Technical managers are often promoted to their positions of leadership by rising through the ranks – more so than most other disciplines. Technology leaders need to assess technical options, align recommendations with business requirements, and communicate these decisions to non-technical stakeholders. If technology managers don’t understand the technology at a detailed level, it’s difficult for them to make the right call. The challenge is that being a great engineer doesn’t automatically translate into being a great leader. Leadership – technical or otherwise – is not something one is born with; it is a skill that is developed over a lifetime.

1. Managing Human vs Bits
Kiran Patel - Director of Engineering, Shutterstock
@kpatel79

2. ABOUT ME

3. COMPANIES
- Sprint
- Condé Nast
- Startups
- Shutterstock

4. JOBS
- Software Engineer
- Production Support Specialist
- RF Engineer
- Tech Lead
- Engineering Manager
- Director of Engineering

5. HOW MIGHT ONE BECOME A MANAGER?

6. Accidentally OR Intentionally

7. WHAT ABOUT ME…

8. In the beginning,
I said “NO” to Engineering Management

9. MANAGER : “I’m drowning,
can you manage this team
for me?”
ME : Ummm…Sure…

10. - Leading technical conversations
- Offering hands when seeing struggling
teammates
- Caring others productivity and outcome
along with my own
- Involving in hiring great talent and enabling
them to build great products
I started…

11. I started enjoying optimizing people,
more than code.

12. “One of the great things
about building a team is the
amazing people that you
can hire and work with you.”
Ben Horowitz – The Hard Thing About Hard Things

13. HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU’RE READY?

14. MANAGE IN THREE DIMENTIONS

15. MANAGE IN THREE DIMENTIONS
TEAM

16. MANAGE IN THREE DIMENTIONS
TEAM
PEERS

17. MANAGE IN THREE DIMENTIONS
TEAM
PEERS MANAGER

18. YOUR TEAM
- Can you effectively lead engineers, particularly your
former colleagues?
- Do you fully understand the work?
- Will you take responsibilities for your team?

19. YOUR PEERS
- Can you work well with your fellow managers?
- Do you communicate effectively with your peers?

20. YOUR MANAGER
- Can you give clear snapshots of the projects for
managers?
- Can you skillfully push back if you disagree with
your manager?
- Can you manage up?

21. “Manager’s job is not to
make people work, but to
enable people to work.”
Tom Demarco – Peopleware – Productive Projects &
Teams

22. DON’T MANAGE…
- Only to advance your career
- In order to please your boss
- To ”take one for the team”

23. MANAGE IF…
- Growth for you involves others
- You channel empathy
- You can give the trust you ask from others

24. WELCOME TO THE MANAGEMENT

25. Get ready to say goodbye to coding

26. Get ready to say goodbye to coding
Get ready to say “HELLO” to team

27. - Unintuitive
- Individualized
- Constantly Iterative
- About people
- Often an anti-pattern
ENGINERRING MANAGEMENT IS

28. “The fundamental response
to change is not logical, it’s
emotional.”

29. RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

30. GET TO KNOW YOURSELF
- Time management
- Sleep management
- When are you at your best?
- Fighting or Flighting?
- Happy, learning, growing?
- Can you scale?
- Constant reflection

31. SEEK HELP, IMMEDIATELY
- Find yourself a mentor
- Educate yourself
- Solicit feedback, Listen
- Count on sr. team members
- Embrace failures

32. COMMUNICATION
- Revisit every time you double your team
- General – email, slack, hangout
- Team - 1-1, direct reports
- Company – all hands

33. - Pragmatism
- Systems Scale vs People Scale
- Individual + Team Motivation
- Parse personality and performance
- Find your truth-teller
INDIVIDUALS

34. “There are two things you
should always be thinking
about: People's day-to-day
and their year-to-year.”

35. - You're directly supporting the people on your team
- you're managing execution and coordination across
teams
- you're stepping back to observe and evolve the
broader organization and its processes as it grows
When engineering management
is done right, you're focusing on
three big things…

36. MY KINDLE
- The Hard Things about Hard Things
- Managing Humans
- Creativity Inc.
- The Phoenix Projects
- The Goal – A Process of Ongoing Improvement
- The Power of Habit
- Extreme Ownership : How U.S. Navy Seal Lead
and Win

37. Join Our Team @shutterstock
We empower our product and tech teams to push boundaries
and build a lot of really cool systems at scale.
COLLABORATIVE AGILE EXPERIMENTAL DATA-DRIVEN
See what we’ve been working on by checking out @ tech.shutterstock.com & career.shutterstock.com

38. Thank y u