The Engineering Manager

How should I best make use of my time?

In the previous post, we looked at some techniques that I find useful for keeping all of my information under control. Certainly, for the new manager, striving for a situation where each day has structure and feels more regimented is a positive place to start. However, once that structure is in place, how should one engage in activities and conversations to best create a positive outcome for the business?

For this article, we’ll expand on 4 categories that were outlined in what I feel is the quintessential book on management: High Output Management by Andy Grove*. He uses these categories to frame the different types of interactions that happen in the workplace.

These are:

• Information gathering
• Decision making
• Nudging
• Being a role model

Information gathering

As you may have gathered (pun intended) from the previous articles, as a manager, the information base that you hold is critical. This is why I recommend having everything documented wherever possible: 1 to 1 notes, actions from meetings, a place to capture informal information, and so on. Your knowledge base is what you use to understand the many activities of the business and fundamentally what you base your decisions on. Information gathering feeds this knowledge base.

It is worth noting that information can be gathered in many different places other than formal interactions and meetings. For example, you could be having a conversation at the coffee machine with your colleague, and then she mentions that her team is building a new API. You realize that this is incredibly helpful for your own team, so you note it down. Weeks later, your Product Owner notifies the team that this particular feature arriving in another of the businesses’ products would be perfect for your own. You already know that an API was written, so you make the connection between the teams.

Keep adding more information to your knowledge base. Always. Keep as little in your head as possible. Tools such as Google Drive and Evernote make this so much easier than it was 10 years ago, and they’re all free. For me, the simple act of writing things down also commits them to my memory better than if I’d just made a mental note.

Decision making

This is one of the more obvious answers to the question “What does a manager do?” You can make decisions of all sizes. You could make a small decision as to grant a holiday request or not during a busy period of work, or you could make a large multi-million-pound decision as to whether to migrate the entire infrastructure into the cloud or keep it within your own data center.

Always take decision making seriously. It is easy to forget that there are many in the business who do not have the power to make decisions, so you must always give them your full attention and take responsibility for the ramifications of making said decisions. Every decision is an inflection point: should we hire Bob or Susan? Should we split the team into two teams? Should we refuse to begin estimating the work required for this project when the proposal for the product is so unclear? Decisions such as these may seem like they are small in that moment, but extrapolated over time and bringing in the cost of the different outcomes, they are actually big decisions. Treat them as such.

Nudging

The concept of nudging is influencing a decision by contributing your own viewpoint to the discussion. For example, you may be involved in a discussion about whether to build or buy some particular software, and you make it clear how you feel about the situation. You are not the decision maker, but you can influence the decision. Like decision making, nudging can occur for decisions of all sizes. You may put your viewpoint across about whether to book a meeting immediately or tomorrow, or equally state your case in a discussion as to whether to open an office in the UK or abroad.

Try to view your daily interactions through the lens of nudging, and you’ll soon see that there are ample opportunities to broaden your influence on the organization, thus increasing your output as a manager.

Being a role model

Being a good manager is about walking the walk as well as talking the talk. The best way to demonstrate to your staff and your peers is to lead by example. Give talks, get involved in day-to-day discussions and contribute technically if you have the time and inclination. Demonstrating the standards that you wish to see others perform to is the best way to create change: lead from the front. If you wish for your team to communicate better in person but you personally prefer to talk to them over email rather than face to face, then it’s unlikely that the situation is going to improve with the rapidity you desire.

You can also be a role model for your department by making connections outside of your typical influence sphere. If you are in Engineering, for example, you may have regular check-ins with influential staff in other areas of the business, such as commercial. These connections can give vital feedback, help you discuss ideas and issues, and identify stakeholders for future projects.

A day through a lens

Let’s have a look at a fairly typical day and see how we can categorize the interactions.

8:45: You sit down and prioritize your to-do list. You read your emails and unread Slack messages. Here you are information gathering.

9:00: You answer your emails. You contribute to various discussions with your viewpoint, which is nudging. You decide to make an offer to a candidate you interviewed yesterday. That’s decision making.

9:10: While in the kitchen and making a tea, you have a conversation with a colleague and learn what they’re working on. Information gathering. You share how your own team tackled a similar technical issue with a degree of success. You suggest taking a similar approach. Nudging.

10:00: You attend a meeting to review a number of CVs that have come in over the last few days. You choose which to invite to a first interview. Decision making. You suggest to the CTO that it is a good idea to open the position out to more junior candidates now that the local universities are a few months away from having large numbers of students graduate. Nudging.

