What We're Assuming about You

This course is suitable for anyone who is:

• Aspiring to become a manager. You’d like to step up the ladder and lead a team.
• Currently a first-level manager. You have hiring/firing authority over the people on a team.
• Currently a leader of leaders. You have people who lead teams reporting to you.

If you’re much higher than that, the chances are that what we discuss here will be material you’re already comfortable with. More to the point, the further up the hierarchy you go, the less tactical and “engineering-specific” the advice becomes, and the more “strategic” you have to think.

If you browse the “management” section of your favorite bookstore, you’ll find that performance management advice is often geared towards the people in the “C-suite” (the CEO, CTO, and so on), who have the power to set policy across the company, or the “VP suite,” where an individual can have near-total control over the policies within a certain department or division.

When you’re a first- or second-level manager, you’re often on the receiving end of those policies, with little to no ability to change them. As a result, we will focus less on the shaping and strategy of such policy, and focus more on the things we can do to tactically influence the team.

Additionally, we’re assuming you’re at a company of some size (not a self-funded startup), with an engineering group of at least 50 or so people in total. (If you’re at a startup, there’s a lot of lines that get blurred all across the organization, and your role as an engineering manager is likely to be much, much broader than what we assume here. There’s still likely to be a lot of good material here for you, just be aware that some of the formalities that we discuss won’t be there to support you in an early-stage startup.)