Want to become a more strategic manager instead of just guessing what to do or deaulting t the most popular ideas?
This workshop elevates Engineering Managers and Directors to a higher level of strategic thinking and doing.
✅ You will learn a process to tackle some of the biggest problems you have in a structured and reproducible way.
✅ You will learn how to avoid traps that usually make managers under-perform and produce bad results.
✅ You also get an analysis of how you and the group performed to help you understand where your own strengths and weaknesses are, so you know where to focus on self-development next.
Engineering managers who already attended are using things they learnt in this session to fix broken processes and cultural issues so they can make world-class teams.
Is this an advanced-level course?
We’ve seen that both senior and new managers have found this course useful. A lot of ways to support new managers has been built-in to the workshop design, which helps keep new managers on-track and contributing. On the other hand, experienced managers tend to enjoy being able to experiment with and get feedback on new concepts, or new ways of using old concepts.
Register Now!
Send an email to book a workshop:
Brian@BuildingBetterTeams.de
Your Facilitator
Brian Graham
Founder & Coach
Brian has a passion for building world-class software engineering teams. He has over a 12 years of experience in the Software industry, ranging from 10-person-startups up to Billion-euro Unicorn tech companies ranging from both Canada and Germany.
Before becoming a coach for teams, Brian has lead multiple teams of engineers simultaneously (both directly managing and indirectly through a manager), lead major transformational change initiatives, and been accountable for major architectural designs of large systems.
What participants walk away with:
Focused feedback. Diving into details and explaining how to progress further. Things to practice, and referrals to tools that help build specialty skills.
A process to solve any case. Understand how to walk through the entire process of coming to a good solution instead of one major “big-bet” or “gut feeling”.
We offer both intense workshops and smaller micro-workshops spread out to accommodate different learning styles and schedules.
Workshop Session Schedule
We break up the content into multiple 45 minute sessions with breaks in-between. This modular setting allows us to run the workshops at any speed between everything in 2 days, or one module per day over 2 weeks. This helps us work around busy manager schedules, and allows time for reflection on the topics learnt.
| Section | Session | Details |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Discovery | After a short introduction we will pick a situation to work on. We will share candid opinions and learn how it might traditionally be handled. |
| 2 | Observations | This activity will give us the tools to defeat our own biases and instinct to jump to a solution before we understand the problem. |
| 3 | Factors | We will learn how to discover and map out the hidden variables that let the problem exist. |
| 4 | Find a solution | Finding a correct solution is only about 30% of the work. We will discover how to re-frame a solution in a way that biases us for taking action. |
| 5 | Dependencies & Frameworks | Usually solutions are not so simple and consist of many sub-problems. We'll learn how to find the right solution to work on first. |
| 6 | Change Mapping | Now that we know the problem and the first solution needed, we need to understand the rest of the landscape. We'll learn how to identify all the elements needed for a successful plan. |
| 7 | Planning | Sequencing matters. We can't always do everything all at once, and often we need to work with others to get the job done. We'll learn how to sequence steps and make them very concrete. |
| 8 | Implementation | Taking the steps in the plan is the ultimate test of day-to-day management skills. We'll practice a few steps and figure out what great execution looks like. |
| 9 | Remove blockers, discuss best practices | Seek advice on how to remove blockers at your own company in our Discord community of Managers and Directors. We schedule have monthly Lean Coffee sessions. |
What are we going to work on?
We walk step-by-step through a strategic problem solving process designed to not just find a solution but actually get it implemented in real life.
Work together through a multi-step guided process on a complex but relatable challenge.
All workshops are based on Situation Cards for Engineering Managers, which proves many of the most critical challenges that every EM needs to be prepared for.
Situation Cards mimic the challenges of a real-world situation an Engineering Manager would need to solve, such as a team who disagrees on what technology to use, shipping features without real-world value, engineers being pressured to make edits in the production database, and more.
You won’t need the cards to participate in the workshop.