally lost. But if the teachers are able to kind of identify material to give you this, like you built up some scaffolding. And then the thing that you're learning next is like The next thing on the scaffolding then it's like, okay, I'll get that I can build on what I know and I can learn that and then what, you know expands.
So as a manager, it's like identifying things for people to do where it's kind of things that just challenge them in life that they're able to learn and they're interested and that's also part of the delegation things. I how can you give things to people to do? That's interesting. The Mixing Bowl and the challenges that because in a sort of a silly example, you could have like a senior engineer and a junior engineer.
You okay? We're like the senior engineer gets all the hard stuff to do. Engineer gets all the easy stuff. And then you have two people that just get bored and then they don't really progress. But if you mix it up enough, everyone has a mixture of work. I get challenged as mentorship opportunities. So yeah, it's a Continuum and you have to pick her up place. So let's say imagine you are manager of number of people,
right? How do you track all these different delegation or do you work in a project management style? Or do you keep track? Like again, coming back to your to do this or calendar? How do you actually keep track of each of these delegation and the Spectrum? Which makes it even more variable like a lot of these things. How do you actually check in back about the status of the project progress and things like that?
Yeah. We tried not to use any additional methods or tooling really is kind of just a mindset that is liked into how we think about how the world extending your team using it just as a check. Like when you say, for example, are you doing a Sprint planning and people are sort of saying? Oh, yeah. Well, I think I could do that and they always been that you could talk about who my best work or more. To better improve the output of the team in the future.
If you see that, there's a junior engineer about do something that's quite difficult. Can you as a manager identify that ahead of time? Oh, hey you, like let's sit down. You do that together to being with us a program that because you can identify that maybe if you sat with them and you give them some more mentorship and they would progress quicker.
So it's less about having the spreadsheet and like each task to each person, but it's more just the way that you think about the worst getting done every day. So another thing that is quite important for me personally, right? I've been also, Not enough to experience this. There's a good amount of spectrum of one on once between different manager and it's somebody named. So I've experienced like a weekly Cadence kind of one-on-one.
There are times where I don't have any one-on-one, except maybe quarterly or maybe during performance review, or maybe just casual chat during lunch and dinner or whatever team activities in your book. Actually, you Advocate having one-on-ones quite frequently. If not weekly. So, what is the reason the main motivation behind that? This is your question. So I mean, I think it's less to do. The output of the one to work on or like the exact what you're doing, but for me is the more
human personal reason? You're dedicating like some time every single week with one of your staff just in front of is it shows that you care? It's also a safe private space where you can talk about anything. You will have 12 ones where you don't even talk about anything, super important, but the whole point is you're giving opportunities to get to know each other better and to build trust because that's the foundation that all the important stuff, bill on. I think also having that Weekly
Cadence as well one. One is just nice to have habit and routine again. You get it in the calendar. You get it in to-do list, you forget about it just happens, you know, after rather explicitly, but there's just so many things when it comes to people and these can be Career Development conversations. These can be little frustrations
that are building up with time. If all of these things sit for too long without any attention, they always boil up into something that's just way bigger than it needs to be. So if you don't have one to ones with your staff at all and your staff really feels that they're underpaid or they really frustrated. Job, or they really annoyed about their colleague and they just not got an opportunity to talk about it. Then what could be?
Just like you have a little chat about it and it takes 10 minutes and say okay. This is much problem. Don't worry. We'll sort it out over a quarter could become like I'm going to quit my job. If that person says that one thing once more with these things can really buckle up. So they just give that nice opportunity for someone to just really continually unload their thoughts. And you can unpack how they're thinking going back to the manager.
Productivity thing. Like, you've got loads of opportunities to help make decisions, too. To gather information to manage their thinking about. How are you working on that problem? So yeah, so I think probably going to store that data in radius and like, I think that probably a good way in order to get like, good cache, hit Ray and you so yeah, the right way. Do you know, maybe what about this thing?
And it gives you a chance to nudge every decision that they're making as well and have a lot more impact. So you measure about safe space. That sometimes is a bit tricky. Like how do you actually cultivate a safe space during the one-on-one? Like for example, you mention about somebody who is Not happy about the situation or somebody and maybe they express that as a manager. You listen to that, how to build that kind of safe space.
