Looking to put customer obsession into action? We bring you a case study from @minarets, VPE at @Mailchimp about doing just that via an engineering event.
Amazon made this a well-known company value. The idea is simple: prioritize the customer’s needs and experience, then work your way backwards through the product and the teams, all the way to yourself.
2. Getting buy-in from leadership
Selling your initiatives internally is a key part of a leadership job. When you’re planning a customer obsession event, the first people you need to involve are your cross-functional peers. Make sure they understand the goals.
3. Keep the balance
Make sure to remind yourself that there are many ways to serve your customers through your product. Fixing bugs is one of them, and you definitely need to keep allocating a healthy amount of time for that, but new developments are for your customers as well.
A director's job is very different from a frontline manager. Many fail the transition, and it can take years to master the role even for those who succeed. Prepare by learning about the expectations and count on a bumpy journey.
2. Examine your motivations
Be honest with yourself about your motivation for getting this promotion. Chasing a paycheck or more control aren’t bad things, but they can lead to a negative mindset. However, the best motivation is looking to unlock more of your team’s potential.
Here’s a taste of Joseph’s priority list about standardizing processes:
1. Deployment process
Make sure that your deployment is repeatable and consistent regardless of which developer is doing it. Document it first, and when it’s done, you can automate it in large parts.
2. Monitoring
Monitoring gives your engineers metrics about the code’s performance in production. There are great tools out there that are easy to set up, and save you a lot of time and energy in the long run. Make sure to have it send your team a message when something breaks.
A virtual offsite event can fulfill the same function as its in-person counterpart. You can do team building, unpack your values, align your team or hold a game day. It works.
2. Don’t even try the same activities
A virtual event often holds more potential distractions for the participants than an in-person one. So you need to make an effort to make the online activities engaging. A series of frontal presentations is sure to lose everybodys’ interest.
In a dual leadership role, give equal attention to both your teams. Neglecting to put out fires on one team can be just as harmful, as paying too close attention to the other, and not giving your team room to grow.
2. Give space to your teams
Giving space to your teams to do their jobs isn’t just going to help them grow, but you as well. When you’re not busy with getting involved in the frontline work, you have more capacity to focus on your leadership role, and get better at it.
Here are some takeaways about communication channels:
1. Coordinate planning
You want to start coordination as early as possible. Send a platform engineer to join the planning sessions of product teams, and see if they have requests or advise them on currently available options
2. Use product managers
Using product managers in platform teams is an unconventional but useful idea. They can help with communication on every level, make it smoother and take some load off management - but definitely can’t replace them.
Why writing is important in #EngineeringManagement and how to improve it? Tips from Erica Greene at @Etsy@codeascraft to improve your team’s and your own writing skills.
Make sure everyone in your team has a clear understanding of the different types of documents you regularly work with. This puts you all on the same page.
2. Provide templates
Provide templates for the different documents you expect your team members to write. A high level overview of the necessary contents, and a clear structure to follow can fit on just one page. Use it as a learning material and a reference point for your team.