EP Acting Manager Retrospective
Context
Four months after I joined Engineering Productivity as a Senior Backend Engineer, my manager is leaving his role and I took on an acting manager job while we search for his replacement. My acting role started on October 7, 2022, and ended on Feb 20th, 2023. During this time I report directly to VP of Quality.
My responsibilities include
- day-to-day Engineering Productivity team operations
- triage/escalate cross-functional issues
- FY23Q4 and FY24Q1 OKR planning
- milestone planning (was not consistently done for every milestone)
- overseeing the daily status of #master-broken
- responsible for the health status of department KPIs including
- giving weekly team updates to VP of Quality
- participate in Quality leadership meetings
- discussing EP team priorities during Quality offsite
- provide performance review feedback
My responsibilities did not include
- compensation review
- performance review calibration/promotion decisions
- expense report
What went well?
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This is a very strong team, everyone is a great manager of one and capable of self-directed project ownership. We are performing well as a team and delivering results as usual despite of the sudden change of management. I am very well supported by my team during my acting journey.
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We had a successful quarter (FY23Q4) where the team made significant improvements to TtFF, master stability and review apps deployment stability. See Key Review (internal link)
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I started chatting with other managers in the company, especially team leaders of the following teams. They greatly helped me establish a high-level view of how these teams influence each other, and how to make better decisions when it comes to planning and escalation. The Delivery team also offered counter metrics on EP team results from the perspective of how we impact their teams' ability to deploy.
- Engineering Analytics
- Contributor Success
- Delivery
- Pipeline Insights
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The book The Making of a Manager was a good read, I echoed a lot of the author's experience, feeling overwhelmed and unprepared for what is to come seem like a common theme for new managers. And yet, there really is no better way to learn about management than being on the job and figuring out things as I go.
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I got to explore and sharpen my management skills, leading team through an unstable time, and in fact through a layoff, while delivering results, are valuable experiences to put on my resumé.
We didn't go well?
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My transition to acting EM happened after the previous manager has left the team, so there was a lot of anxiety at the start of the role figuring out how to get myself supported with practically 0 day-to-day guidance.
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I did not complete my acting manager training issue because I did not make a lot of time for it.
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scheduling 1:1 with folks outside my timezone could be very challenging, especially with my daughter's drop-off/pick-up duties, a couple of times resulted in me showing up late for 1:1s. At the start of the job I tried having 11pm/midnight/early morning meetings all within one week, and that was not sustainable. Thankfully only one late-night meeting remained after the team adjusted their time for me. Having one 11pm meeting every Wednesday was a bit easier to cope with. Still not ideal though, but it was the best we could do.
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Team members are experiencing a lot of distractions from supporting master-broken, review-apps-broken, GDK, gitpod, and answering questions in the EP team channel on various pipeline and tooling problems. The amount of reactive work sometimes supersedes the planned work. I do not feel that I made any effective improvement on reducing this stress for the team.
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I personally do not find async retro effective. Team engagement on the team retrospective issues were generally low.
Other neutral observations
- the EP team is owning a lot of different work streams, JiHu, GDK, Review Apps infra, Triage-ops, Pipelines, and other toolings (danger, roulette, Gitlab Styles, etc). So the EM for this team is also a part-time PM for multiple products, this requires constant calibration of how to distribute attention, the ability to grasp and report the current status of each work stream to management, offer guidance and support to team members, while not having enough capacity to dive into all of the technicals. The manager needs to be comfortable with being selective on what to learn and embrace only the superficial knowledge of the rest. This is also not a bad thing, since this team is strong and dependable, which also means they will make sure to raise alerts when things need eyes from a manager. I would say this is a great team to practice management as the opportunity to overcome this kind of challenge is rare.
How to improve? Perhaps with a different process? Automation?
- For a merge request, I find our Reviewer Roulette section quite bulky, see below. Do we really need to leave all of these messages in a merge request, or can we replace the paragraph with a link to a handbook page?
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The EP team is supporting all automation changes required in the event of group/category/stage restructure. It can be made more clear in the EP handbook how to self-serve these changes.
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The Updating the list of projects process has always been a big question mark for me. Why is EP team manager always involved in these MRs? If the self-service dashboard is sufficient, should we delegate the approval process to the managers/directors who have actual context about the projects being added?