Oren Ellenbogen - Leading Snowflakes: The Engineering Manager Handbook

To Shahaf, Evelyn and Joshua
for your love and support

Thank you for supporting this endeavor. It is my hope that my lesson learned, transitioning from an engineer into a manager position, can help you to save both time and pain in your own journey as a leader.

This eBook is not open source. I am a big advocate of fair use and chose to avoid any form of Digital Rights Management in order to ensure you can enjoy this lesson in whichever way works best for you. If you received a copy without paying, please consider purchasing it.

http://leadingsnowflakes.com

If you have any feedback or questions, please reach out to me. Id love to hear from you. You can email me at

First and foremost, Id like to thank Talya Stern for asking the tough questions, helping out with copy editing, spell checking and grammar. I couldnt have done it without you.

I would like to also thank the early beta readers of this book: Bill Hodgeman, Eyal Efroni, Ohad Laufer, Tomas Lundborg, Victor Trakhtenberg, Ilya Agron, Effie Arditi, Shani Raba, Amit Yedidia and Maxim Novak, for giving insightful and helpful ideas and corrections.

Lastly, Id like to thank Nathan Barry , Justin Jackson , Adii Pienaar and Paul Jarvis for not only inspiring me to write this book, but also for teaching me a new approach for self-publishing.

Words cant express my gratitude for what theyve contributed to this book.

Book design by Mark DAntoni .

Copyright 2013-2014 Oren Ellenbogen

LESSON 1
Switch between Manager and Maker modes

LESSON 2
Code Review Your Management Decisions

LESSON 3
Confront and challenge your teammates

LESSON 4
Teach how to get things done

LESSON 5
Delegate tasks without losing quality or visibility

LESSON 6
Build trust with other teams in the organization

LESSON 7
Optimize for business learning

LESSON 8
Use Inbound Recruiting to attract better talent

LESSON 9
Build a scalable team

The goal of this book is to help Engineering Managers or aspiring managers become more effective at leading software engineers by improving their ability to retrospect, communicate, collaborate, delegate and inspire other people.

Alone.

If I had to choose a single word to describe how I felt in my transition from an engineer into a manager, that would be it. As much as I was excited, I was also terrified.

We were never taught the dark art of building a team or leading people. As if this isnt enough, these unique individuals (hence snowflakes) in our team tend to be incredibly smart, analytical, opinionated, self-driven, and ambitious. Engineers.

What is it then, which could aid me in finding my own management style? What can I do to gain that confidence I need, to start leading, rather than reacting?

One of the things I appreciate most in our profession as software engineers is being able to break complexity into smaller, almost tangible parts, where figuring out these patterns of simplicity can not only produce beautiful solutions, but also introduce us to the building blocks of beautiful software. Writing this book was my own journey to present tools and techniques I believe can discover these building blocks of beautiful leadership.

Now, our job is to ask the right questions, to encourage people to think, to challenge, to inspire.

While we may always feel that we are walking in this path alone, I want to challenge you to look deeper into the way you lead others. I want to challenge you to share the reasons you lead people in a certain way, so those patterns of simplicity you find along the way can become your own secret sauce to leadership.

Im cheering for you for taking the time to invest in yourself and do what you believe is best for your team. I know that youre busy, that you hardly have the time to breathe. It is people like you who encouraged me to write this book. I know because Ive been there. I know, because I can feel what you are feeling now.

I was never a consultant or a theorist. My pains came from facing the same problems youre facing today. My desire for patterns and practices came from mentoring other Engineering Managers along the years.

It is my hope that my observation and techniques could enrich your managerial arsenal, helping you to find your own path to become a great Engineering Manager and a great leader.

In writing this book, I wanted to make sure you will learn practical techniques you could start using immediately. This is why Ive made sure that each lesson is concise, self-contained and actionable.

Youll find each chapter to start with the motivation behind the tools and techniques youre about to get to know, followed by a list of tasks you can use to track your progress.

Let your curiosity lead you, as you can navigate between lessons the way you find most interesting and relevant.

Finally, Ive created an online application you could use to track your progress across all lessons. To do that, simply sign-in to
http://leadingsnowflakes.com .

1. Understanding how interruptions have a different effect on Makers and Managers.
2. How to use your calendar and small gestures to create the quiet time needed to get into the zone.
3. Figuring out which types of tasks you should own on your Maker mode.
4. Tactics for finding the right balance between Maker and Manager modes.

Time investment: 25 minutes.

We all started our professional journey as a Maker a designer, software engineer, product manager, tester or operations engineer. Our ability to make things is what brought us so far.

We all love the feeling of getting things done.

This is why when we go from a Maker into a Manager role, we so often fall back to our comfort zone. Were neglecting managerial responsibilities working to complete yet another task instead. Its the power of old habits. Also, its much more fun (and immediate!) when getting the work done is completely in our own hands.

But lets face it no one is being promoted to a managerial position to increase their own productivity. Our job as managers is to amplify our teammates. No longer will we be measured by our own ability to complete tasks. We already proved our capabilities there. We will be measured by a new unit of execution team execution.

One way to avoid stepping back to our old habits is to completely commit to our new role and delegate all of the Maker tasks to our teammates. While this move can feel right, as it forces us to focus on scaling our teammates, this decision can be fatal in the long-term. By completely disconnecting ourselves from the details, we are risking our ability to understand implementation complexity. This may lead to losing our edge as someone whos able to help with prioritization and estimation, both internally and externally. Our teammates and peers will soon smell our incompetence, and once they will feel we are no longer contributing to technical debates or prioritization, they will stop consulting with us, even if unintentionally at first.