Mentorship Q&A and Videos

I've done a lot of research on how to be a good manager, but now do I just "trust the process" or how do I ensure we are a high performance team over the next half?

I'm a newish EM at a Series-B start up of 150 people, ~25 engineers. So far I have positive feedback from my manager and reports that I am empathetic and supportive. What my manager is telling me now though is that we need to see results. Productivity and performance seem OK in my first months but it is too soon to really see my impact. My manager noted that since we have scaled up from 4 engineers to 25 and gone mostly remote over 3 years there may be a loss of a sense of urgency and the feeling of impact per dev. We are also split into many teams with a smaller scope per team.

The temptation when asked to "get results" might be to ask for constant updates from developers and punish them when fake hard deadlines are given and missed (we are a B2C company so there are rarely actual deadlines). So how do I motivate my team to work hard in a healthy sustainable way? How do I measure the progress and reward them fairly while creating a team focused culture and not one that is competitive and individualist?

Below are some of the management ideas I'm using/working towards. I have lots of room to learn how to do each better, so advice on which to prioritize my effort at improving first would be great in addition to notes on what's missing and what seems off on the list:

Individual attention

• Working with each individual to set SMART goals for the next half
• Working with each individual to figure out what motivates them, and do that
• Figuring out what learning each person wants to do and giving them support there
• Regular, timely feedback (positive and negative)
• 1:1s where I do a lot of listening, help remove blocker
• Shielding from outside distraction and unhelpful pressures

Team culture

• Creating a lowercase-a agile mindset: people are first and it is ok to fail and we learn from our mistakes. We can fail gracefully by making small, quick launches where we get frequent feedback from the users, and feedback from coworkers on how we are succeeding/failing
• Making the team effective first, efficient second: 5 wrong things done in a quarter are worse than 2 right things that move the needle
• Setting team OKRs for the next half that the team wants to accomplish
• Encouraging team work on tasks, pair programming, positive code review culture, etc
• Improving the process to make it effective and fun around how the flow of work happens between planning, selecting tasks, marking things as done and tested
• Team demos with stakeholders to show off results and get feedback

Bonus questions about motivation: In 1:1s how do you figure out what motivates someone since they might not say extrinsic things like money even if that is what they are working for, or the opposite they might be happy at their level and just like the work they do with a good work life balance but might not say that directly either. Also if there is a team of 5 where 2 want money and 3 love the work for itself, how do you tailor their experience to that? The first two will still want fun/interesting work and the second three still want to get promoted and compensated fairly.

Thanks!

Due to unforeseen circumstances from past 6 - 8 months, I've been the Senior most engineer in my team, (I have a total of just ~2.7 YOE). My team consists of ~12 SDE 1s (New Hires) and 2 SDE2s (The other SDE2 being promoted very recently). My manager does a great job filling the role of Senior Engineer which reduces bit of pressure off of me.

However, due to necessity in the team I've ended up being SME in all the services owned by our team. This leads to everyone reaching out to me to help them with their queries, I try to document some of these and add in the Wikis so that it can be easily accessible for others next time. However, when it comes to certain tickets and issues, I end up having to pick that task up myself (Manager does not ask me to, but at same time i know that for someone else the ramp up time required to fix the issue would be too high).

I recently tried to reduce this (2~ months ago), this led to our overall ticket health getting worse and I had to again start looking into them myself and guiding each on-call cycle with right action items for the tickets etc.

This involves me helping them to do the following :-

• Prioritize correct tickets to look into for the on-call cycle.
• A potential fix for the ticket so that they know where to look into.

Due to which it ends up taking 6+ hours weekly to keep this running. I don't really mind doing this; however, I don't feel like this is a scalable solution and would eventually want to slowly scale down from doing this and have my team being able to be self-sufficient.

What's the best way to go about this without affecting my team's ticket health?

Hello everyone,

As a senior engineer L5 in my company for 1 year, I recently found myself in a new team with a new direct manager but report to the same Director in the same Org due to the recent company restructure/company reorganization as part of layoff changes. My Director and I are the direct responsible individuals for the Backend Platform System for the last 1 year. However, I am finding that a significant portion of my time is being taken up by "glue work," such as onboarding new teammates, updating the Wiki, documenting On-call Runbook, mentoring cross-functional team members, providing code reviews for new developers, and unblocking people in their code development. While these tasks seem important, they are making it difficult for me to focus on my own projects.

In my first one-on-one, my new manager expressed a desire for me to take on new initiatives. I am eager to do so, but I need to be able to focus on my own work to make this possible. My manager understood that the frequent on-call support was a blocker for me and asked me to train and onboard a new teammate to take over the on-call support, as well as field requests from users and help others with their work. However, I have still found myself doing a lot of training and providing support even two weeks since my last meeting.

I would like to hear from others who have found a way to balance these responsibilities effectively. How can I prioritize my own work while still contributing to the team's success? I know this will be a difficult decision, and I'm not sure how to approach it. I'm worried that if I stop doing some of these tasks, it may impact my relationship with my manager and team.

If anyone has faced a similar challenge, I would appreciate hearing about how you approached it. Did you stop doing certain tasks and responsibilities, and if so, how did it affect your relationship with your team? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

What are some ways we can bring ourselves to work that makes it easier for others to "root" for you?

(Inspired by the first line of this )

There's a lot said about asking great questions, but I'm wondering what guidelines apply to the other side: Providing great answers. How can it be done in a way where the answer resonates the most with the asker and the relationship is built up?

