By Amara Graham, Head of Developer Experience at Camunda
I cannot login to LinkedIn without seeing a post on layoffs. It’s been like this for weeks, maybe even months at this point; I’ve admittedly become somewhat numb to it.
As a manager, I’m responsible for my own understanding of stability, support, and safety, but also my teams. So while I’m thankful I can say with confidence that today we are ok, I cannot ignore what’s going on around us and I’d like to share three things I’m actively doing to cope as an engineering manager and support my team through the uncertainty.
Practice a strategic mindset
Long gone are the days of people managers just being people managers. Engineering managers can be promoted from within their organization or hired in for their domain expertise. Either way, you can be a good engineer and end up a manager, balancing some amount of individual contributor work and people management work. How often do you think about strategy?
It doesn’t matter how you got into management, but thinking more about the company or product strategy is only going to help you lead the team and support your reports moving forward. Maintaining a strategic mindset has you looking into the future to understand your team’s scope, hiring needs, and, most importantly, how you can be proactive and reactive to unexpected changes.
Putting your head down and hammering out code isn’t the strategy that you think it is. Learn to communicate the value of your development cycle. Find metrics that support your company’s goals and align to the strengths of your team. Throw out the lines of code and look at impact – how fast can you respond to bugs, failed tests, or iterate on product feedback? Can you identify work towards high value features? Focus on high value and high impact, placing other things in the backlog to pick up when things are a bit more stable.
Take care of your people
Be transparent with your team about what you know and what you don’t know. In return, you’ll likely get the same.
Have a report who is disengaged or not as proactive at pulling items from the backlog? It’s likely they are trying to figure out how to cope and proces the instability. Increase your check-ins and transparency. Offer to work on tasks with them or further break them down into more manageable chunks. Partner them with a buddy on the team or encourage them to work on an item that gets them more interaction and engagement with teammates.
Even if you have a super independent, high performing team of 10x developers, label your backlog with granularity so your team can pick up work when they are feeling stuck or uninspired with a bigger work item. Even in the best of times, it happens. Ruthlessly maintain your backlog so your team isn’t feeling more overwhelmed with how work is displayed there too.
Take care of yourself
You are probably being asked to do more with less. You are probably being hounded for metrics, OKRs, KPIs, and other measurable somethings that may or may not sit well with you. Working more hours a day is not healthy, nor will it likely feel like you’ve even made a considerable dent in that to do list.
At the end of the day, log off. Keep a to do list, a brag sheet, and keep tabs on what items people actually look for a status update on. If no one ever follows up on that thing they asked you to do, use that strategic mindset and bump it down on your to do list.
If you are someone that enjoys working in public, role model this behavior in a place your team can see. Take vacation. Reschedule meetings if you’ve lost focus.
Are you seeing how these three things blend together nicely? Navigating uncertainty doesn’t have to be overwhelming or adding more things to an already full plate. It’s normal to feel a bit of survivors guilt, empathy for those impacted, but this is simply a moment in time and together, we’ll get through this.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amara is the Head of Developer Experience at Camunda. Before her step into developer relations, she was an enterprise web application developer focusing on line of business applications and assisting developers across various teams on implementing proprietary and open source solutions. She’s passionate about UX, technical communities (both online and offline) and excited to see where advances in AI take us. In her spare time, she experiments in the kitchen and plays video games.
