From reactive to proactive Engineering Manager
Peter Drucker said in Effective Executive that manager’s time belongs to everyone. As Engineering Manager, you always prioritise enabling your team to be more productive. You act as a glue, filling the gaps that you see when others can’t see them yet. And that’s good - that’s what your...
Best relationship between product and engineering manager
If you are the Engineering Manager in the team and have Product Manager partner to pair with, you should consider yourself lucky! That’s the best situation you can be in if you are leading the team. Your partnership can have one of three results on your team: create a...
5 tips on running better 1:1s
One on one meetings (1:1s) are the most important meeting you can have with your direct reports. It’s really hard to do a good job in just one blog post describing how to run 1:1s. They are just a tool towards a goal much greater than just a meeting -...
Tips on building trust using retrospectives
Trust is the most foundational pillar of a high performing team. Your team members need to trust each other that they can be candid about their work, behaviours and outcomes. To build trust in the team, everyone needs to know that you all have the same intentions. Building trust takes...
Master the skill of managing up
There are a few critical skills that you need to master independently of your role or level. One of them is managing up. Especially if you are a manager - your face to face time is probably drastically limited with your boss. How to make the best of this limited...
Ownership explained for Engineers and Managers
Introduction Ability to take ownership is critical for the majority of careers. For me, as a manager, how people handle ownership and with what level of ambiguity is one of the clear distinctions between senior and junior positions. And to explain my understanding of ambiguity - it’s not only...
How to take over a team?
A few months ago I changed business area I work in at Intercom from Messenger and Platform to our Messages product. I started to manage one brand new and one existing and old team. Taking over such team is always a challenge. The cogs are spinning, everyone has formed opinions...
Continue. Stop. Start.
Start - Stop - Continue is a common way to drive your retrospectives or even your growth. At the end of the sprint, you think about what else we should do, what we should stop doing and what worked well and we should continue. At your performance review, you might...
How to set goals for engineers?
Growing your people is the most important task. As a manager, your most important responsibility is to grow your people constantly. First of all, because people wants to grow and build their careers. Everyone has a steeper and more gentle growth curves in their lives, you included. Therefore, remember...
Embrace the stretch
The world today is the most dynamic it has ever been. Information moves in milliseconds, social media platforms grow to hundreds of millions of users in years and fail in the same short period of time. Every day there is a global competitor appearing in your company’s business area that...