An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“With the right people, any process works, and with the wrong people, no process works.”

Figure 3.8 The expected and actual experience of presenting to executives. My general approach to presenting to senior leaders is: Tie topic to business value. One or two sentences to answer the question “Why should anyone care?” Establish historical narrative. Two to four sentences to help folks understand how things are going, how we got here, an

Combine efforts on opportunity and membership, and you will find yourself solidly on the path to an inclusive organization.

A prototypical head of engineering will be skilled at organizational design, process design, business strategy, recruiting, mentoring, coaching, public speaking, and written communication. They’ll also have a broad personal network and a broad foundation from product engineering to infrastructure engineering. That’s not even a particularly complete

The act of writing a strategy leads folks through a systematic analysis, so, even if we don’t share them, writing these documents helps us work through quite a few challenges, both overwhelming and mundane.

There is a lot less competition for hard work.

you can always find an opportunity to increase your scope and learning, even in a company that doesn’t have room for more directors or vice presidents.

take an hour and write up as many goals as you can for what you’d like to accomplish in the next one to five years. Then prioritize the list, pick a few that you’d like to focus on for the next three to six months, and share it with your manager at your next one-on-one.

Long term, I believe that your career will be largely defined by getting lucky and the rate at which you learn. I have no advice about luck, but to speed up learning I have two suggestions: join a rapidly expanding company, and make your peers your first team.