The Engineering Manager

Expanding your influence

A quick quiz: do you remember the Andy Grove equation (which I harp on about so much) that expresses how a manager’s output should be measured? If not, then check back on our previous article. Even if you do remember, then let’s recap:

The output of a manager = the output of their team + the output of the organization under their influence.

It’s simple yet concise.

Most of the articles written so far on this blog concern themselves with how to improve the output of one’s team: through building effective relationships with direct reports and with one’s own line manager, and how to focus one’s time and conversations so that they benefit both parties equally. We’ve also touched upon how to exert influence on the rest of the department: by getting involved in hiring and being a role model for how you believe that the department should be. Yet, most of this focus has been on Engineering alone. The company itself is much wider than the department. How can you begin to expand your influence there? Should you?

The snow melts at the periphery

We work in organizations of varying sizes, from the very small (e.g. start-ups) through to multinational corporations with tens of thousands of employees. As a manager in the engine room, you have some idea of the general pulse of the business, as you are developing features that serve a business need, as guided by your product manager. You may also involve staff from other areas of the business in sprint demos and have a chance to engage with them there. Yet, this doesn’t really give the whole picture. The context of your work and conversations is likely bounded by the project that you are currently working on and the specific stakeholders who are keen on it getting built.

It’s very handy to begin to experience a more rounded picture of how the business is doing. A concept, also from Grove in another of his books, is that the snow melts at the periphery. What does this mean? Well, in the context of Only The Paranoid Survive, it is framed to portray that the employees on the periphery of the business – e.g. the salespeople going up against competing salespeople – see the real situation in the market with the products that you pitch much quicker than you do; you’re simply further away from the action. It follows that having good lines of communication with key periphery staff can make a business react quicker to market conditions. The larger the business, the larger the void between the periphery and the creative core. This means that smaller competitors have a speed advantage by default. This is exactly the subject of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.

So, as a manager who is performing well, how can you further increase your influence across the company? It’s time to build relationships with those who stand where the snow melts.

Some motivation

If you were to imagine a situation where you have regular contact with others in the business, then you have many opportunities to expand your influence, and thus increase your own output:

• You can experience their challenges firsthand and speed up or lobby improvements to the product, especially if you identify that there are quick wins (e.g. small UX changes, or features that require little engineering effort for a large amount of customer impact).
• You can build rapport with staff in other departments that can become influential stakeholders in your future projects.
• You can be party to strategic discussions as a stakeholder from Engineering, which again gives you a chance to offer your opinion and nudge decisions, feeding into the latter part of the equation at the beginning of this article.
• You can increase your profile in the company and be considered for new opportunities that can grow your career.
• And guess what, you can make some new friends. Who’d have thought it?

Introductions

There is no standard process for being introduced to the right people within the business. You’ll need to get creative here. When I began to do this, I had the benefit of being with the company through a period of extremely fast growth via venture capital, and a lot of the staff that I knew well personally when we were much smaller had been promoted to more influential positions, so I could increase my interactions with them. If you are new to a company and don’t have a clear network, then you can ask your peers or your line manager who they typically interact with and why.

When conversing with your peers, you can ask for a list of staff in other areas of the business that they have had a positive experience with, either informally, or through being stakeholders on their own projects. Also ask them who they think are the main decision-makers in other departments, and who they see as particularly influential and interesting.

When conversing with your own line manager, ask who their own personal network is outside the department and whether there are people within that network that you should be introduced to. Try and find a diverse set of individuals with differing interests. For example, my own network of contacts spreads over most departments and multiple geographic locations; it helps act as a sounding board where everyone’s interests are not necessarily aligned, often giving multiple sides to any particular discussion.

If you haven’t met these people yet, then you can always introduce yourself via email. That’s what I did. In fact, here’s an almost word-for-word representation of the email that I sent out. Depending on the kind of organization that you work for, you may want to get your own email checked over by anyone that you think is necessary first. Fortunately, I don’t work somewhere that makes me feel like I have to do that. Additionally, communication between Engineering and the rest of the business was a hot topic at the time that I sent this email, so I used that as an opener.

Hello,

I’m beginning a practice where I’ll be frequently checking in with others within the business, with the aim to extend another hand outwards from Engineering. If you’re receiving this, I’d love to know whether there is anything that I can help with or discuss.

