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Engineering Manager Principles

By Vlad Zams.   

management

Those are mine and sharing doesn’t imply obligations.

0_ Good team can feel good when its members feel and observe increasing productivity and a little stress.

1_ When the productivity in the internal team environment decreases, I should be the 1st who spots it, I should be the 1st who initiates an action for fixing it and the last who ever thinks about it after it’s been recovered.

2_ When the amount of stress in the external environment increases, I should be the one who takes that emotional heat and spreads as little as I can to anyone else, especially the team members.

3_ When stress increases in the internal environment, I should be at maximum the 3rd person who notices that, and the 3rd person only who discusses that during the work hours.

4_ When productivity in the external environment decreases, I should be at maximum the 3rd person in the team who is getting that news if that news comes from within the team and the 1st person if it comes from outside of the team.

5_ When none of the above happens, team productivity is increasing without anyone doing anything special. That is, good product teams accelerate on their own. That’s it, productivity goes up and stress levels go down.

6_ When there is no increase in stress and no decrease in productivity, I should be improving technical aspects of team work: automating the processes, reviewing relevance and increasing visibility of certain metrics and the precision of measuring them.