Managing Managers

The final episode of the podcast (or at least the first season)

Laura Tacho, CTO at DX and a coach to engineering leaders, shares her insights on developer productivity. She explores the crucial differences between leadership and management, emphasizing the need for strong leadership skills. Tacho introduces a new productivity measurement framework that categorizes success into speed, quality, effectiveness, and impact. She encourages prioritizing continuous improvement over mere assessment and highlights the importance of developer surveys for gauging team sentiment. Essential advice for new managers navigating former peer relationships is also covered.

Meri has a tonne of experience managing managers as a serial CTO, and we chat about everything from being a non-executive director, common traps of first-time directors/VPs of Engineering, what they look for when interviewing managers of managers, and so much more. Guest biography: Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations, currently leading the technology team at Pleo. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organisations, and works as a CTO coach and tech advisor to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.  They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organisations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others. A published author and international speaker, they are the chair of The Lead Developer conference, and a tech advisor for Kindred Capital. Together with their wife, they run micro-charity One Goes Up to help young women & enby folks pursue STEM education & careers. Transcript and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-029-meri-williams/

Alice Bartlett, a seasoned tech director at the Financial Times, shares her journey from principal engineer to leadership. She emphasizes the importance of strong leadership skills over technical expertise in managerial roles. The discussion explores effective delegation, nurturing future leaders, and the challenges of prioritizing tasks amidst busy schedules. Alice highlights strategies for managing uncertainty and motivating teams under pressure, offering valuable insights for anyone in a leadership position.

Lena Reinhard, a Berlin-based leadership coach and former VP Engineering, dives into the trials of middle management. She shares her journey from accidental leader to supporting directors as an independent coach. The conversation touches on the complexities of navigating organizational changes, emphasizing the need for empathetic communication. Lena also discusses strategies for new managers, highlighting the balance between autonomy and involvement. With insights on cultivating strategic thinking, she offers practical advice for thriving in management roles.

Although we’ve never worked together, it seems like CTO Crystal Hirschorn and I were positively influenced by many movements in tech such as XP, lean and systems thinking and in this episode we chat about how that has influenced her management style. A key element of a lot of that is the idea of building a blameless culture and listening in to hear about some ideas of leading and lagging indicators of good engineering culture and much more. Guest biography: Crystal is an experienced Engineering Leader having held various VP and Senior Director of Software Engineering roles, with a career spanning more than 20 years in the Technology industry. The majority of her career has been a mixture of technical leadership, hands-on software engineering, and engineering management. She has managed managers for several years. She’s a resilience engineering advocate and long-time practitioner and advocate of Lean, XP, and DevOps practices to build a successful engineering culture. She is currently the CTO at Zoa – a green energy tech start up. Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-026-crystal-hirschorn/

Experienced VP of Engineering, Sarah Abrantes, discusses the importance of being a leader before a manager, managing areas without background, and countering authority differences. She shares insights on transitioning to managing other managers, navigating unfamiliar territories in tech management, and the challenges of stakeholder management in leadership roles.

Although currently Director of Platform Engineering, Jess Mink is an unusual manager of manager in tech, who’s also played a full-time product role. Listen to this episode as they explain what they took away from that experience, their perspective on how engineering managers differ from other managers, and share their managing manager roles change across different organisations and contexts. Guest Biography: Jess is passionate about building strong, productive technical organizations that are focused on outcomes. While some people are fascinated by architecting code Jess loves to understand and debug human systems.  Developer tools and health tech companies speak to them and despite seeking engineering roles they have a habit of taking on product roles when needed. They've worked at companies such as Auth0, FOLX and Amazon and held roles from Director of Engineering to VP of Product.  They are currently Director of Platform Engineering at Honeycomb.io.  In their spare time they volunteer doing Search and Rescue. Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-024-jess-mink/

Maggie Litton has held many senior management roles across many different companies and in this episode gives us an insight into some of the ways the manager of manager role changes. To me, she is a great role model of a successful manager from a non-traditional career path and offers insights into so many dimensions of being a manager of managers. Listen carefully towards the end to some of the failure modes of strategy, and what not to do if you’re a senior manager. Guest Biography: Maggie loves building organisations that enable people to do useful things. She's worked at Fortune 500 enterprises and startups of all stages. She specialises in optimising remote organisations and reducing accidental complexity.  Maggie is currently Director of Engineering at HashiCorp. Transcript and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-023-maggie-litton/

VP of Engineering at the NY Times, David Yee, discusses managing managers, ethical leadership, delegation, and adapting management styles. He emphasizes principles over tasks, the challenges of transitioning into director roles, and the importance of ethical engineering management. Listen to the episode for more insights on humane management in the tech industry.