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In today’s post, we look into the fifth component of our Engineering Manager framework: customer and business impact.
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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Back in 2016, GetYourGuide had a team composed of ~30 Engineers and a few Team Leads. At the time, we didn’t have Engineering Managers. The idea for the Engineering Manager role emerged when we were evolving our Engineering organization into a platform that could support 100+ Engineers. According to Reid Hoffman's blitzscaling terms, this meant moving from the Tribe to the Village, which meant it would be a difficult task. Nevertheless, just one month later we had our first Engineering Manager job posting live and a few compelling applicants!
Once we started interviewing for this role, we began to notice something odd. Many of the candidates came in with a strong executor mindset. There was considerable emphasis on the “what” of a project, but little mention of the “why” Many of the candidates had excellent track records shipping large projects and managing teams. But, every time we drilled into product decisions on their last project, the reasoning crumbled. After rejecting many candidates, we started questioning what we were looking for in my Engineering Managers. Were we expecting our Engineering Managers to be great Product Managers as well?
The answer came naturally when we took another look at our company core values and Engineering principles, which highlight ownership as a key expectation. As mentioned before, central to the Engineering Manager framework is the idea that the Engineering Manager's success is based on the success of their team(s). With that idea in mind, it makes sense to hold them accountable for things like customer and business impact — an area traditionally owned solely by the Product Manager.
This doesn't mean the Product Manager no longer has a role within our cross-functional teams; delivering customer and business impact is extraordinarily difficult and we still expect Product Managers to be in the driving seat. That being said, there are a lot of principles an Engineering Manager can follow on a daily basis to maximize the chances of their team's success when it comes to impacting the business. Let's look at the top 3 principles we've been applying at GetYourGuide:
There's nothing more important for customer and business impact than choosing which problem is worth solving.
In the role of building Data Products, we have realized this principle is even more critical because the data science development cycle is usually longer. A start in the wrong direction can be very costly down the line. This was illustrated to us recently as we developed a new search-ranking algorithm (one of the core ways our team drives impact) and the results weren’t where we expected them to be. During the retrospective we realized we hadn't consider the following questions:
This simple example shows that though a product improvement can look good on paper, it might not produce lasting customer and business impact. In our case, team execution was good; the problem laid in the planning and prioritization.
A popular quote we repeat in the office is Peter Drucker’s, “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” Success needs to be well-defined with a clear way of being measured.
The key question is what we mean by the right metric? Can a metric be wrong? In short — yes. Since our goal is to drive customer and business impact, a wrong metric is a metric that can't be tied to an overarching business goal. Let's take user engagement as an example. Intuitively, user engagement is a good thing to improve — it means more users come back to our website, right? However, if our goal is for those users to make a purchase we need to demonstrate that more user engagement equals more purchases. In an ideal world, we have used data to establish a causal relationship between our metric and the business KPI.
Together with working on the right product, being an expert at shipping is the most important skill to master to ultimately yield customer and business impact.
Shipping often is like an insurance policy for subpar prioritization. Even if you're working on the wrong problem, the better and faster you can ship, the sooner you can course-correct. In addition, what you can’t learn through data analysis and research you can usually get through shipping.
At GetYourGuide, our core values reinforce a strong bias for action, so we often try to find the fastest way we can test a hypothesis and move on. Engineering Managers therefore need to juggle between building something very quickly to test a hypothesis and delivering solid and reliable systems.
By carefully choosing where the team deploys its energy, measuring progress, and mastering execution speed, Engineering Managers at GetYourGuide maximize their chances of delivering customer business impact.
However, it's also important to mention that chance plays a role. Indeed, only a fraction of A/B experiments yield positive business results, but we shouldn't be discouraged after an experiment turns negative as this often leads to beneficial learnings. Not learning anything from an experiment is the real failure! Building a team that thrives in an experimentation culture and has enough resiliency to move the hardest business metrics is definitely a challenge, yet a fun one. Checkout our post on Team Health to get some of our tools for building and maintaining a strong team in this kind of environment.