The Engineering Manager

As you likely already know, a key part of our role as engineering managers and leaders is to invest in the long term growth of our teams. In a previous article, we looked at how you should expect to push the improvement of your organization over time: you all learn, gain skills, and level up, both individually and collectively. The resulting effect is a rising tide of organizational capability, or to borrow the name of a videogame mechanic, […]

I recently listened to Tim Ferris interviewing Claire Hughes Johnson, who, during her time at Stripe, wrote the excellent Scaling People: an actionable handbook for how to implement and run all of the administrative machinery that makes a company work. Check it out if you haven’t already. During the interview she referenced a quote that I’d forgotten about until then, that: “leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb“, which is typically attributed to Ronald Heifetz […]