Six Recipes for Software Managers

The engineering managers at Localytics have been working together for over a year, and through ups and downs, we’ve grown and learned a lot as a team. The goal of this post is to share some of the lessons we’ve learned with the community. Some of the content is aspirational but all of it is what we believe are best practices for leading software teams, presented to you in cookbook form. We hope these recipes provide value to fellow software leaders as well as a window into our engineering culture.

Recipe 1: One-on-Ones

Weekly one-on-one meetings between managers and reports is a fundamental component to a healthy engineering organization. The purpose of these meetings is for managers to support engineers in their day-to-day work as well as help them define and achieve long-term career goals.

Instructions

  1. Schedule a weekly 30 minute meeting with each direct report, preferably Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday (Mondays and Fridays are often holidays or vacation days).
  2. Make time to prepare for each one-on-one to make sure you are using the time effectively to support your employee. Options include:
  1. During each meeting:

Expected Outcomes

Other Resources

Recipe 2: Team Surveys

Collecting periodic surveys is another way to keep a channel open between managers and employees. Even if you are holding effective one-on-ones, it is important to augment them with weekly surveys:

  1. Answers to a well-formed survey can provide important context for one-on-one’s (so make sure surveys are collected beforehand).
  2. Surveys can be used to extract a superset of data that is relevant to one-on-ones including:

Surveys should be conducted weekly and be lightweight. 15Five CEO David Hassel believes employees should spend 15 minutes every week to fill out progress reports and managers spend no more than five minutes to read each of them.

Instructions

  1. Sign up for an employee engagement or survey tool such as 15Five, TINYpulse or Google Forms.
    Create a set of questions designed to elicit informative responses that take 15 minutes to answer. Include a set of standard questions (e.g. “what do you plan to accomplish this week”) and a set of questions that rotate every week.
  2. Make sure notifications and alerts are setup to collect these at the beginning of the week.
    Review all survey responses before the first one-on-one of the week.
  3. Meet monthly with your management team to review and update the rotating questions to make sure you are pulling the most relevant information.
  4. Make sure to allocate time to address broader issues revealed by surveys. Weekly manager meetings are a good time to review aggregate survey data, identify trends and develop strategies to address issues.

Example Survey

Expected Outcomes

Recipe 3: A Safe Environment

One-on-ones and surveys will have little impact if employees don’t feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. “Psychological safety” is described by HBS professor Amy Edmondson as ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up’’. Google has found this to be the most important quality of high performing teams and if any member of your team does not feel that your workplace is a safe environment then it should be management’s top priority to address.

Instructions

  1. Include culture questions (these are good) in your next weekly survey to determine how your work environment is perceived by employees.

Expected Impact

Recipe 4: An Informed Department

It can be difficult to find the right format and frequency with which to disseminate status information across a multi-team department. Transparency is important but oversharing can dilute your message and cause information overload.

Instructions

  1. Schedule periodic (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly) department-wide meetings

Expected Impact

Recipe 5: Resilient Teams

It’s important to develop teams that are resilient to changing priorities and attrition. This can be accomplished with a thoughtful approach to team size and composition. Teams should be large enough to withstand more than one member leaving and diverse enough to handle a wide variety of work.

Instructions

  1. Choose a team lead by focusing on leadership over technical skills. Leads should be able to foster productive team discussions and deliver real time feedback to team members even if they do not manage them.

Expected Impact

Recipe 6: Self Improvement

The best developers keep up to date of the latest technologies and techniques and so should their managers. Reading blog posts, articles and books are basic ways to sharpen management skills. Many managers don't spend as much time connecting with their peers within the company or industry but learning from other’s experiences one-on-one can be an effective way to step up your game.

Instructions

  1. Subscribe to Software Lead Weekly and explore articles from the archive on Trello.

Expected Impact

Photo by Todd Quackenbush