“This goes back to the idea that the best relationships are peer relationships. If there’s someone above you, that’s someone to learn from. If you’re not learning from them and improving, nobody should be above you. If there’s somebody below you, it’s because you’re teaching them and enabling them. If you’re not doing that, then get a robot; you don’t need a human below you.” — Naval Ravikant
Looking back over the last few years of my career leading Engineering teams, a few activities really gave me energy — even if sometimes they got me physically and mentally exhausted. One of those activities was running staff meetings with my direct reports. Done well, it’s something I find extremely useful for anyone managing managers and a cornerstone of my personal leadership style.
I found myself reflecting on why these meetings are so important — and how to improve on them for my next gig. There are dozens of reasons why these were good to have, but three aspects stand out in my mind:
Making a team out of a group of individuals. It’s easy to get engrossed in the day to day of running our teams. In doing so, we tend to forget to look at and learn from our peers. Different managers can and do have different objectives for their teams, but at the end of the day everyone is building the one company. By baking awareness of each other’s work and challenges into the weekly schedule, we stand a better chance of collaborating effectively, as a team, towards helping the company win.
Build and maintain connective tissue. Middle management is critical to ensure that those on the front lines have the conditions to do a great job. A big part of that is shared context: they need quality information to make great decisions as independently as possible, and they need to understand how their work contributes to the mission. When I’m leading the Engineering organization, I try to be mindful of this and act as connective tissue myself between the Leadership Team and my direct reports. The clearer the context and company strategy, and the better it flows up and down the org, the better off everyone will be.
Create a support group. I have said this multiple times and I’ll keep repeating it: building companies is extremely hard. Engineering Managers in particular tend to have ambiguous and ill-defined roles, and few of them have the years of experience affording them the confidence they need. A psychologically safe environment lets everyone share their hardships, and get help from peers on cracking that tough nut that’s been eluding them for a while. I remember last year being completely exhausted juggling two exec roles at once. My team propped me up and gave me that extra ounce of trust and energy that I needed to keep going.
Running effective staff meetings is a deep topic and I’ll probably write elsewhere about what worked for me in the past, how we structured them, etc. For now, I’ll cherish those weekly sessions where a lot of tough problems were discussed and critical decisions were made. Most importantly, we laughed a lot, poked fun at each other and deep down understood that none of what we were dealing with was life and death.
What’s your experience running staff meetings? What do you appreciate about them? Let me know in the comments. 😉
3 Articles
✍️ On Public Speaking
I'm still to meet someone who doesn't have any anxiety at all stepping on a stage to give a public talk. I can certainly relate, but I'm also super inspired by great speakers. This post by Subbu Allamaraju has some of the best, most concise advice I've ever come across. Preparation is important, but focused preparation is critical.
✍️ Turning Around An Underperforming Team
Almost every team is "underperforming" in some way but sometimes you have a particularly thorny case in your hands. In that situation, it's critical to have a simple framework to guide you, rooted in solid fundamentals. This great piece by Lenny Rachitsky (Product @ Airbnb for 7 years) is exactly that.
✍️ 4 Balanced Metrics for Tracking Agile Teams
Team self-awareness matters. Yet many teams don't realize it or get stuck on vanity metrics. Joel Bancroft-Connors shares four simple and easy-to-track metrics to avoid flying blind (hint: velocity is not one of them). I find them especially useful as a starting point for teams who are just getting into understanding their performance.
2 Podcasts
🎧 Transformational Moments: Learning from Jeff Weiner
I've written before about Jeff Weiner, and how he's been a big influence on me. Now that he officially passed the CEO torch at LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh get at the core of what really made Jeff consistently great and ultimately incredibly admired by those who worked with him.
🎧 Bethany McLean: Crafting a Narrative
I love to learn from podcast guests that theoretically are well outside my usual areas of interest. In this wide ranging conversation, investigative journalist Bethany McLean talks about how she writes stories, how the big corporate scandals in history stem more from intense rationalization than conscious ill intent, and a lot more. I particularly loved her take on how visionaries and fraudsters are, to a large extent, indistinguishable.
1 Book 📚
Earlier I wrote that Engineering Management is generally ambiguous and poorly understood. The phenomenon of fast growing startups, cross functional teams, agile, and all that jazz is pretty recent. Everyone is still trying to figure it out. There are no hard and fast rules, and every place is different.
A lot has been written on how to be great technically, but resources on how to be a great software engineering manager are still scarce.
Beyond the beautiful title, An Elegant Puzzle is a treatise in Engineering Management. The author, Will Larson, has built an impressive career from the early days of Digg, to Uber and Stripe, and is currently serving as the CTO of Calm. He’s also a prolific writer, with almost 600 high-quality blog posts.
Larson, therefore, has seen some complexity in his day — across people and technology. That makes this book a treasure trove of insight into the often disorienting mysteries of leading engineering teams. Starting with a deep dive into the anatomy of teams and organizational design, he then walks us through different tools and the possible approaches in using them. Finally, we dig into both building the culture, and also building careers.
The biggest gift of An Elegant Puzzle is seeing engineering management through the lens of systems thinking. Despite living and working inside very complex systems, we tend to think in terms of cause and effect — this happened because of that. Systems thinking teaches us to think broadly, striving to understand second- and third-degree consequences of events on the broader system, as well as our role in them. Often, big changes seem to appear out of nowhere, but they’re almost always the result of a slow accumulation of small changes.
To illustrate, one example in the book is mapping out a system diagram for developer productivity, from code to production. We may be tempted to optimise our deployment process because… we can and think we should. But by applying systems thinking, we can map out the system as whole and perhaps realise the bottleneck is in the code review. In that case, investing in improving our deployments will have little impact on the overall system outcomes.
An Elegant Puzzle is definitely a must-read for any engineering leader. And I would even recommend it to engineers for better understanding the challenges their managers face. Together with Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path, I suspect it will remain a reference for years to come.
🙌🏽 Thank you for reading! Enjoyed this week’s edition? Have feedback on how I can make this more valuable to you? I’d love to hear from you — my DMs are open on Twitter or just write a comment below.
👉 You can follow me on Twitter @prla