First year as a manager
My team
My colleagues handed me a parting gift. The moment felt heavy to me, as it would be the first time I had such an experience. I was the engineering manager of the industrious product team and, from that moment, I no longer held that role. Together, we completely reshaped how we developed our product. Against well-funded competition; they could only imitate what we created.
My team was spread out across the European continent. We remotely collaborated in the post-COVID world. For my last week, we were all together in Leipzig, Germany, where I had lived the past few years.
How we worked
The way we worked together over that year was the consequence of iterating each quarter. Consequently, we would get a tidy, deconstructed RFC, reducing scope to key features, and churn out every imaginable task necessary to get from nothing to something. Gaps in logic, missing knowledge, team bottlenecks, complex implementations, and blocking tech debt, would manifest through this technique.
No single ticket can take more than a day.1
Each morning we would have quick stand-ups. We'd limit time to about a minute per person and focus only on asking: What are your blockers and who can help? We'd move onto a selective in-depth chat with only those who were needed. We could demo our days-worth of tasks here too, get some feedback, highlight problems, and plan next steps.
Limit the size of your pull requests.2
A task of a day or less is likely to result in less code to review. But, occasionally this isn't the case so we'd have an explicit rule to encourage understanding. In the dailies we could go over the PRs as to clear up what the code actually does.
Keep meetings focused and don't ramble.3
I tended to ramble in the past. I took a long time getting to the point. Doing so in a meeting of more than one person can be disrespectful of everyone's time. When planning how to avoid wasting company time and money, it makes very little sense to burn it on endless all-hands.
Detach, don't stress.4
If a team is feeling overworked, they might feel obligated to not take leave. If they have to work overtime for an arbitrary deadline, the exhaustion compounds. When you feel like the effort is endless and unrewarding, carelessness and apathy become a reaction, leading to disconnection amongst colleagues.
It was actually not much more than some simple rules. My job had been to get us to this point, where everything flowed from them. Then, keep those rules in place long enough so they became the nature of the work. Superfluousness and discontinuities with these ideas could be eliminated and replaced, like bad tools.
Leaving
At the end, with my whole team sitting with me at dinner, I felt like they genuinely cared. I had struggled before, personally, with all the problems we had worked together to fix. I wanted to feel like I could care about the work I did and maybe others would feel that too. They really wanted to be on this team and continue working together, even after I was gone.
I was leaving to move to the US, and so I would leave the role I had created after 4 prior years with the company.
- In order to have completed tasks to discuss and review each day, any task longer than a day should be split into parts, so we'd analyze the task and think about what can be done one day and then the next and what can be done in parallel. ↩
- We had sane limits on the amount of lines changed and files touched (excluding assets and auto-generated files). This made the cognitive load of collaboration — tickets, PRs, and daily discussions — more tolerable and productive. ↩
- I would make an exception for 1:1s though, people need a space to flow with their thoughts and work through whatever it is they need to. ↩
- I don't know if we ever practiced breathing exercises but I found light-hearted humour helped relieve tension. ↩