How I approach engineering management

I view engineering management as a combination of personal relationships, technical depth, a strong understanding of product and design, continuous delivery, and engineering culture.

Personal relationships

By building personal relationships with my engineers I am able to have honest conversations about performance, identify opportunities within the company that align with their career goals, and guide them through challenging engineering or interpersonal situations.

My engineers trust me, therefore I trust them.

Technical depth

With 10+ years of experience in developing web platforms using React and GraphQL I can coach any front end engineer, from lead staff engineers to early career engineers, on technical solutions, collaboration, communication, and process. I directly mentor junior engineers on engineering best practices and directly advise staff engineers on alternative technical approaches to consider.

I tailor my management style to the needs of the engineer. In some cases I'm hands on, in others I'm the rubber duck.

Strong understanding of product and design

I'm passionate about understanding H-E-B's customers. I spend my downtime at work engaging with UX design, product management, user research, and data science to identify opportunities for future initiatives and help my team better understand the impact they are having.

I find engineers are more motivated and engaged when they understand how the work they are doing impacts the user and business.

Continuous delivery

I believe in continuous delivery and when progress stagnates I first start by reviewing my engineer's relationships with their peers. Since, I work in a primarily remote environment it can be easy for work to stall because of miscommunications. I occasionally need to step in and guide product, design, and engineers through design thinking workshops and crucial conversations in order to regain momentum and build cross functional alignment.

Overall, I ensure my engineers are unblocked and are making progress on delivering for our users.

Engineering Culture

I believe in a strong engineering culture.

As an engineering leader I organize and host our weekly front end engineering meetings providing a space for the 31 front end engineers to build relationships, discuss site health, and identify opportunities for collaboration.

I looks beyond my direct team to make sure our organization has the right skills and culture in place to deliver for our customers.

For example, I've previously developed an on call program for all of our front end engineering organization that increased visibility into issues and improved issue response time.