Navigating the engineer to engineering manager transition

After reading about 'anti-fragility', I wrote a brief reflection on how relationships built on trust can get better through unavoidable volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors.

Engineering teams frequently duplicate each other's work. When there are no good reasons and it becomes a pain point, a commonly used pattern is building a platform team, to consolidate scattered capabilities.

While good software engineering is universal across disciplines, managing teams where you lack technical depth can be challenging. In this article I talk a bit about what has worked for me before.

Performance management is the means to plan, review, and reward people for their contributions. My take is that achieveng strong performance and results is more about enablement rather than control.

Finding alignment across orgs with different priorities can be hard. It's also an invaluable skill for senior leaders. Here are a few ways to get to a shared understanding, and frame disagreement clearly to ship your product.

Delegation is a cornerstone in leadership, and fundamental to scale yourself as a leader. I've tried to synthesise what I believe to be good delegation into three simple principles.

Similarly to software, teams can benefit from composition. A common org design pattern is defining a platform team and leveraging it through many application teams.

Capacity planning is an underemphasized subject in system design. Approaching it as part of the design process can be tremendously helpful. Here are some of the basics.

Engineering teams can grow in unexpected ways like systems do. Utilising experimentation concepts can help find the right design before you fully commit to longer-term change.

Assessing who is the best candidate for a role is not a straightforward task. Many parties play a role, and sometimes there are conflicting interests. Here's a take on how to make calibrations more consistent.

System Design interviews are my favourite interview type. Taking the technical part aside, such interviews have a large behavioural component. I wrote down some ideas on how to perform better in the more subjective bits.

Just before joining Facebook I read "The Making of a Manager", a book written by Julie Zhuo, who joined the team as an intern and grew into a VP Design role. I summarised my favourite parts of the book in this article.

A take on how to overcome problems engineering and product development teams face with stakeholders, goals and metrics through an universal, yet very powerful tool: language.

Three reflections I made after reading Kim Scott's "Radical Candor", which I consider to be one of the best books for managers and leaders, regardless of their craft and experience level.