Summary: “The New Engineering Manager’s Handbook” by Oren Ellenbogen offers valuable lessons for engineers transitioning to management roles. It emphasizes the importance of balancing managerial duties with technical tasks and making informed decisions while fostering team trust and communication. The book also highlights the need for engineering managers to focus on business outcomes and develop mental resilience.
Our job as managers is to amplify our teammates. (View Highlight)
Start by writing down your decisions. Any time you have a dillema, just note it in a spreadsheet. (View Highlight)
as managers and leaders, we need to care deeply and thoroughly about our people, while not worrying about what they think of us. (View Highlight)
Technical Debt is less scary than getting out of business - optimizing code or scaling up components that may or may not be used is sticking our heads in the sand. (View Highlight)
I love to use the famous Pirate Metrics (AARRR) framework for that:
• Acquisition – Figure out how to bring more users to our application.
• Activation – Make sure the user enjoys 1st time experience.
• Retention – Increase repetitive visits to our application.
• Referrer – Incentivize your users to bring their friends.
• Revenue – Monetize our users. (View Highlight)
Building mental resiliency is a critical muscle - it’s very hard to build a sustainable team that delivers well where managers struggle to keep up emotionally and technically. (View Highlight)