Situation Cards for Engineering Managers
30 different challenging situations that an Engineering Manager should be prepared for.
This is a training tool designed to support the growth and development of EMs who wish to improve themselves by simulating challenges that would normally come up over a 10 year career, but condensed into a deck of cards that offer new problems.
Leftwards Planning
Leftwards Planning is an easy-to-learn and powerful planning methodology for teams that value short iterations with a defined deliverable. It offers techniques can to correctly staff a project, prevent over-loading a team with more work than possible (mitigating burnout), it offers true transparency, helps you find multiple options for how to organize tasks and people to get the work done under multiple constraints, and also shows you ways to build safety into the project plan with the flexibility to protect deadlines and estimates when surprises come up. Ultimately, Leftwards Planning is a pragmatic way to get your incremental deliveries out faster and safer.
Inputs, Outputs, outcomes
A light-weight tool you can use to have very focused discussions about performance.
Build-Measure-Learn Canvas
Avoid the "build-build-build" trap with this simple canvas to help you and your team follow the "Build-Measure-Learn" principle from Eric Ries's book The Lean Startup. But wait, there's more! The entire canvas is further supported by use of Design Thinking's "How Might We?" question, and the "Feedback Grid".
Use this canvas for every iteration of your work to stay focused on Discovering and Adapting your product, instead of just building everything you can think of.
The Self-Honest Career Plan
Designed to really dig into what you care about, where you are, and find a way to move in the directions most interesting to you with just a few tweet-sized statements about yourself.
This doesn’t replace a 360 performance evaluation or a career ladder framework, but it helps you pick what you actually care about in the broader sense of your career (even when changing jobs).
RFC STARTER KIT
One of the best tools to remove ambiguity from what kind of code and architecture your team writes is an “RFC” process. The the real purpose is to drive a conversation until consensus is formed. Then it becomes a tool to make quick decisions about how to build software.
Change Management Landscape
Leading change management can be difficult. With this "Landscape" canvas, you can identify all the components that are relevant to change, without planning the change process itself.
Use the landscape to make sense of your challenge. After you understand the landscape, pick a process that bets fits it.