Marilyn C. Cole’s Post

How further ahead should engineering managers plan? 🤔 This is a crucial change that takes place when you go from a technical to a management role, and here’s a good rule of thumb to follow. 👇

📊 The 2024 State of Engineering Management report reveals a significant shift: 90% of engineers now play a strategic role in business decisions. Gone are the days of just taking orders—today's engineers are key partners in guiding strategy, driving growth, and improving efficiency. Check out the report 👇

I've been waiting for this for a while now. After months of hard work and analysis, the 2024 State of Engineering Management report is finally LIVE! This is our 5th annual report, and we talked to over 600 engineering professionals, including engineers, managers, and executives. I'm not going to spoil the fun, but we've uncovered interesting insights about GenAI adoption, lack of alignment between engineers and executives, and burnout. So, grab a ☕ and dive in -> https://bit.ly/4ehnMSx

What do you think are the top challenges a VP of Engineering faces during the hyper-growth stage? 🚀 In this four-part series, Gabriela Nir, Head of Engineering Operations, and Hemdat Cohen-Shraga, VP of R&D at Priority Software, 🌟 delve into the world of engineering leadership and discuss how Engineering Ops can serve as a counterpart to address the challenges faced by the VP of Engineering across four main areas: 1. Human Resources and Team Building 👥 2. Business Strategy and Operations 📈 3. Technological 💻 4. Process Development and Optimization 🔧 This article goes into detail about the first and perhaps most unexpected challenge - human resources and team building and the effect it has on the engineering work. 🛠 Enjoy this read and stay tuned for the upcoming parts, where we'll explore more challenges. 📚 #EngineeringOperations #EngineeringLeadership #HyperGrowth #TeamBuilding #TechInnovation

To write an engineering strategy, write five design documents, and pull the similarities out. That’s your engineering strategy. To write an engineering vision, write five engineering strategies, and forecast their implications two years into the future. That’s your engineering vision. - Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - Will Larson

📊 In Jellyfish's 2024 State of Engineering Management Report, we gathered insights from over 600 engineering professionals to uncover the most pressing challenges and trends in 2024. From visibility into project status to the adoption of advanced tooling, the data reveals significant gaps and opportunities. For instance, did you know that 31% of teams struggle with visibility into their projects, with the number rising to 57% in larger organizations? How does your team compare?

Best practices in Engineering are at best a guideline; they should be adapted to suit the team's and the business's needs.

What makes great engineering management, great? W. Edwards Deming had some ideas. "Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives," he posited (according to Wikipedia / not a direct quote). This is **in direct contrast** to the popular Peter Drucker school of thought, which led GE, Jack Welch, and arguably the entire commerical world, into a management-by-objectives approach. Management by objectives, while popular, makes several key mistakes. It allows, and even requires, an individual manager to take responsibility in a single quarter for several different factors outside of his/her control, including the actions of other teams and changing macroeconomic conditions. It also assumes that inertia wouldn't have taken care of the objective on its own, nor could inertia inhibit the goal from being reached. Instead, one of Deming's main values is a "constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service." Every worker should embody and internalize the purpose and direction of the company. You can learn more about W. Edwards Deming's overlooked engineering value system here: https://lnkd.in/ep3hG_xU What are your insights on what makes good management? #EngineeringManagement #Teams #Quality #Engineering

Having reduced capacities on teams can be very challenging for engineering managers. But it's not just the engineering managers that feel it, it's the individuals on the team. Often there are circumstances outside of both the team and the engineering manager's control where demands are outweighing the capacity of what the team can provide. What should be done? In this clip, Nick talks about challenges he faced with trying to spread people out across two distinct teams. ---- 👀 Check out the full video on our channel! 🗣️ Share with your network! #softwareengineering #engineeringmanager #engineeringmanagement

Drucker, on the other hand, had some valuable ideas as well. He never said, "culture eats strategy for breakfast," though that quote is widely attributed to him. (Continued from post linked below) But he did have a belief, a somewhat supernatural belief, that the "magic" of a company is in the ability of its people to transcend thermodynamic limits, by producing more output than what is input. "The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it. It must be a genuine whole: greater than—or at least different from—the sum of its parts, with its output larger than the sum of all inputs," he wrote. To make this work though, he noted that the rank-and-file worker must **actually** be a manager, since otherwise, a worker is simply a result of the laws of mechanics, similar to how the material resources and equiment are subject to those laws. So in essence, he believed that managers and workers were actually one thing, and since he didn't give a name to this, I would propose the word, "agent." To think of managers and workers as separate roles tends to result in a fair amount of buck-shifting. A worker produces its output, then the manager has to approve or deny it. If denied, the worker can simply say, "well that was only v1," and receives an extension on his timeline. If however, we follow Deming's advice and have the workers internalize the company's goals, the worker can simply work until the output is actually satisfactory, as judged by the worker-as-manager, consistent with both Deming and Drucker's schools of thought. #Engineering #Management #Craftsmanship #Enterprise