[d_sem]

You perspective is interesting. Do you have an opinion about to help management know how to manage? I'm personally in a constant struggle to improve my management skills but struggle to weed through the sudo-science of management training resources.

[rewgs]

Hot take: “management skills” are bullshit. A good manager is empathetic, logical, and organized. Easier said than done of course but that is the only “signal” required — the rest is just noise.

[fatnoah]

I've been managing for a long time, and where I always seem to land are to ask stakeholders and the engineering team what a successful engineering org looks like to them, and I start from there. The almost universal answer from stakeholders is consistency and some measure of predictability. For Engineers, it's usually consistency and feeling like their making valuable contributions and shipping products.

People tend to gravitate towards Scrum because they know it, but it's usually implemented because a process is deemed to be required, not that specific goals are trying to be met. By starting with the goals, I can at least start from a position of agreement, and develop a Scrum or other process that can provide some measure of success for stakeholders while meeting the needs of the engineers. It's also a forcing function for me to say that if you want X from the Engineering team, we need Y from you.

I'm also very upfront that a hill I'll die on is that velocities and story points are great planning tools and signals around process health, but they're never goals nor are they tools for judgement and reviews.

[ftlio]

I think clarity on what “level of leadership” (link, Netflix presentation) is expected is a good thing and also helps people understand that such a hierarchy exists. It gets people thinking about just handling things for you.

Otherwise, I dunno, my best managers had their own way of waxing philosophical about leadership and my role, the product, company, etc to make me more autonomous.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-five-level-owner...