Because of course, you want to take action about it, right? You don't want to just be a channel where they just say something, but nothing is being done. So, what's the balance here? How do you create this safe
space? So mean perhaps cool stuff is like making sure you have anyone to ones in front room or if your home just in a zoom meeting somewhere, where you can't be heard and fundamentally, both of you can talk in confidence with each other, but one of the things I talk about in the A book is this exercise called Contracting which is quite useful. So usually you do it. When you first start managing somebody it gives you just a bunch of questions to work through as manager.
But also as a direct report to really talk about what does meeting up once a week me? Well, what sort of thing is you're going to talk about. I want things might need help with, where might there. Be some frictions between both
of you and your personalities. But then also what's important is you can say what's the confidentiality of what we talked about and just being able to do that explicitly is really powerful because if you've Christy told each other, but hey, I everything we talked about in our meetings, totally
confidential. And even if you come in here one day and you're so angry about the way that your colleague constantly does this thing, honestly, just vent, it's cool that you can vent about it. I'm not going to say anything. It's safe. It's all cool. Being able to establish those boundaries ahead of time, just makes the whole thing much better. And I think it just builds that report.
A manager can also do a report that, okay, every week when we meet you always like bring up this particular thing that's happening. There's this really broken process. That's just be infuriating. You Or like you keep saying that the CI builds are slow, but you know, that you can't do that much about it. Should we actually do something here?
Like, how can I help you? And I think he's just always putting yourself forward as I will help you and support you in whatever you're trying to do. Just let me know how I can do that. So, another challenge as a manager, right? If let's say, we are doing this one on one very, very frequently. You will eat up a lot of your time. More meetings meeting, everybody either like 30 minutes 1 hour, right? If I say you reach 20 people under you, that's like 20 hours gone.
Just having this one on one from the week. So is there any limit on how many a manager should have this one-on-one? Yeah, I mean, I guess I could reflect it and say I think there's a limit to how many people you can have reporting to you and still be effective. I've heard people who've got like 50 direct reports. It's like really do you actually spend good time with each of those 50 people. How many hours a day do you work? So I've always said somewhere between it depends on the person.
I usually kept it as if I had to do, everyone's 12 ones in one day, ideally one. Day of the week would be what it would take up and it can depend on maybe you manage someone you only need like half an hour a week with them. Or maybe you only speak once every two weeks. But really I still tried to stick to that weekly hourly cones, even if you don't use the time and that's cool.
If you don't use the time but really sticking to managing seven people ish plus or minus 1 or 2 is about the limit. I think my experience because anymore I don't think you can do a good enough job of working with each of those people and also maintain the balance of taking part of doing the work with your And being a part of the wider department, so if you've got 20 people reporting to you, maybe talk to your manager and say hey, we really promote somebody like another
manager. So also don't forget you are having one-on-ones with your subordinates, but you also should have a one-on-one with your own manager. It's like chain on the top. You have more and more one-on-ones down to the bottom. You mentioned a lot of things about individuals. So now let's go to the bigger
picture. There are two things that I notice you say is hard in the book which are projects and The humans, I know like these things might sound easy to figure out their heart, but why specifically working with projects and humans are hard? Like, maybe you can tell some of the things that you find. Interesting. We are sure some of these churches kind of just have a whole bunch of different so experiences and also just even like, behaviors or various things.
You see all the time. We all know that estimating software is hard. I how long is it going to take to do this? You only really knowing when it's done. I tell you when it's done because then I'll just tell you how long it took, but that's not good enough. Doing software project. Well is difficult and you could write an entire book on that.
But I just wanted to sort of highlight some of the techniques really that as a manager, you could use to help you with your prioritization to help you work better with your product owner, product manager to talk about. Also the way in which people are motivated, you know, the kind of like, don't use the whip to get people to do things. Don't be like, crunch time. Let's get stuff done. You need to motivate people with
the car, instead. Where do people think about their autonomy and Mastery and purpose and so on. How can you really Give people the skills to get interested in what they're doing to really want to achieve. And then the work is a side effect, really those two parts are different scenarios that I think people will experience.
And one of the ones in the humans are B. Is this Mount stupid concept, which is article on my website that gets the most hits I think because it's the first hit in Google from that stupid, but it's just this phenomena of a combination of impostor syndrome, which I think many people experience. So you have these wonderfully, talented people but because either because I knew we had, they're doing some the first time they're not vocal enough.
