Convert Manage stage engineering managers to fullstack managers
Summary
Convert the Manage stage's engineering managers to fullstack managers in order to optimize efficiency, improve accountability, and foster better career development and growth opportunities for the stage as a whole. This applies only to managers, and not the engineers, who will remain backend/frontend.
Problem to solve
EMs in Manage are responsible for their team members and collaborating with product managers and other counterparts across multiple groups within the stage. This is inefficient given the constant context switching between vast product contexts within an already large scope that is Manage's product ecosystem. In addition, each group now faces its own set of large initiatives and has no plans for growth (team splits, new manager hires, realignments, etc.)
Because EMs who manage 2-3 groups spend the majority of their time addressing top priorities, lower priorities with less attention on them result in larger consequences.
The cost of our current structure has resulted in:
- a reduced ability for EMs to proactively identify improvements or opportunities for the organizations they belong to (scalability impacts, technical debt, engineering allocation recommendations, etc)
- a reduced depth of knowledge within a specific product area given they have to try to stay on top of what's going on across multiple product areas
- delays in hiring, as there is limited capacity to process the pipelines or properly source for any given req
- triage reports not being resolved on a regular basis, which can lead to a growing security backlog
- reduced participation in agile ceremonies such as retrospectives, resulting in overall lower participation
- little to no time to pursue action items as a result of team member engagement surveys, resulting in low expectations that anything will come of them
- reduced time to get to other managerial tasks (consistent reviews, reviewing performance indicators, triaging stale issues, improving workflow processes), as the amount of administrative work is multiplied by each group managed for simpler tasks
- longer response times to counterparts and sometimes leadership
- lack of attention on our own growth and development
Proposal
By having a 1-1 mapping of engineering managers to groups, their time is now focused into one group which address a lot of the pain points outlined above.
Strategically, this best sets up the engineering teams to meet the constantly increasing demand to deliver on revenue-based initiatives, security and reliability topics, promote positive changes outside of the stage, and to better develop the careers of those within the stage.
Additional advantages include:
- allow EMs to stay focused in one product context, identifying and addressing problems much more quickly than if charged with multiple groups, given that we have enough engineering managers to engineering groups
- improve accountability and collaboration between engineering and its counterparts, meaning more "EM time" able to be spent on product direction, reliability, performance, usability, and scalability topics
- promote better growth and development of individual contributors (iteration coaching, diversity initiatives, etc), given that managers are dialed into one group
The conversion of Manage engineering teams to fullstack will occur on February 24, 2022.
Current stage structure
New stage structure
Pros
- Nobody has a brand new manager
- Great career opportunities to focus on role-specific goals
Risks
- Knowledge gaps given managers have spent a long duration focused on one discipline
- Steps to address
- Lean on each other for knowledge gaps
- Pursue training options to help fill gap
- Lean on / or build up staff+ eng positions in order to provide robust technical guidance moving forward
- Steps to address
Approvals
-
Engineering Managers (5) -
@dennis (Auth/Compliance/Workspace FE) -
@djensen (Compliance/Optimize BE) -
@lmcandrew (Auth/Import BE) -
@mksionek (Workspace) -
@wortschi (Import/Optimize FE)
-
-
Senior Engineering Manager (@m_gill) -
Group Product Manager (Orit Golowinski) -
Director of Engineering, Dev (Tim Zallmann)
Discussed + Greenlighted by
-
VP of Product Management (David DeSantos) -
VP of Development (Christopher Lefelhocz) -
Chief Technology Officer (Eric Johnson) -
People Business Partner (Giuliana Lucchesi)
Timeline and Tasks/TODOs
-
2022-01-26 Create proposal -
2022-02-03 Receive all approvals -
2022-02-07 Inform all directly impacted team members -
2022-02-07 Team announcement -
2022-02-24 Update EM job titles: gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!98667 (merged) -
2022-02-24 Move to Fullstack Teams -
2022-02-24 Complete transition 1-1-1s with previous manager, new manager, direct report -
2022-02-24 Update async-retrospectives
project (retrospective issues): gitlab-org/async-retrospectives!465 (merged)
-
2022-02-24 Update triage-ops
project (triage report emails): gitlab-org/quality/triage-ops!1151 (merged) -
2022-02-24 Update www-gitlab-com
project (handbook group member lists): gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!98667 (merged)