Managing Managers

Senior Director of Engineering, Katie Wilde and I chat about her unusual path into tech, "falling" into her first managing managers role and the signals that you can look out for to determine the performance of managers and their teams. She also offers a few reasons why managing managers is not for everyone. Listen to this episode to find out more.

Guest Biography:

Katie Wilde is currently Senior Director of Engineering at Snyk Cloud and has played other roles like VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs and Buffer. She co-authored the O’Reilly books “97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know” and “Atomic Migration Strategy for Web Teams” and is also co-author for the Holloway Guide to Remote Work.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-011-katie-wilde/

Nickolas Means is a very thoughtful and calm engineering leader who I was lucky enough to meet through a number of conferences. He's a wonderful story teller and in our chat, we talk about his growth story, the power of peer mentoring, building your own mentoring support group, long feedback loops, metrics for engineering teams, managing up and much more.

Guest Biography:

Nickolas Means is an engineer turned engineering leader who’s been leading teams at companies large and small for the last decade. He’s a student of disasters like airplane crashes and a fantastic storyteller, who I’ve been able to see and hear firsthand at several LeadDev conferences. He’s currently VP of Engineering at Sym, which builds the most developer-friendly way to secure your production infrastructure and has his own podcast called Managing Up.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-010-nickolas-means/

Theresa Neate and I have a common passion for systems thinking, so join us in this conversation where we talk about the serendipity of leadership roles, how managers of managers look for future talent and understand what the "do no harm" principle looks like for engineering leaders.

Guest Biography:

Theresa Neate is an award winning senior leader with a background in service desk, software delivery, quality engineering and platform developer experience, who loves lean and agility and advocates for holistic system quality and systems thinking. She has an additional side interest in cloud, infrastructure and networking. She has also written on the subjects, including contributing 2 chapters to a published O'Reilly book.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-009-theresa-neate/

Tramale Turner has a lot of leadership and management experience to share, across a broad range of fascinating companies. In this episode we cover topics like the importance of introspective, the skill in spotting strengths in others and what it means to build not just good teams, but great ones.

Guest Biography:

Tramale is a highly experienced and motivated technical professional and is currently SVP of Engineering at ActionIQ. He has previously worked as CTO at Taxbit and Head of Engineering at Stripe. Prior to Stripe Tramale has held engineering leadership roles at companies such as F5 Networks and Nintendo, and technical and marketing leadership roles at Critical Mass and Volkswagen.

He has a passion for developing technology leaders at all levels, and is determined to hear underrepresented voices amplified in our industry.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-008-tramale-turner/

Danielle Leong, a tremendous VP of Engineering and impressive portrait photographer, chats with me about what the importance of role modelling, the impact of restructuring and how managers of managers need to live further into the future.

Guest Biography:

Danielle is a seasoned engineering leader who is passionate about creating healthy, inclusive, productive engineering teams and helping them do their best work. She has a wealth of experience ranging from building teams at pre-seed startups to Director of Identity at GitHub to being an early engineer at Twilio. Danielle is also the creator and founder of Feerless, an app that provided crowd-sourced, preemptive notifications for Netflix users with PTSD. In her spare time, she runs a photography studio that specialises in colourful, fun, and inclusive headshots. 

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-007-danielle-leong/

In this episode I chat to the Director of Engineering at Choco, Gabriel Michels, where he discusses the evolution of the EM role, where to get support as a managing of managers and setting appropriate goals.

Guest Biography:

Gab has been in the industry since 15 years. He started his adventure at RTL, rode the wave of browser games at Bigpoint and Gamesys, and started and failed a startup. Today Gab is on the journey to transition the food industry to more sustainable food systems with Choco. He has seen the company's birth as a software engineer from day 1 and today is a Director of Engineering.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-006-gabriel-michels/

In this episode, I chat with Anita Singh, who stepped into a managing manager role at the rapidly growing ultrafast grocery delivery company Gorillas and shared her experience of this in a talk at LeadDev Berlin 2022. We talk about the feeling of more responsibility but with less control and how the perspective of the first team changes.

Guest biography:

Anita is an engineering leader who is passionate about building mobile apps and empowering teams to build quality software that delights users. After spending a couple of years working for bigger public tech companies, Anita has since worked at startups in both Silicon Valley and Berlin, where she has scaled teams, culture, processes and software from the ground up. She enjoys coaching engineering managers and staff engineers in her current role and hopes to continue on this path.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-005-anita-singh/

Episode description

In this episode, I chat to an engineer director who has done the pendulum swing (from manager to individual contributor to back to being a manager), working in hypergrowth environments and one of the earliest microservices architectures where he first wrong about the Backend For Front-Ends (BFF) pattern and what he's doing now to help engineering managers.

Guest Biography

Phil has been leading software teams in their hyper-growth stages since the early 2000s. He headed product engineering at SoundCloud and DigitalOcean, and platform engineering at Meetup and SeatGeek. He is currently a co-founder of Outropy.ai, the Copilot for Leaders.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-004-phil-calcado/

Episode description

In this episode, I chat to an experienced engineering leader who has worked in a global, remote context managing other managers, has done formal co-active coaching training and discusses its relevance to managing other managers.

Guest Biography

Cate Huston is an engineering director at DuckDuckGo and an advisor at Glowforge. She previously worked at Automattic where she led the mobile Jetpack and Developer Experience teams and Cate administers the new-ish manager slack and writes regularly. She is currently writing the O'Reilly book, "The Engineering Leader", coming out in early 2024.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-003-cate-huston/

Episode description

In this episode, I chat to the person who literally wrote a book on Engineering Management, about his journey into managing other managers in a high-growth startup, and the experience of moving to a massive fast-moving company at Shopify.

Guest Biography

James Stanier is a Director of Engineering at Shopify. He is also the author of Become an Effective Software Manager and Effective Remote Work. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science and runs theengineeringmanager.com

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-002-james-stanier/