Maximizing long term impact as an engineering manager
Smart engineering managers foresee what actions maximize long term impact and prioritize those actions accordingly. That is challenging to pull off in practice. The linkage between an EM’s immediate action today and its ripple effect a week, a month, or year from now can have little connection to time spent on the act itself. It also commonly lacks a paper trail or concrete “proof” of action taken. And managerial outcomes often depend on the fickle influences of human psychology and plain luck.
I’d argue individual contributors, a.k.a. developers have an easier time making the connection between action today and impact tomorrow. Most engineers deep in code have clean artifacts of their work to show progress. Developers edit files, merge pull requests, close Jira tickets, and pass automated tests. When they ship features, there’s often a tangible outcome, be it a new set of UI, a performance boost, or a database migration. Past performance across similar technical challenges becomes a predictor for future velocity. This factor is why more experienced engineers become more accurate at making estimates for their work, and why task estimation is such a core tenet of software development.
Continue reading…