Day 10: Setting Principles for Effective Team Leadership
Be Better Engineering Leader, a 30 Days Series
This is the second week of a series of daily lessons on how to Be a Better Engineering Leader. I recommend spending up to an hour on each lesson to gain insights into Product, Technology, and People—areas critical for every Engineering Manager.
Great leaders empower their teams by setting clear principles that provide context for decision-making and align the team with the company’s strategy. Instead of micromanaging, focus on creating a framework that helps your team make autonomous and informed decisions.
Today, we’ll explore how to define and implement principles that will guide your team effectively.
Example Principles from the Industry
Here are a few guiding principles from leading tech companies that can inspire your team’s values:
Google: “Focus on the User and All Else Will Follow”
This principle emphasizes putting the user first in all decisions, encouraging engineers to prioritize user experience and create intuitive, accessible products.Amazon: “Working Backwards”
This principle advocates for starting with the customer and working backward to ensure that products meet user needs. It fosters a mindset of customer obsession and goal-oriented development.Netflix: “Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled”
This principle supports having teams that are aligned in their goals but loosely coupled in their execution. It allows for autonomy while ensuring everyone is working toward the same objectives.Apple: “Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right”
This principle guides decision-making around user data and privacy, ensuring that all products and services are built with a commitment to protecting user privacy.Facebook: “Move Fast”
Evolved from the original “Move Fast and Break Things,” this principle encourages teams to act with urgency, continuously striving to increase velocity while maintaining stability.
Action Points
Define Your Team’s Principles:
Reflect on your team’s purpose and the challenges you face. What values and behaviors do you want to promote?
Write down 3-5 core principles that resonate with your team’s mission and challenges. Share these principles with your team, gather feedback, and refine them together.
Review and Integrate Company Principles:
If your company already has established principles, review them with your team. Discuss how they are currently implemented and where there might be gaps. For instance, if one of the company principles is “Customer Obsession,” identify ways to better integrate this into your team’s work, such as regular customer feedback reviews or prioritizing bug fixes reported by users.
Conduct a “Principles Check” during your next team meeting. Take a recent decision or project and evaluate it against both your team’s and the company’s principles. Discuss what worked well and what didn’t.
Embed Principles in Decision-Making:
Use your principles in real decision-making scenarios. For example, if your team is debating whether to take on additional technical debt to meet a deadline, refer to a principle like “Quality Over Speed”. Discuss how much debt is acceptable and what the plan for repayment looks like.
Regularly refer to your principles during meetings, 1:1s, and performance reviews. Use them as a lens to assess team decisions and behaviors.
Extra Resources
Premium Article: Principles - Guidelines for Your Team
Cheat Sheet: Principles - Guidelines for Your Team PDF
Book Recommendation: Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Key Takeaway
Principles provide a shared understanding of how your team should operate and make decisions. When everyone is aligned on the same principles, your team can make better, faster decisions and work more cohesively toward your goals.
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