The value of asking what are you working on

What you'll learn

The Pitfalls of Task-Focused Management

Common Mundane Engineering Meetings

Shifting to an Open Conversation Approach

Benefits of Engineer-Led Discussions

Sometimes as a manager we get so focused on individual tasks and sprint deadlines that we forget time to sit back and think about the deep problems that we need to be fixing. This is especially true in the interactions we make with our employees and engineers.

The Mundane Meetings

Let’s take a look at all of the different interactions that an employee can have with their engineers.

• Monday might start off with the Sprint planning or Sprint kickoff meeting.
• Tuesday might have one or more kickoff meetings for various large-scale features that we will be working on.
• On Wednesday we might meet to go over architectural designs for a specific feature.
• Thursday we might discuss a particular commit request and code review that is in progress.
• Finally, on Friday we might discuss various bugs that have been found in the feature that is being worked on.

These are all critical interactions between an engineer and the engineering manager. The biggest negative about all of these meetings is that it never allows for an open dialogue for either the engineer or the manager to discuss problems that are unresolved. Problems related to the feature at hand might be brought up and discussed but an opportunity to just discuss the general status of code or of skill sets is never presented.

Try a Different Approach

Trying to different approach with your engineers. Instead of having meetings dominate your interactions throughout the entire week, try instead to have open conversations that are designed for your engineers to lead the direction on.

This can easily be achieved by asking your engineers in a candid fashion “what are you working on?” This gives the engineer an opportunity to share more about their day-to-day tasks and open up opportunities for you to help them as their coach. In this candid conversation you might be able to identify areas for improvement or even ways that they can excel in their current position.

Wrap up

Try to break off from the routine of meeting after meeting after meeting. Instead try to have meaningful conversations with your engineers.