Module 6: Personal development

Pillars of Engineering Management

Over the past five modules, we’ve covered the core tenets of being an engineering leader – but you can’t grow and nurture your teams without also growing yourself.

Finding time to devote to self-improvement can be a challenge, and it always seems like the easiest thing to move down your priority list. It’s also harder for senior leaders to receive actionable feedback on their own work. In this final module, we’ll help you work out how to change that and how you can be more effective with your learning time.

Module 6 takeaways and homework

You learned

About the six vectors you can measure any career on (in depth skills, strategy, delivery, org leadership & management, commercial and domain-specific)
About the habits and skills you need to be a great Engineering Manager.
About the core behaviours of brilliant super senior Individual Contributors.
And about how you might want to “pendulum swing” between manager and IC roles until you hit the fork in the road.

You discussed

The implications for your own individual personal development
And then the implications for your organisation of these personal development concepts – in particular, what “shapes” of roles are needed in your org, whether that is clear to everyone, and what manager, senior IC and pendulum swings are available.

You should be able to

Better articulate your own personal development needs, wants and priorities.
Improve the visibility and availability of different roles for your team and organisation.

Exercise to go further

Take the outputs of your individual exercises today and feed them into your personal development plan.
Take the output of the group discussion and work to make career ladders and paths available for all flavours of technical leader.

Additional readings

My own thinking aligns pretty closely with Pat’s around the Trident Model of Career Development, in that we need to make space for true individual contributors as well as tech leads and managers.
The Rent The Runway career framework is one I have stolen and reapplied as a starting point a couple of times:
Sally Lait over at Farewill has done brilliant work at both Monzo and Farewill on career progression frameworks, and shared with the world.
There’s an excellent collection of a bunch of different engineering progression frameworks here (and they now have a pay-for service that will help your engineers keep track of their development too).
Marco Rogers’ keynote from #LeadDevNewYork on Creating a Career Ladder for Engineers is a really excellent overview covering key things to care about and some typical approaches.