Engineering Manager's Handbook

Engineering Manager's Handbook

by Morgan Evans
Released September 2023
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781803235356

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Book description

A comprehensive guide to engineering management packed with tips, tricks, and techniques to drive results

Key Features

  • Acquire the necessary skills to manage engineers across various settings
  • Gain valuable insights into engineering leadership, people management, and driving organizational change
  • Discover pitfalls to avoid as a new engineering manager and understand their causation
  • Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description

Delightful and customer-centric digital products have become an expectation in the world of business. Engineering managers are uniquely positioned to impact the success of these products and the software systems that power them. Skillful managers guide their teams and companies to develop functional and maintainable systems.

This book helps you find your footing as an engineering manager, develop your leadership style, balance your time between engineering and managing, build successful engineering teams in different settings, and work within constraints without sacrificing technical standards or team empathy. You’ll learn practical techniques for establishing trust, developing beneficial habits, and creating a cohesive and high-performing engineering team. You’ll discover effective strategies to guide and contribute to your team’s efforts, facilitating productivity and collaboration.

By the end of this book, you’ll have the tools and knowledge necessary to thrive as an engineering manager. Whether you’re just starting out in your role or seeking to enhance your leadership capabilities, this handbook will empower you to make a lasting impact and drive success in your organization.

What you will learn

  • Pitfalls common to new managers and how to avoid them
  • Ways to establish trust and authority
  • Methods and tools for building world-class engineering teams
  • Behaviors to build and maintain a great reputation as a leader
  • Mechanisms to avoid costly missteps that end up requiring re-work
  • Strategies to increase employee retention on your team
  • Techniques to facilitate better product outcomes

Who this book is for

This book is a valuable resource for software engineers and developers transitioning into engineering management roles, equipping you with best practices and insights to navigate the new responsibilities effectively. Whether you're a newly promoted engineering manager or an experienced one seeking immediate answers to challenges, this comprehensive and up-to-date guide provides the support you need. Familiarity with the software development lifecycle, including concepts like version control, code review, and deployment, is required.