I am mentoring juniors for the last few weeks. In the past, I've been mentoring people with some professional experience but this colleague doesn't have any. Now, after these few weeks I am wondering:

1. How much time should I spend helping them? Currently, I have to spend 2-3 hours for person per day otherwise they will be blocked for days. Even though I am trying to explain that they can ask other colleagues as well, they are not asking anyone else.
2. How can I be sure what are they suppose to know and what's not? For me, I have my own understanding of what they should know but I know for others may differ. In my country the juniors must be part of an academy before applying for a job. I know what they learn there, so I know what hthey should know and what not. Now, after these few weeks I realize they have gaps which they shouln't have. On the other hand, the academy is typically more than an year and it makes sense many things to be forgetten with the time.
3. How can I measure properly their performance since they are just starting? What is a normal performance?
4. How deep should I go in explanation of his questions? I believe this is where the high quality questions will help them, but I believe they have a lot of gaps to make a quality question and give the proper context.
5. How can I help them to improve their questions instead of having to explain for hours one topic and then another, etc?
6. When should I say I give up on him? I really want to try everything before giving up.
7. How to stay less emotional when explaining the same things for hours to the same person?
8. How can I help them to understand me better? Sometimes, no matter how am I explaining specific case/topic and no matter what examples, nothing helps.

I think the colleagues are really motivated and this is one of the reasons I want to help them. I want to be sure I did everything I can.

Even being a Taro premium user, I'm unable to participate in all the events, though I heavily need mentorship, seems like a roadblock for me because on LinkedIn I see so many posts, it's very difficult to catch up.

Looking for resources on increasing your team's / peer's productivity. I thought I've seen some videos / posts in the past about this and wanted to brainstorm some ways I can boost the productivity of those around me.

Apologies in advance for a long question. Not sure how to ask this question without providing deeper context.

I’ve been working with my current manager for the last 1.5 years. While they have recently helped me get promoted to Senior, it’s been a constant struggle. I dread our 1:1 almost every single week because it always run overtime and we are often still not on the same page. 

I see two major issues that haven’t notably improved in the times I’ve reported to them.

(1) My manager isn’t able to coach me, or any of the SWEs on the team. My manager doesn’t seem confident when we have career discussions - I recently asked them what they thought was the difference between good TL and a great one, and they struggled to coherently answer this. Instead, they said they would know better after the next performance calibration.  Additionally, none of my teammate has gotten proper coaching either.  For example, a teammate struggled to submit code due to their poor code quality and thus had low CL velocity, so my Manager simply told them to submit more CLs, which only made them more stressed without a legitimate way to improve. 

(2) My manager lacks technical understanding of our projects and constantly pushes for speed. My manager was externally hired, and to this day, they don’t really understand the complexity of the work our team does. I understand EMs don’t need to contribute code directly, but my manager almost always underestimate how complicated the projects our team takes on are. As engineers, we frequently have to defend our timelines, which is not only frustrating but also pressures some teammates to favor suboptimal design or hastily done CLs that just causes even more churn. 

The weird part is, my manager often seem unaware of their own actions, and when I talk to them about these issues, they are always receptive to feedback and seem willing to improve. However, I simply haven’t seen enough improvement in the last 1.5 years. 

I could leave, since this is having an impact on my emotional well-being. But I do have good standing w/ my own team and the overall org, and I want to use this situation to learn as much as I could. I know that I myself have a lot to learn as a tech lead (Thanks for , it’s really helpful), and I know I can probably get a bit ahead of our projects and start estimating/de-risking earlier, so my Manager doesn’t get overly aggressive with timelines. I know I can also take this chance to more closely mentor my teammates and help them succeed, since they aren’t really getting it from our manager. 

I want to stay, but is it the wrong decision because I have little career support from my manager? If I do stay, what should I focus on so I can really help my team and at the same time learn something valuable for my career?

My mentee is a slow learner. Rest of the team, both tenured and new team members are very much able to make an impact independently and working together as well. But this mentee of mine, is just not there yet even after being in the team for a little more than 6 months now. As a mentor, what approach I can try, to make my mentee become successful in my team?

Whether that be a formal mentor within the company or you have found a mentor outside the company.

e.g. I want to level up as an engineer, have sought out a mentor(s) to help me do so, what are some of the things I should make sure happen that I get the most benefit out of the relationship.

Ultimately, there is no shortcut to a promotion at this level—it requires significant, consistent contributions that demonstrate your readiness to operate at a higher level of responsibility and impact. And I understand that it might not be easy on those levels, but most of the things described in the official documentation are pretty intense. Is there an easier path to get to the top by doing things smarter and not harder? For instance, there are things that people could do in other companies for bonus points like organizing hike for the team, building Movember type of volunteering event or soccer tournament for the org?

How about the following examples?

Mentorship and Team Development:

Actively mentor junior engineers and contribute to team development. This can include leading internal workshops, contributing to onboarding processes, or providing regular, constructive feedback to peers.

Community and Culture Contribution:

Contribute to the company's engineering culture and community. This can involve contributing to open-source projects, improving internal tools, writing engineering blogs, or participating in company-sponsored volunteer events.

Here are some thoughts from me:

1. Freshly promoted to Staff - This means they are very close to the same path that I'm on.
2. Not within my org - To remove bias
3. Smooth conversation - So it's easy to talk with them

Do these make sense or is there something I'm missing?

I have a couple years of experience, so I'm thinking if it makes sense to go down the engineering manager path. I'm well-positioned to start this journey at my current company as well; I'm a very early engineer on my team, and I have the ability to build up the team and mentor those new people. However, I'm unsure if this is the right way for my career to go and how much of my job I want to be people management - How can I figure this out?