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The mission

Make great ideas happen through empowered engineering leadership

Products

Here you can find practical materials for engineering management. Everything I publish here is battle-tested after multiple years of my career in leadership roles. Engineering internship - checklists, templates Materials and templates to get up to speed with the engineering leadership program. The content results from multiple years of running

Articles

Long-form articles from Practical Engineering Management can be found on the blog: https://blog.practicalengineering.management/ Practical Engineering ManagementHow to be an effective leader or manager in the software engineering industry. Practical hints and stories to maximize the success of our teams and their influence on a company.Practical Engineering

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About me

Hey there, my name is Mirek. 👋 I've been leading engineering teams and technology for almost a decade. I truly loved every single day of that. Over this time, I worked with or helped many people who are now great leaders. The impact they generate makes me proud but also motivates

Newsletter

Once a month, I send Practical Engineering Management newsletter which sums up all activities which I did to make PEM's mission real and to help engineering leaders with their work. Sign up for the newsletter. Archive * Practical Engineering Management monthly, February 2023

Latest

Working from home changed my life

WFH changed my life. It helped me become a father I would have never been when working from an office. It's funny. I was always an office-first person. I still am. I work 2-3 days on-site because I prefer to. Yet thanks to the lockdown, I could fully experience what

Is your manager a good role model for you?

Is your manager a good role model? Here are a few hints for how to assess if you get what you deserve. * You should have regular 1:1s. * You deserve clear goals and alignment with the company's strategy. * You should have more learning opportunities. * You deserve full autonomy in the

Don't prevent risk, build ability to recover

As an engineering leader, you must give your teammates space to try and fail. There is no better way to learn, grow and take on new responsibilities. Don't try to prevent mistakes. Build an environment that guarantees a soft landing. Okay, what does it mean? * Cleanup noise in logs and

Perfection is the enemy of good

Perfection is the enemy of good. We tend to overoptimize things that don't matter. We tend to polish something that is already good enough. We don't share our knowledge because we think it's irrelevant. We collect countless edge cases to cover before we even start working. Perfection makes us unhappy.

SVB collapse makes the IT industry even harsher

Next to massive layoffs in the IT industry, we now face Silicon Valley Bank collapsing. As mid- or low-level managers, there is nothing we can do short term but wait. No one knows what will happen next, so all we can do as engineering leaders is to start preparing our

Good manager is not busy all the time

🐝 Being constantly busy is not a characteristic of a good manager. When you sit down and watch your teams moving on, it's easy to experience imposter syndrome. But one of your duties is to be available when people need you. They need to be able to approach you with any

Engineering internship - checklists, templates

Materials and templates to get up to speed with the engineering leadership program. The content results from multiple years of running or advising engineering internship programs.

Woman's Day and equality

Happy international women's day! 🌷 On that occasion, one hint at building equality. Mainly for leaders of all-white-male teams. Never assume you shouldn't hire the first woman (or any representative of a minority) to your team because they won't feel comfortable surrounded by men teammates. It's not a sign of care.

By 2030 tech talent shortage will reach 4 million unfilled positions

Even though we will experience massive layoffs in tech in 2023, we should keep in mind the big picture. The tech talent shortage is going nowhere and may reach 4 mln unfilled positions in 2030, according to KornFerry (check their Global Talent Crunch report). It'll be a big challenge for

1000x "whys" from your kid and leadership

How does being a father helps me be a better leader? 👨‍👧💡 One proven way to build children's self-esteem is not to force them to do things. Don't use the position of power, but inspire, explain, and acknowledge their feelings. Since my daughter started to perceive causality, she's been asking 1000x

1 out of 3 IT students aspire to solve problems

According to Developer Nation Community survey, 1 out of 3 IT students aspires to solve problems. Think of it when planning career growth for your interns and junior engineers. Support them in becoming independent professionals who use their potential to the fullest rather than becoming your copy and/or task

What to expect from Software Engineer

Supporting growth and planning goals for your teammates require an individual approach. But there is one root concept I use when working with every single software engineer. According to Wikipedia, "A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate

Deliver faster and increase quality

What's the most important objective for a tech company? Deliver products faster and increase their quality over time. Engineering teams too often focus on the "here and now." Deliver this or that feature quickly and forget it. More important than these quick wins is how fast you can iterate over

Lessons learned from the previous newsletter - PrzywodztwowIT.pl

Hey, I'm writing this after more than a year of silence on PrzywodzwtwowIT.pl. I owe you an explanation. When I launched the newsletter Przywództwo w IT, I wanted to share my experience with engineering leaders in the Polish IT industry. I sent my stories and pieces of advice every

I don't plan on Sundays

I don't plan my workweek on Sunday. And it seems to be an unpopular opinion in leaders' communities. I plan my week on Fridays before I finish my work or early morning Mondays. It wasn't always like this. There were times I was super excited about my job and times