Here’s a starter for ten to get the conversation flowing:

• Do you feel that there is anything we can do to improve our communication outside of the department, notably on what we’re planning, working on, and shipping?
• Is there anything pressing that you would like more information on, or any issues that you’d like to raise?
• What could we do better as a whole?
• Additionally, for those closer to the Engineering coalface, are there any projects or discussions that could use my input?

If you don’t reply I won’t be upset – I’ll just assume that everything is going wonderfully right now.

I had a great response from this, which opened up a number of longer dialogues. Some of these exchanges were simply things I couldn’t do anything about, however, I was able to make the right introductions between the right people: a great way of exercising my existing connections and expanding my own influence within other areas of the business.

Checking in regularly

Once you have a list of folks that you have created an initial rapport with, it’s up to you to decide how you would like to interact with them. There are options for the regularity and formality of your check-ins.

A formal way is to get in contact via email once a quarter, then follow up with all of the points that are raised. It helps to offer a leading question to get the conversation going, as demonstrated above. There may be a new product launch to discuss or an announcement of the upcoming roadmap. It’s easy to capture and distribute the information when using a medium such as an email.

However, it’s also extremely valuable to hear the softer side when interacting with your contacts. Informal meetings with those that are geographically closer, such as grabbing a coffee every month, can be a great way to inform each other, vent a bit, and learn something new. This information can feed into your own decisions and make them better informed.

Do it!

Give it a go: get in contact with those outside your immediate circle and see what happens. I think you’ll be surprised.

I’ll leave this post with an addendum: an equally important way of expanding your influence is to just do great work. Word will spread. But if you’re doing great work and working on your outreach, then you’ll be doing even better.

What is culture?

Admit it: we throw the word around way too much. Most companies claim great culture and want to work towards great culture. This is especially true in the yogurt industry. But what actually is it? If you close your eyes and imagine working at a company that has this great culture, what do you see? Is it massages, free drinks, and a laundry service, or is it a group of exceptionally talented people working intensely? Is it both? Is it both with Nerf guns?

When searching on Google to try and find a good definition of company culture, I was overwhelmed by the variety of different articles, and I appreciate the deep irony of producing yet another one.

Culture, in a sense, has parallels with meditation practice and the path to enlightenment. By bringing people into the company and pointing them at a compelling vision of what could be achieved, thousands of positive daily actions make culture emerge. You can’t purchase culture or be too heavy-handed in shaping it: doing so can have an inverse effect. If I was to throw a quote into the mix, I’d probably highlight Confucius, although his wording is a little bit mean. Believe it or not, that quote wasn’t coined by Bruce Lee, but his delivery was kinder.

Culture in technology companies

Since the late 1990’s, a variety of technology companies have had prominence in the press by being providers of reportedly exceptional places to work. If you did actually close your eyes two paragraphs ago and imagine a place with great culture, then it was likely that you incorporated elements of what you had seen or heard about the big tech companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook. On one hand, this is great: why wouldn’t people want to be catered for at work? Yet, some of the press has, for better or worse, portrayed this in a negative way, and the comments sections of these articles are stuffed full of snide remarks about spoiled workers with access to three meals a day and zany meditation pods.

It’s not all about perks, though. Culture is predominantly an externalization what is deemed important to the company. On the contrary to the provision of copious amounts of free stuff, early public exposure of Amazon’s culture showed how committed it was to passing savings on to the customer: employees would build their desks out of old pieces of wood such as doors. Zappos has made headlines countless times with their holacracy ethos; a bold statement that multiple layers of management is not cool.

If you have recently interviewed at a youthful technology company, then it’s likely upon visiting the office that you could have seen markers of how early movers like Google have moved the cultural norm forward: bright colors and fun interiors, table tennis tables, foosball, free soft drinks, and snacks. There’s more of that today. But don’t let this fool you.

Perks are not culture

Let’s get this straight: perks are definitely not culture. It is not complicated to ring-fence some money in a company budget and get a weekly supermarket shop delivered to fill the cupboards. It’s also straightforward to spend some cash on a foosball table to show that you’ve ticked the box. However, a company providing nice perks may still be extremely dysfunctional. In the same way that a couple who have unfathomable wealth can still separate, there are other, much more important, factors that make a company culture strong, and they are fostered from within.

