Assessing Your Own Experience

• How often do you talk to your skip-level reports? Do you meet with them one on one, or as groups? How do you proactively reach out to your teams? How much time do you spend seeking out information, instead of passively handling the information that comes to you? When was the last time you sat in on a team meeting?

• Without looking at your existing documentation, write down your view of the job description for the engineering managers who report to you.
  • What are they responsible for?
  • How do you evaluate them?
  • What areas are most important for success, in your opinion?
• Now, look at the job description your company uses. Are there differences in what you wrote compared to that description, or do they match well? Given that description, what things are you potentially overlooking in evaluating them?
• Finally, do a quick mental review of their current performance. What areas need coaching and development? Make time to cover this in your next 1-1.
• If you manage an area that is outside of your technical comfort zone, how often do you check in on that area to make sure things are going well? Have you taken some time to learn from the manager of that area a little bit about what it takes to succeed in that role? What new things have you learned in the past three months that help you understand that team better?
• If you have one team that is clearly operating more smoothly than others, what are the differences you notice in their processes? Their interactions? Is their manager doing things differently than other managers? How does the team interact with that manager, and how does that manager interact with you?
• What is your interview process for managers? Do you spend time talking about their personal values and their management philosophy? Do you have the team interview their potential manager, or do you keep them out of the process? Do you spend time getting references for candidates?
• What are your organization’s goals this quarter? This year? How are you merging product goals (if any) with the technical goals? Does your organization have a mandate that is well understood by the teams?