They don't speak up enough because they feel like an impostor and then almost the inverse of that problem as well, which is the very senior people who are nowhere near the actual day-to-day getting things done. Think they know everything and this is horrible combination of these two things. At the same time. That means it's just, everything always goes. Well, you've got it, the executive who ends up putting the deadline on a project.
Even though is the engineers, you should come up with a deadline because they do it, but it's really unpacking a lot of These scenarios in like motivation of people, common themes, and fallacies in projects and just trying to give the person reading the book. Like these are things, you'll notice, don't worry. This is normal.
And here are some ways that you can tackle, any good tips and tricks from all your career experience so far on, what maybe is framework strategies that you can use to manage project? Well, is it like the a gel thing or is there any other thing? The best advice I can give is, it depends? I mean, that's the answer to any complicated question is, it depends? I mean, I've Seen what in what ways he was abused scrum and it's what fine, but they've also use scrum and it's worked terribly.
I've seen people use canva brilliantly.
I've seen the music terribly. I've seen people who literally do know planning at all and do amazing work and those that do know planning at all when you terrible work, so there's no answer to this but really where it comes from it's just like understanding people understanding the type of work and then just trying to pick some way of getting things done, the fits that particular projects and that particular people But I think as soon as you start to Force One Way,
everything it starts to break but I mean, I can see these tendencies in any team any company's first of all, I don't know why they seem to like buying like Enterprise project management tools from the whole company. Everyone is just using that. Is that such a good idea or is it better to have the team actually decide what tools they want to use the last year is beneficial, but you can also sometimes see why people might want, everyone's work the same way. Let's consider this.
Like your See and you're like, okay, so I want to really understand what's going on in the whole software part of the business. So what if everyone uses Euro and everyone does two-week Sprints and everyone reports in the same way, then surely that means that someone could write some wizard, your SQL thing, but every two weeks would deliver this amazing dashboard of the bundles of every team and I what was achieved and then we can roll that all into the release list. I get that.
But does that ever work? I don't know and again, it depends. And I can see why people do it. And sometimes people spend money on tools when actually, what they should be spending time with his working, with the people themselves to say, how can we work better? It's very interesting that you say that because a lot of manager, probably. I mean, I don't know if maybe the traditional manager mindset is like they want
predictability. The reason why they want all these analytics dashboards and things like that, if they want to be able to predict, which I think, again, coming back to software industry. It's sometimes difficult to predict part of this also is like you mentioned in the book. Letting go of control, right? Like probably you'd predict so much things will probably happen in the right way anyway in the end. So how can a manager?
Let go of control? This is I think one tough part, especially if you are still accountable for what people are producing, you know, there's a problem. With the German thing that always works is how do I deliver
value quickly? If you're able to coach all of your staff, all of your team's to be like, whatever problem you're working on as long as you're thinking about, what's the highest impact thing that you can do in a short space of time, the doesn't obviously create like, A huge mountain of technical debt and horribleness as well. That's a general good indication of where you should be going and if you can release frequently, that's great. That's like the agile thing at a super high level cool.
But the letting go of control thing is interesting. I didn't use to have to worry about it so much when I was managing one team, but as soon as I started managing multiple team, so I was managing managers, you get this strange feeling that, Hangar s, if there's 20 people reporting up into me in some way. How do we even know what's going on? And you're like a mime. To know what's going on. Well, maybe and am I doing a good job. I don't know.
This starts to get really difficult and then you think, okay. Well, I what is this mean? How does like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company? Feel when they've got 10,000 staff? And they don't know what any of them are really doing and it's like yeah, this is weird. So it's kind of building on that delegation thing of if you're able to really accurately Define what it is that you're accountable for.
Then you've got a framework for delegating the responsibility for all of the different parts, the different people and then you You can feel comfortable with it. As long as you're delegating. Well, some people who are doing a good job. Then you can feel comfortable with letting go of all the control of what's Happening you instead. Just have to set really clear expectations for this is what it means to do a good job.
And this is how we want to work together and go and then you can just manage your productivity things, nudging, people making decisions gathering information and just being comfortable that it's okay to not have to know exactly what's going on. And then what's really nice actually, is that the more that Delegate way, not only does that allow people to grow more, you then free up more of your own time to do stuff.