11:00: You are in a 1 to 1 with a direct report. Lots of nudging but less decision making as ideally you want to steer them into making their own decisions. You learn a lot of things about what she has been working on this last week, and how the issues have overcome. Information gathering. You offer some opinions of how problems might be tackled. Nudging.

12:00: Lunch. You gather some food, rather than information, at this point. However, you do have a conversation with a colleague whilst eating about his experiences using Jenkinsfiles, and your team has moved across to using these recently. You give some advice about who to talk to. Nudging.

12:30: You catch a colleague in the breakout area who shipped some new functionality last week. You tell her that she did a brilliant job and that customers are really appreciative. You do this because you want your department to get better at delivering honest feedback. Being a role model.

13:00: You go through your emails and messages, both information gathering and nudging. You have a decision to make about whether some work should be put into your team’s backlog or not. You decide that you need to talk more in person, so you set up a meeting for later.

15:00: You have the meeting about the work. Your product owner describes how the work can make your own product more compelling, and you also know that you have the technical expertise to build it in such a way that other teams can use it too. You both decide to take the work on because contributing to other teams as well as your own is a good example to set. Being a role model.

16:30: You spend the last couple of hours in the quiet going through items on your to-do list. One of these items is preparing a technical talk on your latest project (being a role model). At the end of the day, you read your email (information gathering), review some pull requests (decision making) and take part in a discussion in the backend development channel about logging (nudging).

In summary

When viewed through the lens of the 4 key managerial activities, it is possible to see how even fairly mundane interactions can be transformed into an opportunity to exert your influence and improve the organization that you work in. Try it out. It’s fun!

* I’ve taken the liberty of using an affiliate link for the High Output Management book. If you happen to buy it, which I highly recommend you do, I make a few pennies that contribute to my coffee spend when writing these posts. Thank you kindly.

Why do I feel like I get nothing done?

A common concern that I hear when talking to new managers is the feeling that they’re getting nothing done. There are so many interactions and tasks in flight any given time that it is almost impossible to focus properly. This feeling is especially common when a manager has spent a portion of their career as a developer.

A lot has been written about how to keep developers productive. Often the essence of this writing is about arriving at and maintaining a state of flow for as long as possible, usually by arranging the day so that one can work uninterrupted. Doing this has tangible benefits: a developer’s productivity is greatly increased by being in this flow state. Complex algorithms and infrastructure require a mental map of the problem to be constructed before progress can be made. Context switching and interruptions can destroy this mental map, resulting in it needing to be recreated before continuing.

In addition to individual developers arranging their time so that they can maintain flow, common processes in businesses also support this: for example, Scrum practices the “sprint” concept, where interruptions are kept to a minimum so that the committed work can be delivered.

However, as a new manager, you may be finding that no such protection exists for you! Constant streams of emails, Slack messages, face to face interruptions and meetings can leave you feeling that you’ve achieved nothing concrete at the end of each day. If you have previously reviewed your daily output by something measurable such as lines of code written or bugs fixed, then it can feel like you’re spinning. How will you ever feel like you’re being productive?

Creating a process for yourself

Whereas you may have had your environment for performing at your optimum provided for you as a developer, you now need to create it for yourself as a manager. You need to have systems and processes that you can work within to make you feel like you are making progress amongst the chaos. I’ll share with you some things that work for me. I’ll caveat these techniques with the fact that we are all very different and these techniques may not all be right for you. However, reading them may prompt you to create an equivalent system, and I will be happy just the same.

For me, the key to feeling productive is keeping as much information as possible, not in my head. This way I can rest easy that I have everything I need to remember written down somewhere, so I can operate in the present moment with as much calm as I can muster. I can systematically work through my tasks in quiet periods and feel good about getting them done.

The tools of the trade

I use a handful of systems to organize myself. None are surprising, but I am fairly strict in how I gather and execute information.

The calendar

I live my day by my calendar. Every meeting has to be in there, or I’m not going. I let others know that if they want to request some time with me, they don’t really need to ask, they can just book some time in my calendar in the free spaces and I’ll be there. (Since this is the case, I block out an hour in there for lunch each day.) Typically, I ask others to book meetings with me rather than the other way around. Given that all of the information that tells me where I need to be is captured here, I can rest easy knowing that I don’t have to remember. I have 10-minute reminders before the next meeting on my laptop and on my phone. Other than that, I typically glance at it once in the morning to prepare my day. That preparation is done in…

The to-do list

I start each day with a prioritized to-do list, and I simply work through those tasks until they’re gone. I typically prioritize my list as the first thing that I do every morning when I get to the office. I don’t usually get interrupted at this time of the day, but if you’re in an organization where you’re unable to carve out space, then you could get into the office 10 minutes earlier or quickly do it at home before you leave. (Yes, I know that’s an antipattern.)

