8 Leading Others.md

Chapter 8: Leading Others

• Technical leadership:
  • Vision: Choosing valuable, feasible things to do and crafting an inspiring story about those goals.
  • QA: Making sure the team's code and practices are high quality.
  • Project management: Planing, tracking, and communication to divide work into coherent pieces, allocate the right resources, do the right things at the right times, and remember the loose ends.
  • Harmony: Fostering a collaborative environment where team members respect each other but also feel safe and valued as individuals.
  • Mentorship: Shepherding the growth of your team members as individuals.

Vision and Identity

• Engineers are driven by when they feel that they're contributing to something wonderful.
• To make your own roadmap => read, ask people their opinions, estimate impact, estimate cost, and tell the story that you're doing the project with the biggest bang for your team's buck.
• Tell engineers a story that makes them proud.
  • This is an opportunity that can change the company.
    • “Our goal is to drive the load time of the site from 1.5s at p95 to 750ms. This is a hard problem, but our team has the expertise, and if we do it, we can bring in over $50 million next year in improved conversion rates.”
  • This is an exstential thread, and your team are the saviors. If the team doesn't deliver, it may be disaster.
    • “At the rate the business is scaling, our main database is going to fall over in six months. This migration is going to be painful, but if we don’t do it, the company will not survive; we’re going to make scaling problems a thing of the past.”
  • This is the smartest, most careful team, the stewards whose expertise and diligence put everyone else on track.
    • “We are the stewards of production at this company. This is a tough and sometimes thankless job, but our diligence saves hours of downtime and millions of dollars.”
  • This is the team that gets things done.
    • “Our company’s business is driven by integrating smoothly with every customer installation. Today, we cover 85%, and our sales engineers sweat to cover the difference. Our goal is to bridge this gap, save tons of money on sales engineering, and unlock another order of magnitude of scaling.”

Team QA

• Leading by example => engineers emulate them.
• Give direct feedback => an opportunity for more nuance and detail.
• Sharing your principles in writing and in presentations => saving time.

Project Management

• Communication
  • Let engineers know the big picture => connect their work to others' and find mutual opportunities.
• Assigning Work
  • The ideal task for a given engineer is "what they've shown they can do, plus epsilon."

Harmony

• Always set a tone of positivity and optimism.
• Keep an eye on people => offer help if they're upset or stressed.

Mentorship

• Your Purpose As a Mentor
  • Core components as a mentor:
    • Teching => sharing practices and insights from your greater experience.
    • Support and comfort => a great relief in stressful times.
    • Evaluation => assessing strengths and weaknesses.
    • Tactical problem-solving => navigate speciifc situations that arise in their day-to-day work.
    • Goal setting => clarify actionable, valuable goals.
  • Two critical goals:
    • Building trust => shared context, openness, supportive environment.
    • Listening and learning => figuring out where you're going wrong and how you can do better.
• A Model of Your Mentee
  • Goals
    • Strong and specific desires
      • masterign a specific technology
      • getting a promotion
      • becoming a manager
      • executing a transition to product management
    • up and to the right => bigger impact, more complex problems, more autonomy, better quality, better communication, better project management.
  • A Vector of Skills
    • Coding: Clarity, testing, documentation, and discipline in scope of differences.
    • Project management: Identifying dependencies, updating stakeholders, and tracking tasks.
    • Communication: Clear emails and engaging presentations.
    • Personal organization and time managament: Not dropping balls but prioritizing effectively.
    • Architecture: The macroscopic design of systems.
    • Leadership/mentorship: At a level appropriate to their position.
    • Emotional skills: Confidence, stress management, and work-life balance.
  • Tools for Getting Organized
    • Stay organized with a shared doc, try to align on goals, and ask good questions.
    • Agenda Doc
      • => doc topics and key takeaways => stay organized and avoid getting overwhelmed.
    • Goal Setting
      • => thinking about long-term plans.
      • => set a calendar reminder to have this dicussion quarterly.
  • Tools for Getting the Most from 1:1s
    • The Top Two Problems
      • Discussing the two most pressing problems => technology, interpersonal issues, organization issues, project management.
    • Probing Questions
    • Upward Feedback
    • Chitchat
    • Answer with a Question
  • Tools for Deep Dives
    • Exercises
      • e.g., reviewing recent work, simulating a task, or producing a real product.
    • Book Club
      • suggest some reading material, then discuss.
    • Reviews and Postmortems
      • what went right, what went wrong, what you'd do differently.
  • Putting the Pieces Together
    • Goal setting once per quarter => set a calendar reminder.
    • Subject matter "units" => aim to identify a theme at least once a quarter.
    • A default of discussing tactical issues.
    • A liberal attitude toward diversions that arise along the way.
    • Transparency about your process => active toward planning and discussion.
    • Time thinking about your mentee on your own => assessment.
    • Regular replanning

Onboarding Engineers

• One-page document => links to key wikis and dashboards or a list of owners for key areas they may need to work in.
• One-hour onboarding meeting.
  • The team's mission.
  • An overview of the team's architecture on a white board, with pictures taken at the end for posterity.
  • A discussion of the major projects going on in the team.
  • A discussion of any key principles, values, or practices on the team and any special gotchas.
  • A review of your larger organization, including an overview of the key engineers and managers in the organization and their portfolio.
  • A Q&A.

Interns

• Internships => one project, assigned a fairly junior engineer as intern manager, far away from the team's critical path.
  • They don't know anything.
  • They aren't going to tell you when they're off track.
• Proactive mentoring and monitoring are the key to managing interns.
  • e.g., an early design review, a full design review, a prototype review, and projected completion.