What if it was easy?
EP001 - The first of many to come!
Welcome to the first official edition of the newsletter (following the introductory post), where we grow our leadership skills together! We’ll pick a cool name, fun logo, all that good stuff eventually, but if I try to perfect all of that we’d never start, and starting is the most important part. So with that, on to the content!
3 articles, 1 podcast, 2 productivity tips, 1 quote with 2 deep examples from my career. Enjoy!
📚 Reading This Week
Should you stay technical as an Engineering Manager by
I picked this article expecting to fight with it, but I was impressed! It was a very nuanced take on how technical you could be as an EM. It covers a great distinction between being technical and being hands on. I appreciate that the graph includes engineers and tech loads, and I would argue that simply progressing as an engineer typically lends your career to be less hands on, it’s how most engineers multiply their impact.
Personal Branding by
This article focuses on a concept that your personal brand (i.e., reputation) is critical for career success.
Your reputation stays with you, it is hard to build positively, and a negative stain can take a long time to fix. As a leader it is critical that you are aware of how others perceive you, and you do whatever you can to avoid tarnishing it. This can look like many things, such as not taking on a second team to manage until you truly know your first team can run well with less supervision. If you run the second team and your first one falls into disarray, it will create the perception that you’re not ready for 2nd level management, but also that you are not yet pragmatic enough to grow safely, damaging your trust. You're now further behind than before you took on that team.
I loved the examples of how Gregor’s beliefs help build his personal brand, and I think this is an exercise I would try. There is a lot to expand on here, especially with regard to managing up and stakeholder management, but it’s a good introduction to the concept of your personal brand.
From James Clear “Who knows you is more important than who you know. Build a brand.”
How to Define Your Goals for 2024 as an Engineering Manager by Leonard Stellbrink
A fantastic article by a fellow Yelp Engineering Manager Leon! He covers different types of goals you might consider as an EM such as “People Goals”, “Technical Goals”, and “Product Goals”. Product Goals was interesting for me in particular because my team doesn’t have a product manager, and we are pretty removed from product directly. We build a Design System that is used by other product teams, so hearing how those EMs might work with their product manager was insightful and an area I want to grow more!
🎧 Listening This Week
Level-up Engineering: Behind the Scenes of a Successful Mentoring Program - Mentoring Tips for Tech Leaders [57 minutes] [blog post]
In this episode from Level-Up Engineering, we hear the story of how Magada Miu, Senior Engineering Manager at Adobe, built up a Mentoring Program from scratch and the challenges she and her team experienced along the way. Lots of useful information on how to be a good mentor, the value you’ll get from mentoring (it’s not just beneficial for the mentee, it’s a two way street!), and how to find a good fit between mentor and mentee. I really appreciated the emphasis that mentoring is beneficial for the mentor. This is something I encourage with my engineers to help them understand that mentoring is a great way to grow yourself. It also feels amazing to help someone grow, it’s the main reason I became an engineering manager. Worth a listen!
🧠 Productivity Tip of the Week
Here is a two for one this week to celebrate the first post, which is my second first post because the intro post doesn’t count: Two different Two Minute Rules.
The first is defined in Atomic Habits by James Clear. He discusses a two minute rule that states all new habits should take two minutes to begin. Want a reading habit? Read 1 page before bed. Want a fitness habit? Get out your yoga mat (literally, do nothing else with it). By starting, you build the habit. The rest can follow. A gateway habit will help you eventually build a strong habit out of the hard thing. I did not follow this when starting the newsletter, but it’s not a strict requirement. 🤷♂️
The second is from David Allen’s book Getting Things Done (which I have not read), that says “If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it’s defined”. This is really powerful as a manager where there is often a flood of things to get done, and it can take more time to add it to a TODO than to just do it and be done with it. One less task to keep on the mental load.
Where I find this particular two minute rule to be helpful is in a 1:1 with an engineer. I treat this time as sacred, and I never want to waste an engineers time, but I’ve learned that it can be better to handle a quick two minute task in the 1:1 with the engineer rather than adding it to my endless TODO and potentially disappointing my engineer when it doesn’t get done in a reasonable time frame. This will slow the conversation a bit (I’m not recommending you do this during a crucial conversation!), and it’s certainly a tradeoff, but worth trying.
The one caveat to avoid is to not just pick up any two minute task anytime you remember it exists. I emphasized the “at the moments it’s defined” for a reason. You need big blocks of time to do deep work, don’t get 20 minutes into slides for an important meeting, remember you need to reply to an email and go “well Coltin said if it takes less than 2 minutes, just do it”. No. Don’t do it, keep on with your slides that you’ve put 20 minutes of brain context into. At this point your better to bundle up your small tasks and handle them later.
It’s hard to stop writing about this, but this is not meant to be a productivity newsletter. Stay tuned next week where I’ll probably write way more than I intend on more productivity topics. That said, have you heard of this rule before? If so has it been helpful? How? And if it’s new, how do you think you could use it in your life?
💡 Quote of the Week
What would this look like if it was easy?
I love the way this quote can help reframe a problem, it invites us to step back and reimagine our approach to complex problems. Here I deep dive into two complex problems I have encountered as an Engineering Manager.
