How to succeed as a new engineering leader

Source: https://ehsangazar.com/how-to-lead-an-engineering-team-e4003575bb11

Starting a new engineering manager or leader role can be daunting. The organisation is new to you and you can’t leverage the relationships you had in the previous job to help you succeed. Having been an Engineering Manager and a VP of engineering, I have some experience here. Here are some tips on how to make good use of your initial time in the new company:

1. Schedule 1-on-1s with key people in the company.
   Ask the leadership for the goals of the company, challenges it needs to overcome in order to meet its goals. A major part of a leadership role is to provide clear direction to your team. Understanding the goals from the company leadership will help you provide clear direction to your team and make good decisions for the company.
   Ask them for their expectations from you. Talk about what characteristics in people allow them to do well in the company.
   At my previous company, our HR had a great practice of setting up meetings for new hires when they joined with the key leaders in the company.
2. Understand the business, competitive advantages & moats.
   Read up on industry dynamics, case studies on the company and competitors. Understand what levers to use to impact the business in a meaningful way. Any product or technology you create should end up helping the company compete better and should help the overall business.
   Understanding the companies’ unique competitive advantages & moats will help you leverage them to create products at scale. These will also help you prioritise your work and projects. Don’t waste your time on projects which will have little impact on the overall business.
   As a VP of engineering at Reliance Jio, I leveraged Reliance’s massive retail footprint & Jio’s online distribution to drive usage for our consumer apps. If it weren’t for this unique advantage Jio has, my apps wouldn’t have been as successful. However, I still needed to put in a lot of effort to align the channels and create products & apps that Jio teams and customers would use without being forced.
   This exercise will also help you understand which parts of company are great and should be preserved, and which parts need to be fixed or improved. The unique competitive advantages of your company will help you maximise impact of your work.
3. Understand the organisation.
   Having understood the company goals, take stock of the organisation you work in. Putting together a detailed engineering org chart would help. Analyse the teams, team sizes and resourcing, which teams are on critical projects and which teams are not performing and scaling well. In order to understand whether a team is doing well, the appropriate measurements and KPIs need to be present as well. If they are not, you probably want to start a benchmarking and measurement exercise where you define the KPIs for your engineering teams. One of my favourite management thinkers of all time said:
   “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” — Peter Drucker.
   One of my favourite experiences in my previous role was taking control of a 100+ person engineering team, taking them through the exercise of defining metrics, making these metrics visible and accessible to all and helping them improve their performance. The experience was very fulfilling as the overall working environment within the team improved with less shouting and finger pointing along with better performance.
   If you want to understand which metrics you need to measure, they are nicely presented in the book Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren PhD & Jez Humble.
4. Understand the engineering system.
   Now that you know the org and the team structure, spend time looking at how product goes from concept to production. Look at your product development processes, e.g., feature grooming and shaping, code reviews, test case definition, unit testing, continuous integration & deployment. Look at incident management and RCAs. Model these key processes using a system design diagram to understand which levers you need to pull to improve them. You would also need to collect and visualise process data to monitor quality and work-in-progress. If this data doesn’t exist, first focus on implementing processes to accurately collect and measure this data.
5. Analyse overall system architecture keeping Conway’s law in mind.
   Understand the current technical system architecture. Understand where Conway’s law had a role to play in the design. Think about what the ideal architecture would look like with the business & business process in mind. You would want to redesign the system to remove the effects of Conway’s law.

Hopefully these 5 tips will help you start smoothly in a new engineering organisation. Leave comments below if you found these tips helpful.

References:

1. Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations — by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim.
2. An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management —
   by Will Larson.