🧠 _

I’ve been a big fan of Dan’s writing for a while. You might have read some of his articles on management in my Level Up newsletter. In this episode, he shines a light on how he found himself in his first managing managers role, how he sees management as his true calling, how management might not be everyone’s cup of tea and how to deal with the ambiguity of the role.

Guest Biography

Dan Na is the Engineering Director of the Market Expansion organization at Squarespace in NYC. Previously he was a Staff Engineer at Squarespace and an Engineering Manager at Etsy. He loves learning and teaching in a collaborative environment and solving both the technical and people problems of shipping software. He’s a weather-agnostic iced coffee drinker, a mediocre golfer, an NBA basketball fan and loves spending time with his family.

Social links:

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-016-dan-na/

Although currently Director of Platform Engineering, Jess Mink is an unusual manager of manager in tech, who’s also played a full-time product role. Listen to this episode as they explain what they took away from that experience, their perspective on how engineering managers differ from other managers, and share their managing manager roles change across different organisations and contexts.

Guest Biography:

Jess is passionate about building strong, productive technical organizations that are focused on outcomes. While some people are fascinated by architecting code Jess loves to understand and debug human systems.  Developer tools and health tech companies speak to them and despite seeking engineering roles they have a habit of taking on product roles when needed. They've worked at companies such as Auth0, FOLX and Amazon and held roles from Director of Engineering to VP of Product.  They are currently Director of Platform Engineering at Honeycomb.io.  In their spare time they volunteer doing Search and Rescue.

Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-024-jess-mink/

In this conversation with VP of Engineering, Sarah Pimentel Abrantes, we cover the importance of being a leader before being a manager, the challenge of letting go at different stages, how to counteract authority differences in skip levels and also managing areas where you don’t necessarily have that background and much more.

Guest Biography:

Sarah Abrantes has experienced a lot of different tech roles over her career. She’s collected knowledge from development, business analysis, process engineering, testing and management, all acquired in a vast range of company and team sizes.She has played senior management roles and helped level up engineering leads over the last years in organisations such as GoEuro, N26, GetYourGuide and Tier Mobility, having recently joined Adyen as VP of Engineering. 

Sarah also presented at LeadingEng Berlin in 2023, so go check out her talk called “Influencing your company’s culture from the driver’s seat”

Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-025-sarah-abrantes/

“Strong teams embrace conflict. They use it as a tool, and they have their great way of handling disagreements."

Hari Haralambiev is co-founder of SoftSkillsPills.com and author of the leadership newsletter “A Leader’s Tale”. In this episode, we discuss essential elements of team leadership and dynamics. Hari begins by sharing his insights on what makes a great software development team, emphasizing the importance of creating the right environment for collaboration and sustainable results. He introduces the TReE team model, a framework for assessing team dynamics, which stands for Trust, Results, and Evolution.

Our conversation also explores the significance of handling conflicts and disagreements within teams, highlighting the role of leaders in fostering healthy conflict resolution. Hari provides strategies for maintaining team engagement during challenging times, such as layoffs and the pandemic, emphasizing the importance of open communication, focusing on controllable objectives, and the importance of authenticity and vulnerability in leadership.  

Listen out for:

_____

Hari Haralambiev’s Bio
Hari started his 20-year career in the IT industry as a software engineer, led dozens of projects as a manager of software teams, and reached the position of Innovation Director before starting his own company. For the past 10 years, he has focused on helping tech people work better together through team coaching and leadership & soft skills training. Hari is co-founder of SoftSkillsPills.com, the platform for dev teams who care about people, co-host of the popular Bulgarian podcast for IT people Radio Tochka 2, and author of the leadership newsletter/comic A Leader’s Tale.

Follow Hari:

_____

Our Sponsors

Enjoy an exceptional developer experience with JetBrains. Whatever programming language and technology you use, JetBrains IDEs provide the tools you need to go beyond simple code editing and excel as a developer.
Check out FREE coding software options and special offers on jetbrains.com/store/#discounts.
Make it happen. With code.

Manning Publications is a premier publisher of technical books on computer and software development topics for both experienced developers and new learners alike. Manning prides itself on being independently owned and operated, and for paving the way for innovative initiatives, such as early access book content and protection-free PDF formats that are now industry standard.
Get a 40% discount for Tech Lead Journal listeners by using the code techlead24 for all products in all formats.

Like this episode?
Show notes & transcript: techleadjournal.dev/episodes/183.
Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
Buy me a coffee or become a patron.