That's even more impactful and my role, for example, I worked really closely with the CTO in sort of department-wide strategy stuff. So it's like, look, if all my stuff taken care of by my team's. Then, can I help make our performance review, process better? Can I make our process better? Can, I spend time getting better benchmarks on pay, so that we can make sure that we're paying people fairly. Like, that's where you can then turn your attention to.
It's like you free up time to do stuff. That's really impact. But yeah, for me personally, those things are really, really one of the blind spot of a manager, especially coming from an individual contributor, especially as an engineer, where you probably have a good input and the good output and in between you kind of know like where things go wrong or go, right? So as a manager sometimes we don't know what's a good input.
What's a good output? So it's really tricky and difficult especially coming from Individual contributor and the letting go here is like okay accountable for what people are producing so I think I see mindset here is really, really tough. Any tips on how these ICS can learn or can read or whatever that is to start having this? Let go mindset here. I used to do with just being
really clear. What a success is, whatever it is that people are working on, but they're not getting so caught up on how people get their. Everyone works in different way if you like super controlling and like right, you know, so we need to build this API and then as soon as people start working on, so no like you need to extract your controllers, in your repository, is your middle way. No, no, this way you need to let go of that. It's like we need to do this API
and it needs to work this way. Work it out. Let's go and do it. Let's just get on with it. See what happens because people will take their own path to the outcomes as long as you decided, what the outcome is, and is clear and how to measure it, then just let people get their their own way. And that's actually a way better thing because actually you learn more you find that some of your team do something in a completely different way than
you expect. Wow. That's way better than how I would have done it. This is great. Nothing goes really positive. And as I said, it just reduces your own. Anxiety over control and it allows you to spend more time on impactful stuff as well. So what kind of balance do you have personally on spending time on the day-to-day stuff as a stinking, the things that you can improve, like what you mentioned? Improving calm improving, how you hire people, what kind of balance for a manager?
They should spend their time. I would say, what works for me. I can't say what works for everybody. But usually if I back together, once ones, with my direct reports, it's about day. I don't actually do them all in one day because I think I'd probably pass out if I I do them all back to back. There's our one day, a week is spent a month. Once I say, maybe half a day to three quarters of a day. A week is on various kind of
like group meetings. Like, the rmd leadership group that meat is like an engineering leadership group, and various kind of actions of things. Come out of that. I try and block out like at least two days worth of time in my calendar, for doing stuff and that can change from week to week. If it's the end of the year, you're writing performance reviews. It could be that you're reviewing pull requests. It could be that, you're writing some documents up and designing.
I knew it could be that you're writing up something as you say, you do Campo en crisis and so on. So I try and have two days a week that I have for that and then the rest of it, I try and keep free. And then it's just kind of flex time for. Okay. Well, I can work with people closely on something. I can ask some questions.
I also try and once a month meet with some of my peers just have a. Once one of my peers and also just some other people in other parts of the business that I know, provide really interesting information. We can do that in both ways. One of my colleagues, heads up all of the measurement of all of our naturalism product metrics and business. So he has an amazing view on revenue and churn. And it's like, what if I meet once a month this guy he's talking about what's going on
was like, wow, that's great. I really understand all these Frontline problems with the business and how we selling it. So, yeah, it's a mixture of those things. So, another classic thing for individuals to think about going to this managerial role, right? There's this startup forces Enterprise and there are so many startups these days. There are so many also, a big Enterprise, some startups do turn up into a big Enterprise as well.
So, how should someone Actually way the dead decision whether to join as a manager in a start-up or to join as a manager and the price. That's a really good question. Yes, again, from my experience working in a larger Enterprise is a great way of hopefully, it's a good Enterprise. Having a whole bunch of support around you from the start. So if you join us and I see big tech company, you're probably have established career tracks. You're probably have a good
manager already. You'll be on that team. You'll have good colleagues. There's a whole lot of processes and things that have already. Even works out and hopefully they're good. Where if you just want to learn and also get compensated. Well because if you join a big company, usually they pay higher that starts to, it's a good
place to learn the ropes. However, there are downsides, if you join a very large company, then sometimes progression is difficult, especially, if you want to become a manager and go down the management track because you're one of many, many people. And if it's a large company
depends, how quick it's growing. Maybe the opportunities don't come up too much, but then if you are for taking a bit more risk and maybe the upside of that risk is Foster personal development, then it starts up. Could be really good. So, that's where I think I was fortunate. I joined the startup. It was very little people, but then as the funding rounds came in and we hired lots of people, suddenly, it was like, okay, we need teams. We need lots of teams. We need managers, those teams.
