Today we present to you the fourth component of our Engineering Manager framework: productivity.
Get a full overview of our Engineering Framework from our series on team health, stakeholder happiness, business impact, and systems health.
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Engineering Managers have many different responsibilities. From ensuring technical deliverables are met to supporting Engineers on their career path, it can be challenging to decide what needs to be prioritized and what should be taken off the to-do list. One aspect of team management that is consistently prioritized is promoting team productivity.
Productivity is about maintaining a sustainable pace, setting the right expectations, and delivering consistently.
To set the right expectations, it is critical to form a close partnership with your Product counterpart in order to leverage technology and increase productivity rather than being constrained by its limitations.
So, what are the goals of an Engineering Manager in relation to productivity? We came up with the following list of 7 objectives with guiding questions and links to help Engineering Managers balance all of the different aspects of productivity and deliver:
Objective 1: Projects are prioritized well (including what not to do)
Discovery is about tackling the following risks:
There is no magic trick. Read, learn, reflect, improve, test, fail, but, above all, try to gain a deep understanding of how you can make things better. Be pragmatic: not everything can be fixed or done straight away. Don’t get annoyed by small issues, but rather focus on impact.
We suggest a simple Plan/Track/Monitor framework. This will help you make sure you are covering long-term thinking and short-term execution while also ensuring your activities do not have any side effect on other teams.
Managing productivity is about tradeoffs, and requires organization and structure to collect the right amount and level of informations to make informed decisions without over engineering and over analyzing opportunities and challenges.
Additional Books to read regarding this topic:
Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?: Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday…
“This motivational and autobiographical book tells the story of an ordinary person in an ordinary team who achieved something pretty extraordinary.” (Source: Amazon.com)
Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results
“This book is useful, actionable, and actually fun to read! If you want to get your team aligned around real, measurable goals, Radical Focus will teach you how to do it quickly and clearly.” (Source: Amazon.com)
INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
“How do today’s most successful tech companies — Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla — design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love — and that will work for your business.” (Source: Amazon.com)
Check out the original version of this article on Medium.