Table of contents

  1. Engineering Manager’s Handbook
  2. Contributors
  3. About the author
  4. About the reviewers
  5. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Get in touch
    5. Share Your Thoughts
    6. Download a free PDF copy of this book
  6. Part 1: The Case for Engineering Management
  7. Chapter 1: An Introduction to Engineering Management
    1. What are engineering managers responsible for?
      1. Maintaining a team capable of serving business needs
      2. Producing mechanisms to be self-sustaining and scalable
      3. Owning the reputation and impact of the team
    2. Introducing the four activities of engineering managers
    3. How do engineering managers spend their day?
      1. Start by asking
      2. Determine relative importance
      3. Fill in the gaps
      4. Be a translator
      5. A checklist for building your schedule
    4. How to prepare yourself for a career change
      1. Taking responsibility for the work product of others
      2. Saying goodbye to the rush of immediate results
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  8. Chapter 2: Engineering Leadership Styles
    1. What is an engineering leadership style?
    2. Leadership styles and their origins
      1. Natural origins
      2. Philosophical origins
      3. Management theory origins
    3. Engineering leadership style archetypes
      1. The commander and the servant
      2. The coach and the delegator
      3. The communicator and the co-creator
    4. What is the right leadership style for me?
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  9. Chapter 3: Common Failure Modes for New Engineering Managers
    1. Scenario 1—You don’t know what is really going on
    2. Scenario 2—You enable a narcissistic engineering culture
    3. Scenario 3—You overshare information with your team
    4. Scenario 4—You avoid making decisions
    5. Scenario 5—You expect everyone to be the same
    6. Scenario 6—You try to do everyone’s job
    7. Summary
    8. Further reading
  10. Part 2: Engineering
  11. Chapter 4: Leading Architecture
    1. Setting the stage for good architecture
      1. The environment
      2. The building blocks
      3. Gathering information
      4. Decision methodology
    2. Understanding the concerns of architecture
      1. The breadth of concerns in architecture
      2. Ownership and maintenance
      3. Depending on open source
      4. Naming things
    3. Managing the architecture process
      1. Building with a clear point of view
      2. When you are or are not the architect
      3. Emotion and other biases
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  12. Chapter 5: Project Planning and Delivery
    1. Why do we need project planning?
    2. Setting the stage for planning and delivery
      1. The environment
      2. Goal orientation
    3. Project planning
      1. Estimation
      2. Prioritization
      3. Assessing risks
      4. Roadmapping
      5. Forming the plan
    4. Project delivery
      1. Project kick-off
      2. Good user stories
      3. Removing friction
    5. Project problems and solutions
      1. You need to do more with less
      2. You have scope creep
    6. Summary
    7. Further reading
  13. Chapter 6: Supporting Production Systems
    1. Creating a commitment to reliability
      1. Ownership mindset
      2. Taking pride in the work
      3. Making a difference
    2. Raising awareness of reliability
      1. Metrics
      2. Communicating metrics actively
      3. Communicating metrics passively
    3. Reliability solutions
      1. Service objectives
      2. Support documentation
      3. Monitoring
      4. Alerting
      5. Service interruptions
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  14. Part 3: Managing
  15. Chapter 7: Working Cross-Functionally
    1. Demonstrating cross-functional leadership
    2. Understanding your partners
    3. Aligning with partners
      1. Adopting a same-team attitude
      2. Uniting team visions
      3. Providing clarity on roles
      4. Providing an aligned structure
    4. Building strong relationships
      1. Making yourself available
      2. Further understanding partners
      3. Helping partners understand you
      4. Seeking and providing feedback
    5. Difficult partnerships
      1. Make your manager aware
      2. Lean into the relationship
      3. Work more defensively
      4. If all else fails, escalate
    6. Summary
    7. Further reading
  16. Chapter 8: Communicating with Authority
    1. Principles of communication
      1. Setting expectations
      2. Assuming the best
      3. Saying no with care
      4. Having an audience perspective
      5. Maintaining authenticity
      6. Giving feedback with radical candor
    2. How to structure your communication
      1. Format
      2. Duration
      3. Depth
      4. Urgency
    3. Communicating with your engineering team
      1. One-on-one meetings
      2. Group communications
      3. Personal commitments
    4. Communicating with your leadership team
      1. Telling a story
      2. Conveying broader value
      3. Reducing uncertainty
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  17. Chapter 9: Assessing and Improving Team Performance
    1. The classic stages of a team
    2. Assessing engineering teams
      1. Common pitfalls of assessing teams
      2. Quantitative and qualitative measures
      3. What is your success definition?
      4. Assessing your team
    3. Introducing team emergent states
      1. Prioritizing desired team emergent states
      2. Fostering team emergent states
    4. Improving team performance
      1. Motivating your team
      2. Mentoring and coaching individuals on your team
      3. Improving remote teams
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  18. Chapter 10: Fostering Accountability
    1. Accountability and performance
    2. Building an accountable team culture
      1. Providing guidance
      2. Promoting ideal behaviors
      3. Accountability in practice
    3. Summary
    4. Further reading
  19. Chapter 11: Managing Risk
    1. Why should you manage risks?
    2. How do you manage risks?
      1. Identifying risks
      2. Prioritizing risks
      3. Communicating and responding to risks
    3. When and where should you manage risk?
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  20. Part 4: Transitioning
  21. Chapter 12: Resilient Leadership
    1. Introducing resilient teams
      1. Why do resilient teams matter?
      2. The engineering manager’s role in creating resilient teams
    2. Preparing your team for change
      1. Managing yourself
      2. Building a resilient culture
      3. Building resilient habits
    3. Preparing change for your team
      1. Change communication
      2. Change leadership
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  22. Chapter 13: Scaling Your Team
    1. Recruiting and hiring
      1. Recruiting mindset
      2. Writing the job profile
      3. Building your hiring team
      4. Interviewing practices
      5. Assessing candidates
      6. Marketing your team
    2. Onboarding new hires
      1. Leveraging automation
      2. Providing new-hire training
      3. Giving structured performance objectives
      4. How to handle a bad hire
    3. Managing a large team
      1. Short-term and long-term planning
      2. Delegating
      3. Focusing on people over projects
      4. Preparing to switch contexts
      5. Making yourself available
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  23. Chapter 14: Changing Priorities, Company Pivots, and Reorgs
    1. Prioritization
      1. Methods of prioritization
      2. Choosing a prioritization method
    2. Managing changes in priorities
      1. Prioritization context
      2. Prioritization dynamics
      3. Prioritization solutions
      4. User testing
    3. Managing changes in objectives or structures
      1. Understand the changes
      2. Understand your team
      3. Be a guide and an advocate
      4. Understand the directive
      5. Align the team and stakeholders
      6. Build alliances
      7. Build momentum
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  24. Part 5: Long-Term Strategies
  25. Chapter 15: Retaining Talent
    1. Why should you retain talent?
    2. What does it take to retain talent?
      1. Satisfaction with the work environment
      2. Satisfaction with growth and opportunities
      3. Satisfaction with their manager
      4. Satisfaction with the company leadership and direction
    3. Pitfalls of retaining talent
      1. Can turnover be too low?
      2. Can engineers be too satisfied?
    4. Summary
    5. Further reading
  26. Chapter 16: Team Design and More
    1. Introducing engineering team design
      1. Common team structures
      2. Team characteristics
      3. Conway’s law—part 2
    2. Lingering questions
      1. What are squads, chapters, guilds, and tribes?
      2. How many engineers can one person effectively manage?
      3. What long-term goals should I have for my team?
      4. What exactly is engineering culture?
      5. What should I do if I disagree with my manager?
    3. Summary
    4. Further reading
  27. Index
    1. Why subscribe?
  28. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Packt is searching for authors like you
    2. Download a free PDF copy of this book

Product information

  • Title: Engineering Manager's Handbook
  • Author(s): Morgan Evans
  • Release date: September 2023
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781803235356