We need managers and managers. And like suddenly all of these career progression things where I never done them before, but we were kind of figuring out as we went along. So I got the opportunity to try these things for the first time. If I was probably applying for that job at a larger Enterprise said, oh, yeah. I want to do director of engineering. Cheering and I like, well, you've only got like a couple of years experience as an AM. We could just hire a more experienced director, from
somewhere else. You have a better chance of experiencing those things for the first time, it starts on. So I didn't bother and question. As a manager is that not every manager is successful on everything they do, right? Sometimes they will find failures a project failures people quitting on them. Good, great people quitting on them, maybe not to say that they are doing bad stuff, but it's just happened. Like the good people have better opportunities. So, how would you advise these
managers on handling failure? What kind of mindset that should bring in order to, you know, overcome those failures? Yeah, firstly, I never take it personally. It's hard, especially if you care a lot about your work and you're really invested in your work, especially if you've got a really good person on your team. They leave, you can't help but take it personally, might just be that they want to do
something different. Maybe their partner is got a job somewhere else, and they're going to move. So many reasons why someone might leave is rarely ever about you. So it's rolling in that kind of letting go of feeling personally, responsible for everything stuff happens and you just have to Deal with it really if you just always use every opportunity to learn something. So if a project is a complete disaster that although like three to four things that you now know that if you did it,
again would never happen. Most probably and then bring those into the next project, if somebody is left particular reason, is there something that you can learn from their departure that can make it better for everybody else. Is it because they were really frustrated about their pay for a year or two years and they never talked about it. Well, okay, that's a shame that happened. But next time with all of your existing. Of talk about the time, ask them.
What do they want to own in? The future? Was the routes for them to get there? Make sure that all the tasks frustrations and failures are things that you can roll into improvements to the Future, for sure. So James, thanks for spending your time. So I have one last question which I normally ask for all my guests. Would you like to share the tree technical leadership wisdom from all your experience, your career for us to learn from you can
try. So I thought about this when you asked me before and three, I came up with the first one and I think is especially true. Ooh, for management is the many people experience a gap between their own personality and then their work personality. So, like the personality of the manager or the leader. Like, I got to be this person.
I've got a pretend to be this person and that just causes you pain realizing that if you are able to get an engineering manager, or that's because you can do it. So, just be yourself. You don't have to pretend to be some manager person, or team leader person, just be you. That's the best thing you can do reduce the gap between your personalities because it's Always, that's the first bit of wisdom. This is the kind of
self-awareness thing. The second thing is, if you find yourself unable to justify something, then always questioning companies, people teams projects all contain many bad decisions rarely because people are being silly or rarely because they're doing a bad job. It's just all the sauce really complicated. So I think always questioned things that you don't understand or don't make sense.
And if you have any kind of bad smells, like if there's a decision that just seems a bit weird follow up. And find out. Why? If there's a piece of infrastructure, we've got some be distributed system like once a week. It goes down for half a second. Don't ignore that 12. That bad smell is probably something weird that you want to check out. So always kind of like question things and follow your nose. And then the last thing I think is even though software is really hard and people are
really hard fundamentally. Everything can always be solved by first principle was asking questions and Common Sense and working together. I don't care how hard something is. You can always draw a little box diagram, this Narrows the explains the process and It becomes more simpler that point and you're able to talk to people about it. So nothing is ever as complex as it seems. And there's always a way forward. Thank you so much for sharing
those wisdom. So games for people who would like to know or contact you further when I can find you. Sure. So on Twitter is Jason, ESS jst. Am I ER? I also run the engineering manager.com., So one word, the engineering manager, and on those links to pretty much everything. I try and write every couple of weeks and there's a whole bunch of stuff on there and looks the book. And so I do highly recommend your book.
So for people who either like they are engineering manager, now or aspiring to be an engineering manager, so please check out the book. I think it's really cool. I like it when I read it. It's really, really fun, and I can put myself in the shoes of the actor. The figure inside the book, which is really fun. So, thanks again, James for spending your time. It's really great, and I wish you good luck in your career.
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