The technique I use in the morning is to look at my calendar first, see what preparation I need to do ahead of time, and then feed this preparation into my to-do list. I’m not here to convince you to use certain software, but I have learned to trust Asana, which is free for individual use.

The killer feature for me is the ability to add recurring to-do items by date. This allows me to automate more. For example, I have my 1 to 1s with my direct reports at the same time each week, so I simply have a recurring task in Asana to do my preparation on the days in question. These tasks then automatically appear in my to-do list when I open it on the morning of the meeting, greatly reducing my need to think about doing it explicitly. I just follow the lead that my past self provided to my present self.

Another excellent feature of Asana is hiding anything that isn’t marked for completion today. You can add a task, give it tomorrow’s date, then move it into the “Later” section which I always have collapsed away from view. It’ll pop back to the top automatically tomorrow morning. Less to see, less to think about.

The place to capture information

Your to-do list is the place for quiet contemplation and thinking, but you still need somewhere to capture information informally. Throwing this information into your calendar or to-do list can make them muddled and stressful places. Instead, it’s good to have somewhere to jot notes that you can carry around with you at any time. Then, later, in a quiet place, you can translate all of these notes into real to-do list items.

It doesn’t matter what tool you use, but it needs to be something that you always have access to, such as a notebook or mobile phone. I personally use Evernote on my phone to capture these messy thoughts, and then I delete the notes once I’ve translated them.

The email inbox

I tend to go through my emails in batches every few hours rather than having them open in front of me while I work; it’s too easy to get distracted my unread messages when they’re flashing on the screen. I work towards “inbox zero” by aggressively archiving everything that I’ve actioned or read. I can still find these messages later if I need them, either my looking at the archive or by using the search functionality. The key point is that I don’t want emails staring at me unless I need to do something with them; this keeps my mind calmer. Another important point is that I do not use my email inbox as a to-do list. If there is action to be taken then I move that to my to-do list and then I archive the email. Anything in my inbox either requires a response or is unread.

Wherever possible, I turn on email notifications for other pieces of messaging software, such as Slack. Doing this means I can treat my email as my primary hub of digital communication, and reduce the need for other systems to be kept open. Again, out of sight, out of mind.

An example of a day using this system

8.45: I sit down at my desk and I open Asana. Today already contains some recurring tasks, such as preparation for a weekly meeting and a 1 to 1. It also contains a daily reminder to go through my emails and check unread messages on Slack. I open my calendar and see what the day holds. I add a few items as a result. I then prioritize the list by dragging the tasks into a different order. If I can tackle all of this today, I’ll feel accomplished.

9.00: I start going through my emails. Some require no response and get archived; they are purely bulletins. Others that do are replied to and then archived. Anything requiring action beyond a response, e.g. having a conversation with someone, goes into my to-do list in Asana. Then I archive the email.

9.15-12.00: I go about my morning. I have a couple of meetings where I take short notes in Evernote on my phone. I also note down some reminders to myself for later in the same place. When I get back to my desk, I enter these as to-do list tasks and reprioritize them in Asana and begin working through actions.

12.45: I go through emails once more, archiving them as I go. I now have zero emails in my inbox.

13:00: Lunch.

13:50: I’m back at my desk for an hour before a weekly steering meeting that requires some preparation. This is the most important current task on my to-do list. I do that preparation now and then check my mail once more, answering a Slack direct message that I received an email notification for.

15.00: I’m in a meeting jotting down some rough notes in Evernote again.

16.00: I’m back at my desk and I translate these notes into tasks in Asana. These get labeled with tomorrow’s date, as they are not urgent. I put them into “Later” so that they disappear out of my sight until tomorrow morning. I then get my head down and get as many to do list items done as possible. I want to finish my list by the end of the day.

17.30: They’re all done apart from one, which was the lowest priority anyway. Oh well, I’ll kick that to tomorrow by setting the date on it and kicking it into “Later” on Asana. My list for today is empty. I close the tab.

17.45: One more pass on emails, archiving as I go, and I have an empty inbox. Home time!

In summary

Management often means exposure to chaos, and I find having a system to manage my communication contributes greatly to my daily happiness on the job. Although all of this process may seem overly regimented, it serves a higher purpose: it greatly helps my own focus, increases my trust that I see everything I need to, and contributes to the calmness of being under control and the satisfaction of making progress.

What system works for you?