The First 30 Days: A short primer for engineering leaders joining a new org
Tags: engineering, leadership, newrole
Published: 2024-04-29 23:59:47

---
title: The First 30 Days: A short primer for engineering leaders joining a new org
published: true
description: Strategies for engineering leaders new to an organization on create a plan to optimize performance across people, processes, and projects within the first 30 days.
tags: engineering, leadership, newrole
cover_image: https://res.cloudinary.com/dacvn90nd/image/upload/fl_preserve_transparency/v1714489643/30days_eioha5.jpg?_s=public-apps
# Use a ratio of 100:42 for best results.
# published_at: 2024-04-29 21:06 +0000
---
An incoming leader needs to quickly gain an intimate understanding of how effectively **people** are producing and being developed, the efficacy and adoption of the **processes** being employed, and the attention to true quality that is being paid to the **projects** (performance, maintainability, stability, etc.).

Joining a new engineering organization as their leader will generally involve the challenge (and ultimate goal) of elevating variably performing teams to become consistently high-performing units that effectively meet both technical and business objectives through mindful yet aggressive **realignment** and **optimization**. However, one must first figure out what's working, what isn’t, and what should be done about it. The answer to these questions will feed the development of a _comprehensive_ Transformation Plan that delineates a holistic approach to achieve peak optimization across the team’s people, processes, and projects.

## The First 30 Days

1. **Validate what the Team is doing right:** Assess and affirm the strengths of the current engineering practices, codifying the team’s effective strategies, tactics, and achievements.

2. **Identify opportunities for optimization:** Pinpoint areas where technical, operational, or organizational changes can lead to enhanced performance and alignment within and across your teams. These adjustments may range from significant overhauls to minute refinements but each will contribute incrementally to overall effectiveness. 

3. **Develop a Transformation Plan to optimize people, processes, and projects:** Include recommendations to reorganize the team or greater organization, coaching plans for individuals, and process corrections or improvements, all of which will foster a robust product engineering culture. Ensure the plan includes clear milestones aligned with the organization’s broader business goals.

This approach ensures a comprehensive understanding of the entire state of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) being inherited by conducting 1:1 meetings, assessing performance reviews, observing Scrum ceremonies and supporting meetings, inspecting the team’s artifacts (like code repositories, Scrum boards, product requirements, design specifications, documentation, DevOps pipelines, automation scripts, and supporting organizational policies), and if available, analyzing metrics from tools like Pluralsight Flow, which analyze IC behavior in Git, Github, and Jira to provide actionable insights.

The aim is to create a plan in which targeted and tailored transformations lead to significant, sustainable enhancements in time to market, product quality, and personal agency across the team(s).

## Some Prerequisites
The ability to correctly observe and analyze existing behaviors and artifacts, and then develop a plan for positive transformation involves several skills that you’ll need to acquire or strengthen as an engineering leader. These include knowing and understanding:

1. How to identify broken processes within your project management workflow (likely Agile Scrum these days) and how to fix them.

1. How to select the appropriate technical solutions to build your stack, including the right tooling.

1. DevOps principles like CI/CD strategies, serverless vs containerization, and infrastructure-as-code.

1. How to evaluate talent, identify opportunities for growth, and draft and follow a coaching plan.

1. Other skills, like balancing (A) engineering skill sets, (B) perceived career paths, and even (C) personal dynamics within the team.

## How do I do any of that?
That's a question the answer to which could fill a book. Follow me for upcoming posts in which I’ll detail many one of these key skills for engineering leaders, as well as what goes into developing a Comprehensive Transformation Plan.