Engineering Managers in the Wild: Recent Episodes
Alberto Guarino
This is a podcast about Engineering Managers (EMs), their stories, and their art. What do EMs really do? What problems do they help solve? What challenges do they face? How do they support their teams on a daily basis? How do they grow? And how does their role change from company to company? I'll try to answer these questions (and many more) through conversations with friends, colleagues, and beautiful people I've met along the way. As we present different perspectives and experiences, I hope you'll be able to appreciate how interesting and challenging the role of an EM can be.
Julien is a Senior Engineering Manager at Spotify. In this episode, we talk about dealing with underperformers as Engineering Managers, the tools we can use, and the importance of listening and showing empathy.
- What does underperforming look like?
- The importance of taking action and thinking about this as an opportunity for growth, not as a mark of shame
- What is a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) and what should it include?
- Feedback, clarity, empathy, emotional intelligence, and other crucial ingredients
- Leveraging career frameworks
- When should HR be involved?
- What are the hard sides of this? What happens when things go bad?
- Having post-mortems and learning from every situation you face
Julien shares his stories and lessons learned, and reminds us that, as managers, we’re not alone in this and we should ask for support too.
Links and resources:
- Julien's profile on Linkedin
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Marco is an Engineering Manager at Spendesk. In this episode, we talk about his journey as a manager from a startup to a scaleup, and what he has learned along the way. These are some of the areas we discussed:
- How the EM role changes depending on the company you're working for and its maturity
- How you can deal with the feeling of being lost and not knowing anything after starting a new role
- How important it is to build your own network inside a company
- Questioning yourself and revisiting assumptions and tools that worked for you before
- Managers and football referees, what do they have in common?
- Change is the only constant, but when is change too much?
Links and resources:
- Spendesk (company)
- Empatica (company)
- Think Again (book by Adam Grant)
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Gustavo is an Engineering Manager at Spotify. In this episode, we talk about team cohesion in a distributed world and why this is an important topic to be aware of.
- What is team cohesion?
- How has remote work affected it?
- What can you do when you notice a lack of connection and low engagement in a team?
- Is it just a manager's responsibility to take care of team cohesion?
- How can you bring this up with a team and create a space for them to discuss?
- How do you deal with time zones, meetings, pair programming, synchronous vs asynchronous work, and more?
- What tools work? What doesn't work?
- Are team offsites still a thing?
Gustavo shares his experience and some stories that I really enjoyed listening to. I hope you will enjoy them too! 😊
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/emsinthewild/message