Managing Managers

Meri has a tonne of experience managing managers as a serial CTO, and we chat about everything from being a non-executive director, common traps of first-time directors/VPs of Engineering, what they look for when interviewing managers of managers, and so much more.

Guest biography:

Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations, currently leading the technology team at Pleo. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organisations, and works as a CTO coach and tech advisor to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose. 

They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organisations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others.

A published author and international speaker, they are the chair of The Lead Developer conference, and a tech advisor for Kindred Capital. Together with their wife, they run micro-charity One Goes Up to help young women & enby folks pursue STEM education & careers.

Transcript and show notes:https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-029-meri-williams/

The Financial Times (FT) uniquely combines individual contributor and management responsibilities in senior engineering roles. In this episode, I talk to Tech Director Alice Bartlett about what that’s like for her, how tech skills (at that level) are not necessarily key skills, and how it’s more important to have strong leadership skills, which includes managing your energy (and your calendar!) Listen to this episode for more insights and to hear Alice’s leadership journey in tech.

Guest Biography:

Alice is a tech director at the Financial Times. She oversees the team that builds and maintains FT.com and the apps. She has been at the FT for eight years and managing managers for about 5 years. She lives in Brighton with her family.

Transcript and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-028-alice-bartlett/

I’m so pleased I got to chat with Lena, who happens to also be based in my hometown, Berlin. In this episode, we chat about the challenges of being a middle manager, becoming an accidental leader, what she does when she talks about organisational development, the differences of supporting Directors+ as an external independent person (versus being a manager), the challenges she sees as people transition to managing managers. Listen to this episode to hear these themes and so much more.

Guest Biography:

Lena Reinhard has dedicated her career to helping technology leaders build successful engineering organisations. Her background includes roles as VP Engineering at CircleCI and Travis CI, along with being a co-founder and CEO of a SaaS startup. She's committed her career to supporting leaders and their teams during times of rapid change and tough market conditions. Lena's supported with a diverse range of companies across the globe, from early-stage startups, scale-ups, to corporations, and NGOs. She now works as a leadership coach, management trainer, and organisational developer, and hosts the podcast “Leadership Confidential” with real talk about leadership beyond the clichés and challenges of leading teams and organisations, and how to deal with them.

Episode and show notes:https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-027-lena-reinhard/

Although we’ve never worked together, it seems like CTO Crystal Hirschorn and I were positively influenced by many movements in tech such as XP, lean and systems thinking and in this episode we chat about how that has influenced her management style. A key element of a lot of that is the idea of building a blameless culture and listening in to hear about some ideas of leading and lagging indicators of good engineering culture and much more.

Guest biography:

Crystal is an experienced Engineering Leader having held various VP and Senior Director of Software Engineering roles, with a career spanning more than 20 years in the Technology industry. The majority of her career has been a mixture of technical leadership, hands-on software engineering, and engineering management. She has managed managers for several years. She’s a resilience engineering advocate and long-time practitioner and advocate of Lean, XP, and DevOps practices to build a successful engineering culture.

She is currently the CTO at Zoa – a green energy tech start up.

Episode and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-026-crystal-hirschorn/

In this conversation with VP of Engineering, Sarah Pimentel Abrantes, we cover the importance of being a leader before being a manager, the challenge of letting go at different stages, how to counteract authority differences in skip levels and also managing areas where you don’t necessarily have that background and much more.

Guest Biography:

Sarah Abrantes has experienced a lot of different tech roles over her career. She’s collected knowledge from development, business analysis, process engineering, testing and management, all acquired in a vast range of company and team sizes.She has played senior management roles and helped level up engineering leads over the last years in organisations such as GoEuro, N26, GetYourGuide and Tier Mobility, having recently joined Adyen as VP of Engineering. 

Sarah also presented at LeadingEng Berlin in 2023, so go check out her talk called “Influencing your company’s culture from the driver’s seat”

Episode and show notes:https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-025-sarah-abrantes/

Although currently Director of Platform Engineering, Jess Mink is an unusual manager of manager in tech, who’s also played a full-time product role. Listen to this episode as they explain what they took away from that experience, their perspective on how engineering managers differ from other managers, and share their managing manager roles change across different organisations and contexts.

Guest Biography:

Jess is passionate about building strong, productive technical organizations that are focused on outcomes. While some people are fascinated by architecting code Jess loves to understand and debug human systems.  Developer tools and health tech companies speak to them and despite seeking engineering roles they have a habit of taking on product roles when needed. They've worked at companies such as Auth0, FOLX and Amazon and held roles from Director of Engineering to VP of Product.  They are currently Director of Platform Engineering at Honeycomb.io.  In their spare time they volunteer doing Search and Rescue.

Episode and show notes:https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-024-jess-mink/

Maggie Litton has held many senior management roles across many different companies and in this episode gives us an insight into some of the ways the manager of manager role changes. To me, she is a great role model of a successful manager from a non-traditional career path and offers insights into so many dimensions of being a manager of managers. Listen carefully towards the end to some of the failure modes of strategy, and what not to do if you’re a senior manager.

Guest Biography:

Maggie loves building organisations that enable people to do useful things. She's worked at Fortune 500 enterprises and startups of all stages. She specialises in optimising remote organisations and reducing accidental complexity.  Maggie is currently Director of Engineering at HashiCorp.

Transcript and show notes: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-023-maggie-litton/

In this conversation with VP Engineering at the NY Times, David Yee, we cover a huge amount of ground from how delegation differs for managers of managers, the focus on principles over tasks, adapting your management style, bad reasons why people want to be a director and what does ethical engineering management mean to him. Listen to this episode for more.

