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In my experience it is very difficult as the engineering manager to be the person with the final say. I've constantly been in situations where the leadership la
by SilverBirch 4y ago
In my experience it is very difficult as the engineering manager to be the person with the final say. I've constantly been in situations where the leadership ladder gets involved - someone on the business side comes to you and says "Hey I need X" you go "Great, I'll stick it in the backlog and we'll look at it on the next planning review", but that's not good enough, so now his boss is talking to me, before you know it the CEO is talking to the CTO and I'm twiddling my thumbs thinking "what the fuck is the point of any of our processes". In reality what is happening is that I've got multiple stakeholders on the business side and a fight between their priorities is being run through my planning process.
It's great if there's actually stuff you can turn down, but more often than not there really are business objectives that won't be met if you don't do the work. It's about choosing which of those business priorities gets harmed and that's generally not a call that's down to engineering.
- phkahler 4y ago>> It's great if there's actually stuff you can turn down, but more often than not there really are business objectives that won't be met if you don't do the work. Make it about resource planning. Two stories: One of my old managers was really good at getting himself in meetings where new business was being discussed. Even if he wasn't invited because people didn't think our team would need to be involved in a project. He could either convince them that we didn't have resources, we needed additional resources, or we could make due (maybe shuffle a bit) with what we had. Our team was almost never blindsided. I was running a small software team doing multiple embedded projects. We had more projects than people, but I made a chart breaking software for each project into common high level components (some were N/A of course, some were largely reusable) and showing percent complete on each one. In one meeting I simply showed that one of the smaller projects had zero percent completes across most components, and said it was going to stay that way for the foreseeable future due to all the other partial completes on higher priority products. That one got cancelled within days. I've come to appreciate an important part of management is to prevent these interruptions from reaching the people doing actual work, or to... you know "manage" the workload on behalf of the team.
- noobker 4y agoEngineers never want to admit that it amounts to politics. No amount of process will shield you from politics. It has to play out; priorities have to be decided. You can try to alienate yourself from it and watch it play out like the weather -- leaving yourself to prepare for the seasons. Or, you can suck it up, learn that humans are a critical (THE critical) component of the system. You have to learn how they work too.
- hinkley 4y agoIn addition to this, GP is wrestling with an open feedback cycle. As long as the executives are allowed to behave this way with no consequences, they become habituated to doing it. They need back pressure, in order to train themselves to look a little farther down the road (a month is not too much to ask) instead of constantly sabotaging the team every time a new thing they just thought of enters their heads.
- kcexn 4y agoExecutives typically do face consequences for making poor decisions. But the nature of their work means the outcome horizons are often way off in the future. C-suite leaders who perform poorly are eventually removed by the board and shareholders. In some organisations there is so much fear of making poor decisions, that leading never really happens. And instead of thriving in a competitive environment, the company slowly dies. A good middle manager is supposed to be able to mediate the strategic needs of the organisation as dictated by senior leadership, and the feelings of their team in a way that makes everybody happy. This is a very difficult skill.
- hinkley 4y agoNot finding out for years if at all is an open feedback cycle. In a world where we are doing fast feedback iterations, that’s two to three orders of magnitude off from the rest of the organization.
- foxbarrington 4y agoYou could try only accepting work from product managers. If someone wants something they need to convince a PM that it’s more important than whatever the PM currently has in development. Product is the “what” and engineering is the “how”
- carlivar 4y agoI agree, but that just changes the role and leaves the potential problem. The PM might be weak and not defending the existing backlog.
- SilverBirch 4y agoIn reality that's what happens - the advice in this twitter thread is about the PM role, not engineering manager. It's still ridiculous though, because you still end up having phone calls with the CTO and CEO to explain why some arsehole is complaining directly to them about their pet project not getting prioritized, including having to explain to them that there is a process, which they designed, for us to make these decisions and that phoning me up isn't a part of that process.
- pbronez 4y ago> In reality what is happening is that I've got multiple stakeholders on the business side and a fight between their priorities is being run through my planning process. Yes, because YOU are the scarce resource that the org needs to allocate. Critical for orgs to figure out smooth ways to identify these conflicts and resolve them with good decisions. Not easy though!
- ineptech 4y agoAgreed, where is the Product org in all this? Eng mgrs deciding which features to build is like a construction foreman deciding how many bedrooms.