Newsletter - Failure modes of an engineering team lead #12096
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| - **Ensure everyone has access to best information to make good decisions.** Expose all context to public channels by default. PMs should provide them with insights from analytics, user interviews, and competitor research. | ||
| - **Push decisions down.** When someone asks, "Should we do X or Y?"" reply with, "What do you think and why?". Ship their answer if it's 80% as good as yours. | ||
| - **Don't the sole point of communication between your team and others.** Instead, connect the right people together. Be connective tissue, not a gate. |
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| - **Don't the sole point of communication between your team and others.** Instead, connect the right people together. Be connective tissue, not a gate. | |
| - **Don't be the sole point of communication between your team and others.** Instead, connect the right people together. Be connective tissue, not a gate. |
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| Leadership feels like a new role, so you abandon the old one. Meetings are the easiest way for you to keep an eye on things, so now you only have time to manage the work instead of actually doing it. | ||
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| Another factor is ego: all those invites make you feel important. Meetings create an illusion of productivity, and nobody pings you afterward asking why you didn't commit today. Repetition cements the habit: more meetings → fewer commits → you feel rusty → meetings feel safer → repeat. |
Very vague feedback: I do think the "how to fix it" bits is a little long (?), I think reading through it, I started wanting to skip to the next point after reading the bolded text in the list. I think just those points in the bolded bits were enough without additional context (most of the time) |
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| > 🏆 **You'll know you're successful if:** Every Keeper Test answer is a confident "yes" and repeat-bug tickets have vanished from the board. | ||
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| ## 5. You're always the hero |
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With this framing, this one feels a lot like "being the bottleneck". I think this can mostly stay the same, maybe just adjust the framing to be around burning out.
- You have a lot of pressure to deliver and engineers relying on you, you take on too much
- This happens because you don't prioritize well, don't ask for help when you need it, don't understand your constraints.
- Fix it by communicating with those above and below you about how you are prioritizing, improving on understanding constraints.
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| > 🏆 **You'll know you're successful if:** Your team geunienly look up to you. Respect is earned in pull requests far faster than in meetings. | ||
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| ## 3. You're scared of changing goals |
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A related, and maybe more important point, work being disconnected from goals or not having goals at all. I feel like one of the biggest responsibilities for team leads is when it comes to goals. Changing goals happens occasionally while work on goals (and opportunities for disconnect) happens all the time.
First draft. (we abandoned the first version, but now are revisiting because of the poll results)
Looking for feedback on: