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Management

  • Jeff Bezos's S-Team

Key Gotchas

Productivity

  • Fewer/no code writing
  • Keeping the team productive (focus of amplifying the team's work, not yours)
  • Helping on design decisions and architecture
  • Listening to your team's decisions
  • Not stealing credit

Lead by example

  • team will emulate good and bad behaviors
  • Not showing negative thoughts to the team. Working with the upper management

Time management

  • Keeping inbox clean
  • Managing your todo list
  • Saying no when necessary (tactfully)
  • Are you the right/best person to do it?
  • Explaining what you would need to sacrifice in order to take this task
  • Delegating
  • Setting clear expectations on the task
  • Trusting people to do their jobs even for important tasks

Strategy & Tactics

  • Think strategically, act tactically
  • tactics: get stuff done. The implementation, the pieces required. The HOW
  • strategics: business objetives to be fulfilled with the task. The WHY

Estimations

  • Avoiding overcommitment
  • Minding the overhead
  • Other stuff engineers need to do
  • Time for alignments when working in a team
  • Documentation
  • Testing
  • Debugging
  • Studying and researching!
  • Listening to your project manager
  • Involving the team on the estimations

Dependencies

  • Taking a large project and break down into smaller chunks
  • Taking in consideration the experience level of each engineer and how quick they can deliver
  • Understanding dependencies between tasks (including external dependencies - on other teams)
  • Upper management will find odd that you are mentioning the detailed tasks when estimating
  • Because for them it does not matter (strategics only), but for you it does

Project Management Methodologies

  • Kanban
  • Scrum

  • Waterfall

  • Charts

  • GANTT
  • PERT

Simplicity

  • Prefer simple solutions and evolve it into more complex solution as needed
  • Example for recommender system: use a simple graph database instead of deep learning
  • Work backwards from customer experience to the simplest tool to achieve the desired goal

People management

  • Have 1:1 meetings once a week with everyone in the team
  • Talk about carer goals
  • Blockers. Understand issues and personal sides for low performance
  • Give feedbacks (positive and negative)
  • Receive feedback
  • Give recognition! Acknowledge work well done
  • Agenda
    • Check-in on project status (and blockers)
    • Check-in on performance goals
    • Check-in on career goals
    • Feedback (positive and negative)
    • Feedback for you
  • Sandwich feedback
  • Start with good feedback
  • Tell the negative feedback
  • And end with positive feedback
  • SMART goals
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time based
  • Checkpoints
  • Check periodically if the engineer is receiving opportunities to achieve the goals
  • Is the engineer on track to achieve it?

Handling emotions

  • Reflective listening & Active listening
  • You don't need to come up with a solution instantly
  • People just want to be heard and to validate what they are feeling is valid
  • Repeat with your own words that they said to confirm that you understood correctly
  • Don't make judgments!
  • Don't try to fix it yourself, share with HR if it's a delicate problem
  • Write down the situation and keep it in a safe place

Hiring

  • Sourcing
  • Interns / college hires
  • Incent employee referrals
  • Open source projects contributors
  • Academic papers
  • Social media
  • Technical events / tech talks / hackathons
  • Internal hires
  • Remote workers

Firing

  • Don't do it out of anger
  • Don't deflect blame
  • Don't make it personal
  • Don't give false hope
  • Employee has to know for some time that he is not meeting expectations
  • You should offer a performance improvement plan first
  • Be transparent the whole cycle so that the person can even look for a new job first
  • On layoffs:
  • Make sure final payments / severance are available
  • Guidance for unemployment & insurance

Working with upper management

  • Honesty
  • A good relationship will make both more effective
  • Have backbone, disagree and commit
  • It's okay to push back something that you are told to do
  • No one better than you that understands the limitations of your team
  • Sometimes you need to accept/commit a decision even though you don't agree
  • The upper management may be right about it, you just didn't consider all the variables
  • When something wrong happens
  • Be honest
  • Come with solutions
  • Present the plan to fix the immediate problem
  • Show that you understand the root cause (5 WHYs)
  • Preferably come with the actions taken
  • Meetings etiquette
  • If you don't know say I don't know but find out and follow up
  • Don't interrupt others

Team morale

  • People instinctively identify themselves as part of a group/tribe, build your tribe.
  • Set a common goal
  • Care about each individual's goals too
  • If a project needs to be aborted, communicate with your team accordingly and recognize the great work done so far
  • Brainstorm ideas for making your team more cohesive based on what you've learned