2hrs per week saved thanks to WFH

Thanks to working from home, we save about 2hrs a week (commute time savings). And 40% of this extra time is allocated and goes back to our jobs (either primary or secondary). These are facts from National Bureau of Economic Research. Not saying that the remote first job market will

Engineering leader, go back coding

In this challenging year, with tightening budgets and leaner teams, engineering leaders should go back to coding. Go back to coding to understand the team's challenges better. Go back to coding to see how easy it is to onboard to the project. What are the gaps in documentation, or what's

Three levels of engineering teams engagement

There are three levels of engineering teams' engagement. Interestingly, each sees themselves as high-performing contributors who work hard each day, using their professional skills to the fullest. 1st level of engagement - focus on input. Engineers are smart people, and they know how to solve problems. But they expect organizations

How to stay rational under pressure?

There is no easy way to detach yourself from emotions, esp. when you experience a tough and stressful situation. What helps me make better decisions is acknowledging these emotions rather than trying to suppress them. When facing a difficult situation, I try to ask myself “I feel angry, how does

Running too fast

What do running have in common with software development? I've been running short distances for years but pushing my 5km run by an additional one or two kilometers was such an exhausting experience. I couldn't understand how running 10 or 20, or 40 km could be a pleasure for anyone.

Leaders create leaders

There is nothing more rewarding than observing people who you mentored some time ago and who are now great leaders doing an outstanding job, sometimes in a very different environment.

Investing in the team's growth

Investing in a team's growth seems to be an obvious thing for engineering leaders. But in this challenging year, we need to double our efforts. Technical skills - yes, they are essential. So your people need to be better engineers or architects. But because the role of technology in a

Planning a week

How to plan a week as an engineering leader? Here is the framework I've been using for years. 🧵👇 Start with one priority. There is only one, the most important subject to cover in the week. Timebox at least 4-8 hours for it in your calendar. At least one long block

Weekend reset

There is no work vs. life. There is one life. Even though I do my best to work 8am-4pm, work and life spillover are not surprising. I keep thinking about work challenges and wins, I read professional books after hours, and my daily schedule is adjusted to my work schedule.

The Eisenhower Matrix

My common use case of the Eisenhower matrix is to decide if I should bother my teammates. * Important/urgent - talk to them now * Important/not urgent - add to our 1:1s document, so we'll discuss it next meeting * Not important - just keep it in my head until

Find solutions, not problems

No matter if you work in command&control or trust&inspire culture, there is one thing you can do to build empowerment in your engineering team almost immediately. During the next refinement sessions, observe what's dynamics between the team and the Product Manager. If it's this way: * She comes with

Value of Continuous Delivery

The value of continuous delivery is not the number of releases per day but the opportunities it brings. As stated in a quote: "the goal for continuous delivery is to make it safe and economic to work in small batches". Higher quality and shorter lead time are outcomes of continuous

No release on Friday

Do you have "no release on Friday" policy? One of teams I led pushed things to production almost every Friday. Sounds crazy, but I don't recally any major disaster. A few highlights of how the team did it. 🧵👇 1. Everyone owned quality. You create a feature, you test it. 2.

Notebook

If you are a leader, your work starts with a great notebook 📒🖊️. I really mean it. Make sure you have good quality paper and pen, so you can write without any distractions whenever you need to do that. Let's take 1:1s as an example. Whenever your boss writes something

Mercenaries vs. Missionaries

John Doerr, one of Intel's most successful salespeople, once said, "We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries." How does it translate to the tech industry? 🧵👇 Short explanation. Missionaries believe in what they do. They align themselves with the organization's mission. While mercenaries "just" do what they do to

5 Characteristics of a high-performing team leader

5 Characteristics of a high-performing team leader, according to the book Accelerate. Visionary, inspirational communication, intellectual stimulation, supportive leadership, personal recognition. Visionary - do you have a plan for the next 2-5-11 months (the rest quarter, half-a-year or year)? Are you on track toward these goals? If not progressing, what's

Leadership from a Dancing Guy

The essence of leadership I shared probably a hundred times with teammates: There are many lessons here, but the most important one for me - you don’t need to have an authority to lead. Go and build the movement! 💃🎶

No budget for training? Buy a book

Your company is running out of money for trainings or conferences? Buy your people great book(s). Read it first, extract concepts you want to share with them, and give the book to them. 📖 Don't have a budget for that too? What about sparing 10-50$ from your salary for that?

Teammates empowerment assessment

How to assess whether your teammates are empowered? If they face a problem or obstacle and come to you saying, "I couldn't do this because I faced that problem," they are not empowered. If they face a problem or obstacle and come to you saying, "I couldn't do this because