5Ps of Engineering Management

1. People 
2. Project  
3. Product 
4. Processes
5. Partnerships

Auxiliary

1. Strategy
2. Org structure
3. Operational excellence

Framework to decide between jobs - 3 Cs

1. Career
2. Compensation
3. Commute

Engineering Manager Interview Question - What would be your biggest challenge while onboarding if you join the team ?

This is one of my favorite questions that I use while hiring Engineering Managers. How would your rampup look like and what can go wrong/what would be your biggest challenges?

The reason this question is interesting is because it gives me insight about how well this candidate understands about the team and the role. It gives me a signal on engagement and how invested they have been in the process. It also gives me insight into how effective our interview process has been in terms of explaining our role, opportunity and challenges.

From the interviewee manager's perspective, it also gives them an opportunity in terms of showcasing how seasoned they are on all the manager dimensions : people, project, product, process. At the director level, I also look for signal regarding cross-org collaboration and setting right team structure.

A key quality of a good leader is to anticipate problems(in all the above dimensions) before they arise and to evaluate all possible options on an ongoing basis. While ramping up on a new team, it is very important for managers to absorb as much information as possible from team, partner teams, PMs and all other cross functional POCS. Even though it may be prudent to hold onto judgement quickly, it is important to detect and diagnose pain points effectively and analyse.

Based on my experiences hiring and onboarding managers and from my friends/colleagues who have onboarded as managers in the past, I have developed a thick skin. Gray hair has taught me to believe in Murphy's law - "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong" , especially in every dynamic and fast growing workplaces.

I will cover each of the manager dimensions in more detail in future posts. In the mean time,  if you have interesting manager rampup stories, would love to hear from you in comments below. 

Pro tip : for EMs interviewing for new roles, this is a great question to flip around and ask the hiring manager. With an element of surprise, this question can be a great tool to get some insights about the team. 

Engineering Managers Book Reading List

1. The Manager's path
2. Managing Humans
3. Five dysfunctions of a team
4. Mythical Man Month
5. Radical Candor
6. First, break all the rules

Bonus Blog :

1. http://katemats.com/ - Kate Mats who is a director at Google
2. https://rushabhdoshi.com/ 
3. 
   

Difference between PM and TPM roles

The goal of the PM(Product Manager) is to answer the "what". The PM is the customer advocate. The PM works with "Customer Research" to formulate customer needs/pain-points into product requirements which feeds into the product backlog. The PM owns the goal to measure progress against the product vision and strategy. The PM works with Engineering to create/define metrics to measure progress against those goals. The PM is responsible for prioritizing the backlog to make sure the most critical items are being executed on.

The Engineering Manager(EM) is responsible for the "how". This is about how to build the right engineering solutions to achieve the goals. The EM is responsible for determining cost estimates, identifying dependencies from other teams, risk mitigation, project sequencing and planning needed to hit the goals. This is effectively the roadmap which the EM and PM builds together.

The TPM(Technical Program Manager) is now responsible for driving day to day execution. In some companies, there is a specific TPM role for this. In some companies this responsibility is shared by the PM and EM. TPMs are more useful where there are multiple teams involved and it is a huge cross organization collaboration effort. Often times infrastructure, services and platform teams tend to have TPMs and consumer facing teams tend to have PMs. However, these are more of heuristics than rules. 

States of dysfunction in an organization

The reason it is important for both Engineering Managers and Product Managers to be aware of these states is because this finally leads to poor customer experience. Listing the common states of dysfunction in a team/organization. 

1. Shipping the org chart
2. Optimizing for output metrics and solving sub-optimal problems
3. Under-investing in user research - outdated customer demographics
4. Fear of conflict and everyone making compromises on the product
5. Not having well defined metrics
6. Measurement systems to track goals being error prone
7. Lack of ownership and accountability
8. Lack of psychological safety
9. Too much firefighting and poor operational efficiency as a result of moving too fast(team about to go bankrupt due to tech debt)
10. Too much politics in collaboration

Will soon publish posts with examples illustrating the not so common ones like Shipping the org chart and Fear of conflict and how it manifests in the product and affects the customer. I am planning to include tips for senior leaders about how to plan/structure their organizations so that some of these dysfunctions can be prevented/mitigated early. 

