Managing Managers

The final episode of the podcast (or at least the first season)

Laura is not only a coach to engineering leaders but also the CTO at DX, a company focused on improving developer productivity. But Laura has been talking about development metrics for a lot longer, and in this episode, we dive deep into the latest research, concrete measures for development teams and their managers, and more! Guest Biography Laura Tacho is CTO at DX, a developer experience company. She’s been building developer tools and working on improving developer productivity for over 10 years, all the way from the heyday of IaaS and PaaS on cloud, through Docker and containers, CI/CD, and now as part of DX. She’s also an executive coach for engineering leaders and an expert in building world-class engineering organisations that consistently deliver outstanding results. Laura has coached CTOs and other engineering leaders from startups to the Fortune 500, and also facilitates a popular course on metrics and engineering team performance. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauratacho/  Twitter: https://x.com/rhein_wein  Website: https://lauratacho.com/ Full transcript and show notes: See https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-030-laura-tacho/

Meri has a tonne of experience managing managers as a serial CTO, and we chat about everything from being a non-executive director, common traps of first-time directors/VPs of Engineering, what they look for when interviewing managers of managers, and so much more. Guest biography: Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations, currently leading the technology team at Pleo. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organisations, and works as a CTO coach and tech advisor to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.  They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organisations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others. A published author and international speaker, they are the chair of The Lead Developer conference, and a tech advisor for Kindred Capital. Together with their wife, they run micro-charity One Goes Up to help young women & enby folks pursue STEM education & careers. Transcript and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-029-meri-williams/

The Financial Times (FT) uniquely combines individual contributor and management responsibilities in senior engineering roles. In this episode, I talk to Tech Director Alice Bartlett about what that’s like for her, how tech skills (at that level) are not necessarily key skills, and how it’s more important to have strong leadership skills, which includes managing your energy (and your calendar!) Listen to this episode for more insights and to hear Alice’s leadership journey in tech. Guest Biography: Alice is a tech director at the Financial Times. She oversees the team that builds and maintains FT.com and the apps. She has been at the FT for eight years and managing managers for about 5 years. She lives in Brighton with her family. Transcript and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-028-alice-bartlett/

I’m so pleased I got to chat with Lena, who happens to also be based in my hometown, Berlin. In this episode, we chat about the challenges of being a middle manager, becoming an accidental leader, what she does when she talks about organisational development, the differences of supporting Directors+ as an external independent person (versus being a manager), the challenges she sees as people transition to managing managers. Listen to this episode to hear these themes and so much more. Guest Biography: Lena Reinhard has dedicated her career to helping technology leaders build successful engineering organisations. Her background includes roles as VP Engineering at CircleCI and Travis CI, along with being a co-founder and CEO of a SaaS startup. She's committed her career to supporting leaders and their teams during times of rapid change and tough market conditions. Lena's supported with a diverse range of companies across the globe, from early-stage startups, scale-ups, to corporations, and NGOs. She now works as a leadership coach, management trainer, and organisational developer, and hosts the podcast “Leadership Confidential” with real talk about leadership beyond the clichés and challenges of leading teams and organisations, and how to deal with them. Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-027-lena-reinhard/

Although we’ve never worked together, it seems like CTO Crystal Hirschorn and I were positively influenced by many movements in tech such as XP, lean and systems thinking and in this episode we chat about how that has influenced her management style. A key element of a lot of that is the idea of building a blameless culture and listening in to hear about some ideas of leading and lagging indicators of good engineering culture and much more. Guest biography: Crystal is an experienced Engineering Leader having held various VP and Senior Director of Software Engineering roles, with a career spanning more than 20 years in the Technology industry. The majority of her career has been a mixture of technical leadership, hands-on software engineering, and engineering management. She has managed managers for several years. She’s a resilience engineering advocate and long-time practitioner and advocate of Lean, XP, and DevOps practices to build a successful engineering culture. She is currently the CTO at Zoa – a green energy tech start up. Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-026-crystal-hirschorn/

In this conversation with VP of Engineering, Sarah Pimentel Abrantes, we cover the importance of being a leader before being a manager, the challenge of letting go at different stages, how to counteract authority differences in skip levels and also managing areas where you don’t necessarily have that background and much more. Guest Biography: Sarah Abrantes has experienced a lot of different tech roles over her career. She’s collected knowledge from development, business analysis, process engineering, testing and management, all acquired in a vast range of company and team sizes.She has played senior management roles and helped level up engineering leads over the last years in organisations such as GoEuro, N26, GetYourGuide and Tier Mobility, having recently joined Adyen as VP of Engineering.  Sarah also presented at LeadingEng Berlin in 2023, so go check out her talk called “Influencing your company’s culture from the driver’s seat” Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-025-sarah-abrantes/

Although currently Director of Platform Engineering, Jess Mink is an unusual manager of manager in tech, who’s also played a full-time product role. Listen to this episode as they explain what they took away from that experience, their perspective on how engineering managers differ from other managers, and share their managing manager roles change across different organisations and contexts. Guest Biography: Jess is passionate about building strong, productive technical organizations that are focused on outcomes. While some people are fascinated by architecting code Jess loves to understand and debug human systems.  Developer tools and health tech companies speak to them and despite seeking engineering roles they have a habit of taking on product roles when needed. They've worked at companies such as Auth0, FOLX and Amazon and held roles from Director of Engineering to VP of Product.  They are currently Director of Platform Engineering at Honeycomb.io.  In their spare time they volunteer doing Search and Rescue. Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-024-jess-mink/

Maggie Litton has held many senior management roles across many different companies and in this episode gives us an insight into some of the ways the manager of manager role changes. To me, she is a great role model of a successful manager from a non-traditional career path and offers insights into so many dimensions of being a manager of managers. Listen carefully towards the end to some of the failure modes of strategy, and what not to do if you’re a senior manager. Guest Biography: Maggie loves building organisations that enable people to do useful things. She's worked at Fortune 500 enterprises and startups of all stages. She specialises in optimising remote organisations and reducing accidental complexity.  Maggie is currently Director of Engineering at HashiCorp. Transcript and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-023-maggie-litton/

In this conversation with VP Engineering at the NY Times, David Yee, we cover a huge amount of ground from how delegation differs for managers of managers, the focus on principles over tasks, adapting your management style, bad reasons why people want to be a director and what does ethical engineering management mean to him. Listen to this episode for more. Guest Biography: David Yee is VP of Engineering at the New York Times. As an engineering leader, he’s built and scaled teams at both small and enormous companies in the worlds of journalism, music, and art—with an emphasis on product-oriented engineering and humane management. His career has included roles as Chief Architect and co-founder at 20 by 200, co-founder and CTO at Editorially, and Engineering Director of Chorus at Vox Media Website: http://tangentialism.com/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/tangentialism Mastodon: https://yee.camp/@david  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-yee-3643651/ Episode Transcript and Show Notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-022-david-yee/