Culture emerges from the consistent quality of the decisions and interactions of individuals, teams, and departments at the company. At the core of the culture is the vision of the senior management for what should be achieved: why does the company exist, and how is it going to serve its customers? What will be its ding in the universe? This defines the direction that the company is going in and should be exciting enough to pull staff through bad times: they know that hope is on the horizon and that they are making a real difference to the world.

Vision and purpose

A company with fantastic people but with no direction would be subject to luck when defining its reason for being, and in turn, in choosing which customers it needs to serve. It could be an interesting experiment, but a company should have a purpose under which its staff can unite. It defines the products that the engineering department should be building and ensures that they are what the salespeople at the periphery need in their armory to beat the competition. Regardless of size, there should be a vision: a start-up may want to use technology to disrupt a market that is in dire need of innovation, and a public company may want to dominate the market and provide the best return on investment for its shareholders. Both are equally valid and can be used as a point of reference for making decisions.

A detailed guide on how to create a vision for a company goes way beyond the scope of this article, and potentially this site: those wanting to become, or learn more about, being an engineering manager are (potentially) less likely to be defining the company vision (unless you’re a CTO). However, it is everyone’s duty to question upwards for clarity on where the company is going and why. The best visions are not primarily about making money. If the company does something truly interesting and innovative, it will make money by proxy; focusing entirely on making money can drive short-term, risk-averse thinking and stifle innovation.

With a vision defined, and therefore actions being clear and reasoned, culture emerges from interactions: those between those who work together within the company and those between the company and the outside world. As a manager, you need to make sure that you yourself perform your own interactions in congruence with the greater purpose.

Relationships within the company

Hundreds of individuals make thousands of small decisions and interactions that in turn define the direction that the company travels. Should I raise that issue to my manager? Should we build this feature or that feature? Should I give her two days off in lieu for all of the work that she put in at the weekend? Should I be direct and say that I think his behavior is inappropriate?

These decisions along the overall trajectory, especially those grounded in the way that staff support and challenge each other, make the company culture emerge. This is why Radical Candor resonated with me: each interaction between an individual, if both caring and challenging, promotes a healthy culture within a company where each employee pushes each other forwards in a supportive manner. This, in turn, drives a culture of open communication because of the inherent trust. Those who carry each other, care deeply and drive performance become an example of how that company operates, regardless of exactly what the company is building.

When individuals do not challenge each other enough, the resulting culture can cause a company to drift. Nobody feels accountable to deliver, output can wane and the company can become susceptible to increasing threat from competition. When individuals do not care enough about each other, toxic interactions ruin culture. When individuals don’t respect, support and push each other forward, then politics can rule: individuals try to mark territory and form protection around themselves, and can potentially oust others for their own self-gain. This isn’t harmonious with progress; it’s protectionist, and again, the energy spent on these activities is energy not spent succeeding for the benefit of all.

Relationships with the outside world

The culture created from the relationships between individuals is not bounded within the organizational structure of the company: it radiates outwards in any interactions that staff have with the outside world. These interactions can be completely informal, such as networking at an event or posting on Twitter, yet carry through to the formalities of sales pitches and trying to raise VC capital. If the company has an excellent culture, then it is self-evident in interactions with staff that work there. A company with a cut-throat internal culture may be more likely to have an aggressive demeanor in the marketplace, especially when pitching against competitors. More negativity is at stake for the individual if they lose. I’ve seen some particularly dirty sales tactics in my time: the worst being total and utter lies to get contracts signed. Often we’re not surprised when we discover which companies this behavior comes from because you can decipher the culture from their marketplace presence and actions.

In fact, thinking about the processes that need to occur for companies to have a strong culture, you can see how important it is to hire and train the right people. Those that have worked on developing themselves, in turn, develop each other, which develops the culture of the company as a whole. There are no shortcuts.

In summary

Culture is precious, and it emerges through daily interactions between individuals, socially and professionally. Everyone has a part in defining good culture; from senior management creating and broadcasting the vision, to individual managers and peers caring for each other and driving high performance, to the interface between the company and the outside world through those that work there. It cannot be bought or faked; the seed must be planted and it will grow with time. Think about the culture of your own company and how it came about. Who do you think is responsible for it? What could you do to make it better?