In the mean time, would love to hear stories about the states of dysfunction that you have seen in your product/team/organization. 

Amazon is playing the infinite game

What is the difference between finite game vs infinite game ? 

Here is the difference quoted from wikipedia from James Carse, the author of the book finite vs infinite game

"There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. The infinite game - there is only one - includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. A finite player seeks power; the infinite one displays self-sufficient strength. Finite games are theatrical, necessitating an audience; infinite ones are dramatic, involving participants..."

The difference between business and sports is that business is an infinite game. The quarterly results are not an end goal, getting to x% market share is not an end goal. The end goal is to stay relevant and keep adapting. So how can a company play an infinite game ?

For a company of Amazon's scale(750k employees), how does a company manage to make sure every employee/project plays the infinite game. Regular companies are often plagued by short term decision making and thinking. EmployeesManagers laser focussed on getting a launch, moving that metric by x% and so on. There is one thing that Amazon does differently and that is ingrained in their culture.

No wonder the saying goes

Culture eats strategy for breakfast - Peter Drucker

Difference between input metrics and output metrics

Amazon focuses on the concept of input metrics rather than output metrics. Let us take an example to understand this better. You start a business of writing a blog which is currently generating 10k yearly revenue. Your northstar goal is to attract enough readers to the blog so that you can run ads and generate 100k in ad revenue from the blog. You are super motivated and you decide to dedicate 2 years of your life to this cause. In order to track your success, you decide to measure your progress at the yearly milestone. As you can tell, I have reduced this to a finite game so that it is easier to explain. We will see how the strategy plays out based on the cultural focus on input metrics vs output metrics.

How does the strategy differ in both the cases

If you obsess for output metrics, this is how your goal setting will look like

• Year 1 Goal : reach 40k revenue by end of year 1, growning revenue by 300%
• Year 2 Goal : reach 100k revenue by end of year 2, growing revenue by 150%

If you obsess over input metrics, this is how your goal setting will look like

• Year 1/2 Goal : Increase your content categories in the blog to 10 from 1(of course based on your strategy) by increasing blogs publication per month by 300% and measure per category revenue
• Year 1 goal : Diversify into 2x more categories, invest in ad revenue goals in the top 5 categories and focus on improving article quality in the bottom 5 categories
• Year 2: Take goals on getting to 100k revenue in the top 5 categories, invest the profit = revenue - expenses, into continue expanding to 2x more categories

Analysis of the strategy

Though I didn't break down the Year 1 goal into sub-goals in the first case(output metrics) deliberately, I wanted to show a point that you can achieve the goal by just focussing on the existing category. You may end up hitting your goal and have a hugely profitable blog, you may reach a dead end if other categories become more popular.

In the second strategy(where you focus on input metrics), you will always be in a dual mode of exploring and exploiting levers. You will never run out of levers as you are always evaluating new levers. At the same time, you will have a list of the top levers you have identified which are waiting to be exploited.

By obsessing over input metrics rather than obsessing over output metrics, Jeff Bezos is making sure that the entire company plays the infinite game. In computer science, there is the term called breadth first search and depth first search. Breadth first search makes sure that Amazon will find the shortest distance path to revenue and will always have multiple tentacles out there.

Example from Amazon's shareholder letter

Here is an example from Jeff Bezos's 2010 letter to shareholders demonstrating the same

Shareholders understand this and reward Amazon among the highest PE ratio of all the trillion dollar companies as of this writing.

