Название: The Engineering Executive's Primer: Impactful Technical LeadershipАвтор: Will Larson
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2024
Страниц: 360
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB
As an engineering manager, you almost always have someone in your company to turn to for advice: a peer on another team, your manager, or even the head of engineering. But who do you turn to if you're the head of engineering? Engineering executives have a challenging learning curve, and many folks excitedly start their first executive role only to leave frustrated within the first 18 months.
In this book, author Will Larson shows you ways to obtain your first executive job and quickly ramp up to meet the challenges you may not have encountered in non-executive roles: measuring engineering for both engineers and the CEO, company-scoped headcount planning, communicating successfully across a growing organization, and figuring out what people actually mean when they keep asking for a "technology strategy."
As an engineer, you’ll often be responsible for onboarding peers onto your team. In those cases, you’re often implicitly more senior than the peer you’re onboarding, but you’re both knowledgeable in the shared field of software engineering. Onboarding executive peers is different. You’re truly peers, without any implicit hierarchy between functions, and you often don’t share the context of having worked in a common profession because they might be the new executive for Finance, Sales, or any other function outside Engineering. Further, engineers (and most other functional contributors) go deep and narrow, whereas executives need to start by going shallow and broad. To tease out the distinction between onboarding engineers and executives, consider these two points: When onboarding a peer software engineer, your goal is to help them understand your current process and one specific onboarding project well enough to implement that one project.
This book explains how to:
• Get an engineering executive job, negotiate the contract, and onboard at your new company
• Run an engineering planning process and communicate effectively with the organization
• Direct the core meetings necessary to operate an effective engineering organization
• Hire, onboard, and run performance management
• Manage yourself and remain effective through many challenges
• Leave the job when the time is right
What This Book is Not:
If you’re looking for details on how to run one engineering team, this won’t be the most useful book for you. This book does not explore practices for running your weekly team meetings, conducting one-on-ones, or giving feedback effectively. Instead, it focuses on how multiple teams work together effectively across a company’s Engineering function. For those omitted topics, I heartily recommend Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path (O’Reilly) and my own An Elegant Puzzle (Stripe Press). Likewise, this book is focused on the whole Engineering function, which is the intersection of technology-focused and people-focused leadership. There is no meaningful way to talk about leading an Engineering function that doesn’t engage with both those leadership aspects.
Will Larson was the chief technology officer at Calm and the author of An Elegant Puzzle and Staff Engineer. He's also a prolific writer on his blog, Irrational Exuberance.
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