Simplify Career Growth
Challenge: Yelp provides 15 dimensions for engineers in our career growth framework, with 6 levels per dimension to move up and increase impact. The complexity of navigating these 90 definitions can cause a lot of anxiety, especially during quarterly review when I ask an engineer “so, what dimensions would you like to bump up this quarter?” 😱
To compound this, the system is built for a very wide engineering organization. The same system covers infrastructure engineers, backend engineers, fullstack engineers, android or iOS engineers, engineers on feature aligned teams, engineers on engineering effectiveness teams, etc. So some of the descriptions are quite vague and open ended for good reasons, but it still makes it challenging to navigate.
It’s no surprise then that engineers struggle to know where they fit in the levels, what is needed to progress in their career, and how to set effective goals and make progress. It’s part of my job as their manager to help them through this process, but it’s not easy.
But what would it look like if it was easy? If it was easy:
We wouldn’t wait until calibration time to discuss levels. Levels should be an ongoing conversation so there is no panic and no crunch time for complex conversations.
I would make sure engineers understood the expectation for their current dimensions at all times.
My direct reports and I would have a plan for which dimensions we wanted them to grow in, so we didn’t need to focus or review all 15 every quarter.
We would discuss only a few dimensions in a 1:1, to give the engineer time to absorb, reflect, and come back with more questions next week if needed. It’s okay if a dimension takes a few conversations to synthesize into “this is how I would achieve this level of performance”.
I would have a very solid understanding of all of the levels, which recursively is a hard problem that can be broken down further.
I should be able to say “that is an example of a level 3, to make that an example a 4 I would expect an engineer to do X instead”.
This is still a lot of work, but it is no longer a hard intractable problem that feels overwhelming. There are steps and potential process to make it easier.
Quarterly Planning
Challenge: Quarterly planning is a complex beast. There is no one correct way to tackle it, and if you haven’t set yourself up for success far ahead of time, it can be incredibly difficult and painful. I did a lot of quarterly planning while I was still an Engineer. I had no training and I just made it up as I went. Now that I’m an EM, I still have not had any training, but I’ve learned a few more things!
Today I manage the Design Systems team, which is 2-3 teams in one. We have a sub team for Accessibility which has its own set of unique problems, and we also have designers with their own design manager. In some ways the designers and engineers are on the same team, and in other ways they are each other stakeholders.
To compound that, we build a design system used by almost every frontend engineer in the company. This means we have a lot of stakeholders with very different needs.
These teams operate in different ways, and have different tolerances for changes to the systems they use.
Some teams might invest heavily into Server Driven UI, while others might prefer direct native development.
Some want components to change dramatically to fit their new features, others want them to never change because it might impact revenue or mess with their ongoing experiments.
Most teams have a very short term focus, where we typically optimize for the long term.
We also need to consider engineers career aspirations and needs, which may not line up with what needs to get done. Balancing the individual needs vs the group can be hard. Quarterly planning has also “snuck up on me” in the past, where the end of quarter approaches and we have not even spoken to stakeholders, let alone put together a plan!
So with all of that and more, what does quarterly planning look like if it was easy?
Calendar reminders for when to start each part of the process.
A clearly written down process (can be a flexible a process).
Delegate the process, ideally to engineers who’s career growth benefits from the opportunity.
Anything delegated needs very clear expectations and objectives.
Stakeholder conversations happen throughout the quarter, and not just during the quarterly planning process.
We have a clear mission that helps prioritize the most impactful projects.
We have a clear long term roadmap that is updated regularly and gives guidance on what projects get us closest to achieving that roadmap.
I’d ensure we have cross-functional conversations between design, engineering, and accessibility so that all the sub-groups are represented in the process.
Accept that changes happen, quarterly planning can be messy. While we try to understand everyones needs, stakeholders may come in with a last minute ask. Being adaptable will lead to less issues.
Remember that the point of the plan is to serve the companies needs, it is not meant to be rigid and prevent collaboration because things weren’t done “properly”.
Make sure I understand everyones career aspirations before we get into quarterly planning or staffing, so we can make sure as many people are represented as possible.
If it’s not possible, figure out a good alternative. Maybe a team transfer is in order, maybe a scope change is needed, maybe we need to pick up a “lower priority” project that is a better fit for the team/engineer.
I would gather feedback on the process to keep improving it every iteration.
This is not a catch all, but it certainly helped me make quarterly planning and level conversations more effective. What is your biggest pain point today, and what would it look like if it was easy? If you’re not sure, let me know in the comments and I’d love to see if I can reframe it in an easier way for you!
Thank you for reading and supporting this newsletter! While my focus is on writing and not growth, as of writing we are already at 24 subscribers 🙏! I hope this has been valuable for you, and please share it with anyone else who might benefit.
Congrats with the first step 🎊
I’ve been using “2 minutes” rule for years, and only recently realized that this rule is useful not only at work, but also in everyday life (housekeeping, relationships, etc). Putting clothes in the washing machine and turning it on, throwing out the trash, immediately putting dishes directly in the dishwasher, quick call to your relatives and other actions take only 2 minutes or less. At the same time, it makes environment around you better and more orderly and empties your head of unnecessary information.
And back to work again, this technique is not only prevent growth of your TODO list, it also helps to work in more orderly, calm and unstressed environment (by analogy with how pleasant it is to be at home if all the things are done). Almost automatically!
Thanks for sharing the Personal Branding article, I have just started working on it!