#40 - Intentional Technical Leadership

Hey my friend!

Happy Saturday! 🎉

Welcome to another issue of the Intentional Technical Leadership newsletter.

Are you tired of ineffective meetings? Me too! In this issue, we'll be diving into the nitty-gritty of meetings for an effective engineering organisation.

We also look at giving you some heuristics to measure your own impact as a manager. You can use these to determine your effectiveness in your company and to help you set goals for your own development.

We'll also be discussing setting performance goals for your software engineers at all levels.

So grab your tea or coffee and get ready to level up your management skills!

🔖 Interesting Reading

Meetings for an effective engineering organization

This is an interesting article about effective meetings by Will Larson, CTO for the meditation app Calm.

We all know that many software engineers don't see the value of meetings but he argues that they're a vital part of an effective engineering organisation.

Good meetings can be the heartbeat of an organisation to avoid gaps in communication. They can also help to form the culture of the company and surface concerns. He does also state that meeting can be paused or stopped if they're not valuable. I think this is an important idea that you should regularly revisit for your own meetings.

He suggests a number of regular meetings that your teams should have as well as engineering leadership meetings. For me, my engineering manager meetings are incredibly important. Having a peer group who understand the challenges that you're going through and can offer support is really valuable.

What do you think about meetings in your company?

Do you need more or less of them?

Evaluating Managers: 5 heuristics to measure managerial impact

This post provides some interesting ideas on measuring your impact as a manager.

It's sometimes a challenge to know if you're doing the right thing day-to-day, especially when some projects take a long time to complete.

In the article, Abdul suggests collecting some data to understand how you operate against some key areas. It's interesting reading and I'm curious to see how difficult it is to collect this data regularly.

What do you think? Should we be collecting metrics on our own performance?

Setting Performance Goals for Low, Mid, and High Performing Engineers

This is another great article from Laura Tacho, this time about setting performance goals for your engineers.

She shares her experience in setting goals for her software engineers at different levels depending on their performance.

Setting her less experienced engineers up for success is a great idea and it's important to set achievable goals for them. On the other end, she suggests ways to stretch high performers.

She makes a great point that setting goals doesn't always equal a promotion. Time in role and the ability to influence and impact different parts of the business is often a consideration with senior leaders.

How do you set goals with your team? I'd love to know.

I hope you enjoyed this week's selection of intentional technical leadership articles.

Hit reply and let me know what you think.

Feel free to send me any interesting articles or podcasts you've found as I love hearing from my readers.

Have an amazing week and be excellent to each other!

Speak to you soon,
Marc

Senior Engineering Manager @ Netlify

👓 Read more of my technical leadership articles on my website.