An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Organizations
2.1 Sizing teams
2.2 Staying on the path to high-performing teams
2.2.1 Four states of a team
2.2.2 System fixes and tactical support
2.2.3 Consolidate your efforts
2.2.4 Durable excellence
2.3 A case against top-down global optimization
2.3.1 Team first
2.3.2 Fixed costs
2.3.3 Slack
2.3.4 Shift scope; rotate
2.4 Productivity in the age of hypergrowth
2.4.1 More engineers, more problems
2.4.2 Systems survive one magnitude of growth
2.4.3 Ways to manage entropy
2.4.4 Closing thoughts
2.5 Where to stash your organizational risk?
2.6 Succession planning
2.6.1 What do you do?
2.6.2 Close the gaps
3 Tools
3.1 Introduction to systems thinking
3.1.1 Stocks and flows
3.1.2 Developer velocity
3.1.3 Model away
3.2 Product management: exploration, selection, validation
3.2.1 Problem discovery
3.2.2 Problem selection
3.2.3 Solution validation
3.3 Visions and strategies
3.3.1 Strategies and visions
3.3.2 Strategy
3.3.3 Vision
3.4 Metrics and baselines
3.5 Guiding broad organizational change with metrics
3.6 Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt
3.6.1 Why migrations matter
3.6.2 Running good migrations
3.7 Running an engineering reorg
3.7.1 Is a reorg the right tool?
3.7.2 Project head count a year out
3.7.3 Manager-to-engineer ratio
3.7.4 Defining teams and groups
3.7.5 Staffing the teams and groups
3.7.6 Commit to moving forward
3.7.7 Roll out the change
3.8 Identify your controls
3.9 Career narratives
3.9.1 Artificial competition
3.9.2 Translating goals
3.10 The briefest of media trainings
3.11 Model, document, and share
3.11.1 How it works
3.11.2 Where it works
3.12 Scaling consistency: designing centralized decision-making groups
3.12.1 Positive and negative freedoms
3.12.2 Group design
3.12.3 Failure modes
3.13 Presenting to senior leadership
3.14 Time management
3.15 Communities of learning
4 Approaches
4.1 Work the policy, not the exceptions
4.1.1 Good policy is opinionated
4.1.2 Exception debt
4.1.3 Work the policy
4.2 Saying no
4.2.1 Constraints
4.2.2 Velocity
4.2.3 Priorities
4.2.4 Relationships
4.3 Your philosophy of management
4.3.1 An ethical profession
4.3.2 Strong relationships > any problem
4.3.3 People over process
4.3.4 Do the hard thing now
4.3.5 Your company, your team, yourself
4.3.6 Think for yourself
4.4 Managing in the growth plates
4.4.1 In the growth plates
4.4.2 Outside the growth plates
4.4.3 Aligning with values
4.5 Ways engineering managers get stuck
4.6 Partnering with your manager
4.7 Finding managerial scope
4.8 Setting organizational direction
4.8.1 Scarce feedback, vague direction
4.8.2 Mining for direction
4.9 Close out, solve, or delegate
5 Culture
5.1 Opportunity and membership
5.1.1 Opportunity
5.1.2 Membership
5.1.3 Keep going
5.2 Select project leads
5.3 Make your peers your first team
5.4 Consider the team you have for senior positions
5.5 Company culture and managing freedoms
5.6 Kill your heroes, stop doing it harder
5.6.1 The fall and rise of a hero
5.6.2 Kill the hero programmer
5.6.3 A long time coming, a long time going
5.6.4 Resetting broken systems
6 Careers
6.1 Roles over rocket ships, and why hypergrowth is a weak predictor of personal growth
6.1.1 Your new career narrative
6.1.2 Opportunities for growth
6.2 Running a humane interview process
6.2.1 Be kind
6.2.2 What role is this, anyway?
6.2.3 Finding signal
6.2.4 Be prepared
6.2.5 Deliberately express interest
6.2.6 Feedback loops
6.2.7 Optimize the funnel
6.3 Cold sourcing: hire someone you don’t know
6.3.1 Moving beyond your personal networks
6.3.2 Your first cold sourcing recipe
6.3.3 Is this high-leverage work?
6.4 Hiring funnel
6.4.1 Funnel fundamentals
6.4.2 Instrument and optimize
6.4.3 Extending the funnel
6.5 Performance management systems
6.5.1 Career ladders
6.5.2 Performance designations
6.5.3 Performance cycles
6.6 Career levels, designation momentum, level splits, etc.
6.7 Creating specialized roles, like SRE or TPMs
6.7.1 Challenges
6.7.2 Facilitating success
6.7.3 Advantages
6.7.4 What to do?
6.8 Designing an interview loop
7 Appendix
7.1 Tools for operating a growing organization
7.1.1 Line management
7.1.2 Middle management
7.1.3 Managing an organization
7.2 Books I’ve found very useful
7.3 Papers I’ve found very useful

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