About Practical Engineering Management
Hey, It's Mirek here, the author and owner of Practical Engineering Management. You can read more about me here.
Mirosław Stanek
How to empower in practice?
When leading engineering teams, I have never had a problem finding inspirational materials for empowering people, building strategies, defining goals, and being a good leader overall.
Yet, very often, when I read something super inspiring and returned to my day-to-day job, it wasn’t obvious to me HOW I should implement all of that. For many years, I kept asking myself questions like:
- Can we implement Toyota’s kata method for software delivery?
- Can we create a tangible plan for technology based on Richar Rumelt’s experience in building strategies for the biggest businesses?
- Can we build an empowered team of engineers based on lessons from Marty Cagan for Product Managers and Product leaders?
- How to implement bits of advice from Bill Campbell, legendary coach for executives from Apple, Google, and Amazon, to a team in an early-stage startup?
For most of my leadership career (as Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering, and Engineering Site Leader), I experimented with bringing these inspirations and lessons to our day-to-day work.
Some of these achievements are documented already, e.g.:
- Multi-year story of improving product delivery from 1/month to on-demand. Originally inspired by Toyota’s Stop-the-line method: https://medium.com/azimolabs/the-evolution-of-apps-quality-assurance-at-azimo-b2fa31d5cc5e
- Building a fail-safe environment to support fast delivery and experimentation of product: https://medium.com/azimolabs/fail-safe-not-fast-24cf4e80aa7
- Effective mobile engineering — how can testing, architecture, code structure, or team structure serve product excellence: https://medium.com/azimolabs/fail-safe-not-fast-24cf4e80aa7
- Transforming Quality Control into Quality Assurance to improve product iterations: https://medium.com/azimolabs/quality-assurance-and-software-delivery-processes-in-frontend-engineering-66820dc5d4c1
- Answering the question “why do we build the code?”, to lay the ground for empowered engineering: https://medium.com/@froger_mcs/why-you-do-the-code-7266c24ba81d
- …actually, the entire blog — AzimoLabs, which I initiated many years ago, was created to inspire engineers to do more than write code.
Some of these articles can be outdated in terms of technicalities. But motivations and later outcomes of these initiatives had their roots in building truly empowered teams, focused on long-term success, inspired by lessons I learned from Ed Catmull, Bill Campbell, Richard Rumelt, and many other influential leaders, mentors, and researchers.
What is Practical Engineering Management?
In Practical Engineering Management, I will show you how to get up to speed with leading the team. I won’t tell you why you should empower people, trust them, work with small feedback loops, or be outcome-driven. Many great sources are explaining that already.
Instead, I’ll focus on implementing these values in your day-to-day work. You will get something to implement relatively quickly, so you can start building good team habits in the fastest possible way. I want to provide you with the solid ground you can build upon based on years of my experience.
You can call it the MVP of Engineering Management.
What you'll get from Practical Engineering Management?
- You will learn what leadership is about and how to implement best practices step by step to maximize your and org's outcomes.
- You will become an outstanding leader. It's not only about generating more value for the current organization but also about becoming a better professional, growing to a senior leader's position, and getting better opportunities from the market.
- You will empower people by helping them grow, building trust, gaining autonomy, and broadening their ownership. You will build strong professional relationships which will stay with you forever.
- You will become an influential and self-confident leader. With all practical hints and materials, your work will be conscious and thoughtful.
What’s my motivation?
I want to help make great ideas happen. I want to contribute to making the world a better place. There are things I proved working, and now I want to scale up my impact. Sustainable Development Goals from the United Nations highly inspire me, and whenever I can help you, your team, or your company in chasing them, I will be honored.
