Platform Teams; Google's EM Checklist; Tech Lead Vows; Interrupted Dev
Issue #36 Bytes
🌱 Dive into Learning-Rich Sundays with groCTO ⤵️
🎙️ Leading Dev Teams vs Platform Teams ft. Anton Zaides, Director of Engineering at Taranis
In #Ep59 of the groCTO Podcast, we had the pleasure of having back Anton Zaides, Director of Engineering at Taranis and author of the Leading Developers newsletter. This time, we’re diving into practical strategies for fostering collaboration, improving alignment, and tackling the unique challenges of platform engineering.
From role-swapping to aligning platform efforts with business outcomes, Anton offers invaluable insights for both engineering and product leaders. Check it out!
Leading your platform teams? Share your thoughts & learnings in the comments! 💬
Article of the Week ⭐
“When human potential is unleashed, organizations thrive.”
Effective Engineering Managers
You may have heard of Project Oxygen. A series of experiments and surveys conducted by Google to figure out what makes great engineering managers.
In 2008 Google set out to learn who their best engineering managers are and what makes them tick. But first they needed to learn what their engineering managers were doing using a series of double-blind surveys and sheets. Addy Osmani generously summarises their research for you.
Original Research
A great manager initially was summarised as having these eight traits.
Is a good coach
Empowers team and does not micromanage
Creates an inclusive team environment
Is results-oriented
Is a strong communicator - listens and shares information
Supports career development
Has a clear vision and strategy
Has key technical expertise
Over time it has evolved into an aggregate list of 10 traits that great engineering managers shared and are actionable.
10 traits of a great manager
Is a good coach. Emotional intelligence and soft skills excelled compared to pure technical skill.
Empowers team and does not micromanage. Engineers have enough technical feedback coming in from peers and tech leads. What they love from a manager is someone who can help them overcome obstacles without telling them what to do.
Creates an inclusive team environment. Reports value a manager who puts the well-being of the team inside the success envelope, rather than just a side effect.
Is results-oriented. Speak to employees with data and analytics and help them connect the dots between their work and values towards team and product outcomes.
Is a strong communicator - listens and shares information. Listen and listen some more. Drive conversation towards actionable feedback and make offer alternatives without judgement.
Supports career development and discusses performance. Engineers hate being micromanaged on technical decisions, but yearn to be supported and helped in career performance.
Has a clear vision and strategy for the team. Teams across an organization can become uniform and bland. It’s important for managers to keep a clear sense of identity and purpose for the team.
Has key technical skills to help advise the team. While not crucial, the team will have greater respect and easier time communicating with someone who knows how the sausage is made.
Collaborates across Google. Google is an outlier—it has an engineering org bigger than some nation states. Horizontal communication and networking are a key component necessary for great managers.
Is a strong decision maker. Be decisive, but allow space for being wrong and learn quickly with immediate pivots.
Other highlights 👇
Vows of a Tech Lead
Marcus visualizes his experience for the 7 key responsibilities of tech leads organized into three distinct areas of influence:
Inside the team
Outside the team
Across multiple teams
Responsibilities
Within the team
Workflow Management. Smooth progress with a bit of task grooming.
Internal Communication. A high signal-to-noise ratios drives simple, stress-free meetings.
This is the area of technical expertise, process and collaboration. Learning how to work with each other in addition to working with the product is the main accelerator for the team to discover and foster its own identity.
Outside
Cross-functional Collaboration. Connect specialists and experts from different domains and skill backgrounds.
Advocacy. Help shape the team’s boundaries and promote their success stories.
To anyone outside the team it’s pretty much a black box. The tech leader’s responsibility is to communicate in simple terms how to interface the team, what services it provides, what support it needs and what other teams and people it depends on to achieve business success.
Across
Cultural Promotion. Culture is what the teams do and don’t do out of principle.
Continuous Improvement. Adapt and realign as the business changes over time.
Personal Development. Individual growth, well-being and self-care.
Conflicts, politics and misunderstandings are bound to arise sooner or later. Their continued management and resolution is a worthwhile skill to be gained and honed. The team requires consistent in leadership and mediation to fine tune when to push, when to listen and when to move on from certain issues.
How Do Interruptions Impact Different Software Engineering Activities?
Lizzie Matusov explores how engineers respond to different types of interruptions. Are all of them negative? Why are they so impactful? Let’s dive in!
Impact
Based on research from a study conducted by the Duke & Vanderbilt universities, twenty participants were measured, observed and surveyed while performing different kinds of tasks. The impact of the interrupts can be categorised as
Interruption intensity varies. Interruption gets us out of flow and focus and usually demands a real world sync. The more focused participants were on their task (ie. code writing), the higher impact interruptions had on their stress response.
Kinds of interruptions affect stress differently. The pure emotional response we know. In-person interactions were much lighter compared to remote, digital ones. Part of the perceived stress is also derived from how long it will take to get back into state or flow.
The real performance hits differ from self-reported perception. In-person interruptions were claimed to be more impactful, though the data shows there’s a positive effect to balance it out. Conversely, being interrupted during code reviews seemed to be a chill occurrence, while the data showed them to be more stressful than reported.
What you can do about interruptions
Are interruptions a concern? Yes. But are they going to stop any time soon? Hell no! The dual data vs. perception nature of the study showed an interesting action point, albeit an unintuitive one: rely on perception data (surveys) more than performance data.
Meaning, if your engineers say they’re annoyed, go off of that even if the data disagrees or is inconclusive. Augment your instrumentation with surveys, developer experience studies or 1 on 1 feedback. And notably—though you may already know this—avoid high urgency interruptions when engineering teams are involved in high-focus coding activities: code writing, review, deployments, and similar.
Find Yourself 🌻
That’s it for Today!
Whether you’re innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
See you next week(end), Ciao 👋
Credits 🙏
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Featured Authors - Addy Osmani, Marcos F. Lobo, Lizzie Matusov
Sponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
1) Subscribe — If you aren’t already, consider becoming a groCTO subscriber.
2) Share — Spread the word amongst fellow Engineering Leaders and CTOs! Your referral empowers & builds our groCTO community.