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Is it possible, as an engineering manager, to nail your day job and go above-and-beyond to effect organizational change, without burning the midnight oil?
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed as an engineering manager. But how is it that some engineering managers work flat-out managing a handful of reports, whereas others can juggle multiple teams without (seemingly) breaking a sweat?
This talk is all about how to spend your most precious resource as an engineering manager: your time. We’ll look at the “buckets” you should be investing your time in – people, process, interfacing, technical, hiring and strategy – and how that investment typically evolves as you increase your scope. We’ll look at how you can setup effective filter systems, to avoid information overload while ensuring nothing gets missed. We’ll also explore how to catch the trickiest problems you’ll face as an engineering manager early, to avoid cascading failures that will quickly eat up your bandwidth.
Finally, we’ll look at how to strategically spend a little of the time that you earn back, to work on high-impact, org-wide initiatives. Taking a couple of examples from myself and colleagues, we’ll see how spending just a few hours a week addressing your organization’s hardest challenges can be genuinely transformative – both for your company, and for your own career.
The talk aims to be as practical as possible – giving specific, actionable advice and examples throughout. Attendees should leave being able to more strategically spend their time, and create better work-life balance without sacrificing their impact.
