Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

My management principles, values, and practices

2 min read

Although there is 📜 No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering, I generally believe that…

The role

This is what I think: ✍️ Déjame sin trabajo, por favor. tl;dr:

  • An EM needs to be technical.
  • North star metric: “time I spend in VSCode”, as a proxy metric for “we no longer need an engineering manager”, so I can either enjoy creating with my own two hands or focusing on bigger strategy problems.
  • I don’t want to be a manager and I will look for ways to make myself redundant and not needed. I would love to live in a world in which we need no manager roles and I suspect these could be bullshit jobs. The reality is that I haven’t found a company in which the role is not needed (but have found ways to be less needed over time).

People

Process

  • People hate it, but a good work process is key (Process allergy). I’ve seen waaaay more problems caused by chaos and misalignment that by overfocusing on a goal.
  • Single Queue of Work (a queue for operative work, a queue for retro actions… that doesn’t work).
  • A single topic per sprint.
  • Retrospective:
    • Prepare beforehand and discuss:
      • Delivered value.
      • Team metrics.
  • Checklists:
    • “Sentinel” checklist.

Product

Tech

  • Have very good reasons to hack a framework.
  • Have very very good reasons to build vs. buy if it’s not your core business .

Other

Decision making

Time management

Almost everything in 📖 The Effective Executive and 📖 Four Thousand Weeks. Particularly:

  • Even if I focus on critical tasks, they will always exceed my available time.
  • I can only focus on one at a time.
  • I will timebox my efforts to avoid exceeding the attention I give to an area and to work in general.
  • I have to be wary of not entering into my “clearing the docks” mode. ✍️ The human side of a bill shock.

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