If the team is completely freaked out, you can sense that as a manager. It almost doesn't matter if the answer is yes or no, because what you're doing is opening up the space to have a further dialogue about it. Sometimes there are really great answers there. People might just be saying like, oh, my estimate didn't take into account the beacon period or the beta period or testing. And that's an opportunity to sort of revise that. Let's do a better job of taking into account all the things that are involved in estimation.
Our guest today is Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering at Figma and former VP of Engineering at Slack.
In today’s conversation, he unpacks why most startups get it wrong when they uplevel someone from IC engineer to eng manager and unfurls what stellar engineering management looks like at high-growth companies, including:
- Setting appropriate expectations and goals
- Turbocharging the team’s effectiveness
- Delivering high-impact feedback
- Going from a peer to a manager
- What leaders risk when they drag their heels on managing out low-performers
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