2020 Rewind by an Engineering Manager
By: Om Vikram Thapa
Tags: Motivation, Team Building, Rewind, Management, Engineering

rewind-2020-engineering-manager

“There There”

to all of you engineering managers out there :)

We all should NOT forget what a challenging year this has been from leadership and management point of view. Not only we need to keep ourself positive and self motivated but also we need to keep the team highly motivated (Really!!) and responsible for their work(Virtually!!)

Anyways we all would have tried multiple approaches to keep things up on pace while managing the team as well as completing our quarterly goals. Balancing between stake holder management + distribution of quarterly priorities to the teams or pods and performing quarterly feedback cycles and..walking on the razor sharp sword while reminding ourselves -

YES, I GOT THIS!!

I have jolted down 5 such initiatives from my own experience which seems like working out for me (Fingers Crossed) These initiatives has a mixture of following ingredients -

I Build I Bond (IBIBO) > Slideshare Presentations Ideation & Documentation > System Design Diagrams Research & Development > Reliability Team Formation Transparency > Monday Team Meeting Process Change > ADSM is better than DSM

Before we dive deep into the detailed initiatives lets understand I have a team of 26 members, divided into 5 smaller pods, tech stack ranging from python, goLang, reactJs to reactNative. Thus there was a dire need of new ideas or initiatives in this pandemic situation because first we had never worked together virtually for so long and second — versatility in the team structure brings more complexity for engagement in common topics or activities.

1) SlideShare Presentations

slideshare-presentations-omvikram

Last year provided me plenty of time to read, articulate and understand many of the concepts which I used to touch base only on surface. A combination of Medium blogs + @Youtube videos + Udemy classes helped me to upscale by knowledge base and I thought why not share it with my team. In normal days I would have called them in a meeting room and used a whiteboard but pandemic taught us various ways of presentation medium. I am an old customer of SlideShare and I used it to the max to serve presentations on

Behavioural Science

Technology Space

Processes Adoption

This has helped me to continuously being in touch with the team while challenging myself to the latest tech, leadership & management skills.

Note — You can find my work in the below mentioned link

2) System Designs Diagrams

system-design-google-drawings

System Designing has been always part of my job and I used to take part in HLD & LLD of few real time problems. This pandemic gave all of us time to read more about system design, explore more real time problem statements and their solutions ( I recommend HighScalibility.com or MakeUseOf.com)

I found Google Drawings very useful to quickly articulate your ideas into block diagrams and thus used it heavily to document ad share System Level Designs HLD & LLD by following the 4 major steps

Step 1: Constraints and use cases Step 2: Abstract design (High Level Design) Step 3: Understanding bottlenecks Step 4: Scaling your abstract design (Low Level Design)

This way I started contributing more to the teams project which makes me more closer to their project and additionally the team members get motivated to be prepared next time for next project from system design point of view.

3) Reliability Team Formation

reliability-team-progress-confluence

Reliability is the base of any system and this is the word which develops “Trust” in your customers. This pandemic we focussed on this area since Travel Industry got hit big time and we were packed with cost optimisation and infra scale down activities, we thought this was the best time to focus on Reliability aspect of the system including streamlining Alerting & Monitoring. I wrote about it in my previous medium blog also -

I got motivated by Google & Facebook where they have a dedicated team for Reliability but at GO-MMT I started this small team of 5 members who started meeting every Friday & looking into the system in depth, they started

contributing to add Amazon Web Services CloudWatch Dashboards,

optimising the code to reduce New Relic & Logs Alerts

documenting legacy architecture & system knowledge

understanding infra thresholds

performing RCA of a production issue as Team

bringing more people onboard to be a part of Reliability Team

4) Monday TEAM Meeting

monday-team-meeting

Virtual Meetings is the new norm and lot of optimisations on saving personal time has been around in social media channels like blocking time for lunch, blackout period, babysitting time etc..

But other than DSM, Discussing common objective, Status Updates, Stake holder requests and KT Sessions we figured out that one of the weekly meeting is MUST HAVE which doesn’t discuss any of the above mentioned agendas but still a HIT among the team, this is our Monday Team Meeting.

We discuss the following in different orders every time -

Warm Up Chit Chat (Team’s Health)

Welcome to the new member (if any)

Recruitment Updates/Attrition News in the Team

Leadership Decisions or Projection for next Quarter

Any changes in the Roadmap since last week

What are we going to attack this week (as a Team)

Pretty Usual Right? But it works because the above topics bring together a very important aspect of any relationship i.e. TRANSPARENCY

Why Monday then?

Because it sets up the mood for the week

You already know what happened last week

You can set small milestones for the week

I understand this can be a long meeting and people might have Monday Blues thus we kept the timing 11 AM (not too early, not too late) so that the team can get up, freshen up and join the Monday Meeting with a hot cup of tea/coffee. This is our PRIME TIME :)

5) ADSM is better than DSM

alterate-day-dsm-calendar

Yes we are AGILE and yes we love to follow DSM but online DSMs are pain for both managers as well as the team. We learnt it by the first month of the lockdown when the Managers are exhausted because they have to be present in all the DSMs while the team members were struggling how much he/she has to repeat themselves everyday about the same project.

I know a lot of you will disagree with me but Alternate DSMs worked better than regular DSM (Its more scalable for a longer term) This way managers have more time to do something productive or take rest in between while the team members are also fresh since one of the most frequent complain you will receive from your team member this lockdown was —

I have been spending too much time in meetings

If ADSM is able to save quality development time for the team member then why NOT take the risk and move away from regular DSMs.

I would like to give a pause to my thoughts here and would like to remind you to the famous quote from our Idian Super Hero “Shaktiman”

shaktiman-famous-quote

Yes, this industry, this community doesn’t need breakthrough or path breaking ideas, these are small, regular but impactful ideas which has a long term impact on the team, their work and indirectly to the goals of the organisation. Thank you for the read guys..Please do share your initiatives or ideas to me — How you have been able to engage and motivate the team.