Activities

Some of the activities we want you as an Engineering Manager to engage with include:

• retention (maintain and improve professional satisfaction, show the team that contribution matters and that we understand the impact and challenges)
  • expect to share some degree of public praise when earned, “catch people doing something right” and then amplify it
• regular, weekly 1:1s with each direct report (informal continuous feedback) ****
  • ensure these are focused on delivery and care
  • here is a 1:1 guide and ‣ (includes guiding notes) for you and your team member to log interactions
  • Team member gradually assumes responsibility - takes control, leads meeting
  • ensure 1:1s are effective when carried out remotely, as many or most are
• talent acquisition
  • our team is talented, hardworking, friendly and honest, and we expect to keep it this way even as we grow
  • we monitor our candidate pipeline on Lever (we should expect to problem solve and communicate when hiring timeframes exceed norms)
  • help to build and refine our Engineering ‣ and then train our engineers to interview
    • including developing our value proposition to reflect/uncover why Prismic is the best place for a candidate to do very best work
  • interviews
    • improve our Engineering interview process
    • engage and interview with new prospective hires
  • improve our ‣
• enablement
  • help product squad to develop technical, software engineering skills
    • share and develop broad-based skill support with ‣ and ‣
  • help product squad to achieve its leadership aims (ensuring each team member has the opportunity to contribute and develop as a leader)
  • work with Engineering Leadership to develop career paths and opportunities for growth
  • Encourage engineers training opportunities (tech conference, webinar, online training, public speaking etc)
  • bolster our ‣ page with enablement articles, suggestions and other skill-building assets to amplify concepts across the org
    • generally build tools that might be useful via coaching/mentoring, or for team members to self guide their own development

When engaged with product squads, keep team members engaged and have them own their technical project or process optimizations

While considering activities and leadership, it is worth reviewing ‣

Leadership

Leadership determines a team member’s experience. The team member’s experience is key to their satisfaction and retention, to product and platform quality, to how Prismic competes, and to how efficient we are. Leadership is key to trust.

When we talk about leadership, our core values are: fairness, ethics, compassion and appreciation — we expect our leaders to do and say things that benefit all concerned. We abide by the rule of “whoever needs it most,” which means, when we’re making a decision that necessarily favours one party (we’ve boxed ourselves in to “pie slicing”), then we assess and observe who must live with the consequences and factor this into the decision.

We are currently articulating, embedding and enforcing norms for how Engineering works together.

Weekly, we meet in a recurring Engineering Leadership meeting to reflect on this activity and generally to more deeply embed our culture

• expect that we will confront any behaviour that undermines organizational performance
• expect the agenda for the Engineering leadership meeting to be pre-populated before we meet
• help to turn the work of engineering leadership into an Engineering-wide code of values and integrity that is clear, consistent and compelling — and communicate this work in the form of the Engineering Vision, broadly shared in the ‣

It must be part to the mission of leadership to reduce or cap overhead

• If overhead (company-wide meetings and engineering-wide specific recurring items) exceeds 3.5 hours per week, we want to be aware of it 🚨
• If team overhead (planning and rituals) exceeds 3.5 hours per week, we also want to be aware of it 🚨
• Engineers prefer to group meetings into contiguous blocks (”one long interruption”, “paying all of our taxes at once”), rather than to space out meetings at “chaotic” intervals (e.g. one meeting every 2.5 hours) that have a permanently damaging effect to focus - preserve team sanity by blocking and grouping meetings for a period (e.g. end of day), and try to ensure there are large chunks of available space for the team focus time
• Meet with a good purpose in mind - overhead contributions should allow our team to strengthen relationships and to clarify priorities, to strengthen our roots. Synchronous time is expensive, spend it wisely