This post is part of my weekly engineering manager competency review series. At the end of each week, I publish a review of the notes I thought over the past week. My goal is to create a log where I can capture these insights for future me to review.
The competencies below are from Square's Software Engineering Career Ladder.
Prioritization & Execution
The goal is to drive execution by organizing team work, setting goals, and holding the team accountable.
What's good
- Established OKRs for the frontend team
When I started my role as the engineering manager for the frontend team, one of my mentors suggested I focus first on setting a vision and driving alignment for the team. After thinking about it, I decided establishing team-wide OKRs might be a good first step. I also thought that this would be a good opportunity to write down objectives that align with the overall goals of the company. So far it's been going well and it gave us clarity on what we have to focus on every sprint planning.
Do Better
- Having an execution strategy for achieving our key metrics
The initial plan was to review the key metrics we established from the survey we sent to the team about blockers affecting their productivity. But I had some doubts about this because I wasn't really sure if we would be able to achieve our key metrics or the initiatives we are doing actually move our key metircs. So I consulted the team about this and one suggestion the team made is to send the survey on a regular basis so that we know our initiatives are actually moving the metrics, instead of waiting for the end of the quarter to know how the team is doing with achieving the key metrics we set for ourselves.
Action Item
- Instead of updating the FE productivity survey results on a quarterly basis, update it on a bi-weekly basis.