A Simple Framework For Engineering Management
A Simple Framework For Engineering Management
Use the 4Ps (Purpose, Priorities, People, and Process) to focus your attention.
The 4Ps is an acronym for (Purpose, Priorities, People, and Process). It’s a helpful framework for engineering managers that allows you to understand the critical areas of your role.
You can use it to focus your thinking or structure your week. For example, I have one day per week to focus on “priorities.” This includes reviewing important projects and realigning priorities if things have changed. I have one full day per week dedicated to “people,” which means conducting 1:1s and focusing on any work that helps support my team. Allocating a theme to specific days of the week has been a great way to avoid context-switching and focus more intensely on specific management areas.
Purpose (aka Direction)
Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.
John F. Kennedy
Purpose is the reason you go to work every day. Creating clarity of purpose is the primary job of an engineering leader. Think about whether you’re clear on your team’s purpose and whether you’ve communicated that with your team.
With clarity of purpose and direction, your teams will be more focused and motivated on what matters, and you’ll give people reason and motivation to work hard.
Leadership activities in this category might include refining your product mission and vision, creating a strategy, clarifying goals for the quarter, and communicating why your team’s work matters for customers.
A mistake younger engineering managers make is thinking that this isn’t part of their job. Even if you have a company-wide high-level vision, you must still understand, communicate, and clarify your team’s unique purpose.
Questions for creating clarity of purpose:
Why does our team exist?
Where do we want to be in 2-3 years? What are we working towards?
What are our goals over the next 6-12 months?
What is most important right now?
Give your team a meaningful purpose and a clear direction.
Communicate it regularly.
Clarifying purpose and direction is the real work of leaders. Don’t skip it.
Priorities
“Do first things first, and second things not at all.”
Peter F. Drucker
Create a system for prioritization that reliably and consistently ensures your teams work on the right things in the correct order.
In software engineering organisations, priorities constantly change as new challenges, opportunities, and demands arrive. A systematic way to reassess, realign, and communicate priorities is essential.
A prioritisation system takes an extensive list of work that needs to be done and outputs a small list of work to be done in a linear order that matches your team's capacity.
In every engineering organisation I’ve worked in, there has been (far) too much work to do. As a result, teams have to make trade-offs and decisions about where to focus time and energy. If you don’t make conscious prioritisation decisions, your team will quickly become overwhelmed, inefficient, and burned out. If you’re choosing to work on an important new project, what are you explicitly choosing not to do?
If a new urgent priority arrives (which they do … often), how will you deal with it? One option is to increase the number of things your team works on. This won’t scale. The other option is to deprioritise something else and refocus your team’s attention.
Prioritisation is an ongoing battle to avoid thrashing (stopping and starting work too often) and ensuring that your team is working on the most important things.
Prioritisation decisions are nuanced. You can deliberately choose not to work on what is “technically” the highest priority to manage work more effectively. An example of this would be prioritising finishing an existing project before picking up a more critical work item to avoid stop-start interruptions for the team.
Prioritisation is a high-leverage activity for managers. Your job is to ensure that your team’s work is aligned with the needs of the business. You won't be successful if your team is highly productive at doing the wrong things.
People
"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be."
Rosalynn Carter
As a manager, you work through other people. This means you must ensure that you have the right people, with the right skills, working the right things.
Activities in this category include hiring and onboarding people to your team, investing in the growth and development of your existing team, and dealing with problems such as conflict, poor performance, misalignment, and motivation.
Process
“Scaling a business is all about building systems and processes.”
Robert Kiyosaki
When people hear the word “process,” they usually have some negative reaction. This tends to be because many processes are overly complex and burdensome. Software Engineers, in particular, tend to hate the word “process”.
A process is a series of related tasks that result in a desired output. How you deploy software deployment is a process. How you build software is a process. How you hire people is a process. How you get approval for vacation is a process.
Despite the unfair reputation process has, it’s the only way to build a scalable, productive, and highly effective engineering organisation.
Imagine that you didn’t have any processes. Each time someone wanted to get something done, they would be unsure about what steps to follow, and everyone would do things differently. Doing things differently every time means it becomes impossible to improve, and routine tasks become unpredictable and unreliable.
Systems vs Processes
Systems and processes are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are different. A system is a collection of interconnected elements working together to achieve a goal. Your business is a system, and your team is a system.
A process is a sequence of steps or actions to accomplish a particular task or objective within that system.
If you want things in your company to be simple, predictable, and reliable, you must invest in creating and improving the systems and processes that define how work is done.
Conclusion
The 4Ps is a simple framework that can help you think more clearly about your responsibilities as a manager. You can even use it to schedule your days by allocating specific days of the week to focus on specific areas.
I’d love to learn more about your interests and challenges as an engineering leader.
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