References

1. The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon
2. Finite and Infinite Games
3. The Infinite Game

Build vs Buy Tradeoffs as Managers

Cultural Tradeoffs
A lot of the companies in the valley have a strong sense of purpose backed by a mindset of innovation and research. Fear of being outmaneuvered by the next startup or not being able to on top of the latest industry trends may be some of the underlying deep rooted reasons. This spurs innovation, new research keeps happening, engineers and scientists keep publishing papers and patents. Like any completion funnel, some of these research ends up getting productized leading to revenues and the virtuous cycle of investment on in-house research keeps going on. Some other advantages of building in house and open sourcing

• Brand building
• Leverage open source community
• Engineering recruiting
• Innovation and product development
• Strategic value development

This is all great. But there are always two sides to the same coin. Taken too far, this leads to the Not Invented Here(NIH) syndrome. The deep rooted fears behind this may be ingrained in the organization : defensive mindset, lack of objectivity, tribal territorial fear, touch of arrogance, complacency. NIH has several side effects like : "re-inventing the wheel", huge recurring maintenance costs, loss of focus as an organization, weak prioritization and goal setting, increasing costs.

Corporate Examples
At the time of this writing(2019-early 2020), companies blinded by "Capital as a moat" strategy pursued by VCs(read softbank), are subject to these states of dysfunctions. The typical path of misfortune while building for the wrong problems looks like : founder raises ton of money -> head count -> hiring ramps up to show growth and progress to the VCs -> NIH syndrome -> build everything -> engineers love this as they have opportunity to grow -> more senior engineers needed -> team grows -> managers get bigger teams -> becomes senior manager. This kind of bloat doesn't end well. As Warren Buffet calls it, "Only when the tide goes out you know who is swimming naked".

From internal conversations with Googlers, I feel Google was also plagued by NIH from 2010-2014. During this phase, there was a culture of arrogance that Google has the best technology and scale and they didn't even treat AWS as meaningful threat. They practically missed the essence of AWS and software as a service. This is why AWS had a huge headstart even though this was playing out in the public markets and everyone was aware of what AWS was building.

What can manager's do
As managers it is super important to be aware of the state of the company/organization/team relative to both external and internal technology/products. We need to make sure that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in either direction. As managers, raising capital(VC money/head count) is important, but it is also super important to ruthlessly prioritize and build the right products and the right culture within the teams.

Exercise for the readers : Often times companies make big acquisitions. Only some of the times are these acquisitions successful and the acquired company is successfully integrated into the mothership. What are strategies behind these successes with examples. Please leave your thoughts in comments. 

The subtle art of not giving a f* : debugging suffering

If you are on blind and really frustrated with your job, you need to read this post

Questions to ask yourself about your suffering

• Dont ask "How do I stop suffering". Ask "Why am I suffering : for what purpose" ?
• What emotions am I feeling ? 
• Why am I feeling them ?
• Why do I consider this to be success/failure ? How am I choosing to measure myself ? By what standard I am judging myself and everyone around me ?

Onoda's value of loyalty to the Japanese empire is what sustained him on Lubang for almost 30 years. But this same value is also what made him miserable upon his return to Japan. 

Mustaine's metric of being better than metallica likely helped him launch an incredibly successful music career. But that same metric later tortured him in spite of his success. 

Pete Best got kicked out of Beatles, but he maintained a happy family life which the other Beatles members struggled to do. This is because he changed his values and the metric by which he measured life success. 

You need to be prioritizing the values that are important to you. Your happiness will depend on that. 

Earshare is the new mindshare

As Andresson Horowitz is predicting one of the latest trends in consumer tech is the explosion of audio consumption. Monthly active podcast listeners and weekly active podcast listeners are on the rise. There are several factors driving this trend :

• Wireless earbuds allow us to listen to audio on the go
• Smart speakers at home make audio consumption available and accessible round the clock
• Connected cars and internet make sure audio is available when we are driving

There are various ways that this trend is playing out in publicly traded companies. Let us take 3 examples from big tech

• Hardware : Apple is already leading with exploding growth in the wearables division. One of the prime drivers of this growth is wireless earbuds. You can read more here : Wearables made $10 billion in Q4, 2019 alone. Apple also sells Apple speakers but they are not as popular as the earbuds. 
• Google and Amazon are also great ways to play this trend. Global smart speaker sales hit a record high last year with shipments of 146.9 million units, up 70% over 2018. Nearly 70% of owners of smart speaker devices in the US own Amazon Echo devices. 

Monetization

At this point hardware sales is the biggest stream of monetization in this market as companies vie to gain marketshare. 

There are two ways this trend could be monetized. 

•  Voice ads
• Voice shopping