Guest Biography:

David Yee is VP of Engineering at the New York Times. As an engineering leader, he’s built and scaled teams at both small and enormous companies in the worlds of journalism, music, and art—with an emphasis on product-oriented engineering and humane management.

His career has included roles as Chief Architect and co-founder at 20 by 200, co-founder and CTO at Editorially, and Engineering Director of Chorus at Vox Media

Episode Transcript and Show Notes:https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-022-david-yee/

I had the pleasure of chatting to experienced tech leader and CTO, Anna Shipman about the challenges of IC and management responsibilities combined at higher levels, how to think about splitting time as a director, and some really great points on strategy, tactics and more in this episode.

Guest Biography:

Anna Shipman is Chief Technology Officer at Kooth, pioneering great digital mental healthcare for everyone.

With over two decades of software engineering experience, Anna has led teams both large and small. Before joining Kooth, she served as the Technical Director for Customer Products at the Financial Times, overseeing the award-winning FT.com website and FT iPhone and Android apps. She also played a crucial role in launching the GOV.UK website during her time at the Government Digital Service.

Shespeaks at conferences,blogs on her personal website, has amailing list and is always up for a game of pool.

Socials

Transcript and show notes:https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-021-anna-shipman

Nivia has a fascinating and long history in technology and we talked about how directors can help people through organisational change, the trauma of dealing with forced change from COVID and how a lot of being an effective manager of managers is building and sharing context and influence.

Guest biography:

Nivia is a technologist with over 20 years of engineering and leadership experience. Her career path has included nearly every role in tech; but her true passion is inspiring people to do their best work. These days Nivia applies her talents as Director of Engineering for Spotify's new music team, tasked with bringing enriching artist expression tools and experiences to Spotify. 

Nivia gives back to the tech community by speaking at, chairing and attending tech conferences. Her hobbies include: mentoring Black engineering leaders; reading; and relaxing on her farm with her hubby Andre and their feline overlord Zuko.

Social:

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-020-nivia-henry/

I really enjoyed a lot of the insights Claire shared with me in this episode - everything from getting comfortable with how other managers approach problems differently from you, the benefits of an external coach and having a physical outlet to balance out the intellectual stress and finally some insight into some of the ways that Claire runs her organisation.

Guest Biography

Dr Claire Knight is a Senior Director of Engineering; Ecosystem & Emerging Products at Netlify. She served plenty of time in the coal code mine before making the move into wrangling folks rather than just bits. With many years of engineering leadership at companies such as GitHub and Six to Start, Claire now leads many engineering teams at Netlify, defines strategy and expansion, with particular focus on the platform and SDK. Claire lives in Barkshire, UK, with her husband and three cats who from time to time also like to be involved in video calls. When not working, she likes to lift heavy things, only to put them down again and is a 2023 AWPC World Champion Powerlifter.

Social Links:

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-019-claire-knight/

Thiago Ghisi covers his background of moving from a consulting career to a management role, his experience of onboarding in different contexts and why he thinks joining as a director is easier than joining as an engineering manager of a team. We also spent some time understanding his current role at Nubank, which has more than 2000 engineers and how he allocates his time effectively.

Guest Biography

Thiago Ghisi is an engineering leader who has worked at places like Apple, ThoughtWorks and Amex. He is currently a Director of Engineering at Nubank and also runs a podcast, “Engineering Advice You Didn't Ask For”

Social links:

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-018-thiago-ghisi/

I have worked with so many people who have followed a non-traditional route into tech and so really enjoyed hearing Sally’s journey into tech and how she found herself managing other managers. Given her experience, it’s also great to understand how she leads and manages areas of tech that are beyond her own individual contributor experience and love the concept of swirl and to be wary of this as a manager of managers. 

Guest Biography

Sally Lait is an Engineering Director for Trust & Safety at Bumble Inc. – encouraging kind connections that demonstrate integrity, equality, confidence, and respect during all stages of any relationship, through our apps like Bumble Date, Bumble For Friends, Badoo, Fruitz, Official etc. Prior to that she’s been VP of Engineering at Farewill, led engineering in Operations and Financial Crime as well as Monzo’s web discipline, ran a digital transformation consultancy, and worked for a global digital agency. What’s really important to Sally is building a strong culture, and creating supportive and inclusive environments for people and teams to thrive and do fantastic technical work. She’s a strong advocate for building software and teams alike with empathy, responsibility, and accessibility in mind.

Social links:

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠⁠⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-017-sally-lait/⁠

I’ve been a big fan of Dan’s writing for a while. You might have read some of his articles on management in my Level Up newsletter. In this episode, he shines a light on how he found himself in his first managing managers role, how he sees management as his true calling, how management might not be everyone’s cup of tea and how to deal with the ambiguity of the role.

Guest Biography

Dan Na is the Engineering Director of the Market Expansion organization at Squarespace in NYC. Previously he was a Staff Engineer at Squarespace and an Engineering Manager at Etsy. He loves learning and teaching in a collaborative environment and solving both the technical and people problems of shipping software. He’s a weather-agnostic iced coffee drinker, a mediocre golfer, an NBA basketball fan and loves spending time with his family.

Social links:

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-016-dan-na/

I’ve been really lucky to meet Maria several times at conferences in real-life and in this episode, we were able to shine a light into parts of her 20 year journey in tech. I love how she thinks about management, structure and she has so many great insights on what it means to be a manager of managers. Her past few roles have also been focused on Product and Engineering Operations, so listen in if you’d like to learn more about that too. 

Guest Biography:

Maria Gutierrez is an Engineering executive and advisor with over 20 years of experience working at companies ranging from early-stage to large public tech companies. A big focus of her work is building healthier and more impactful Product and Engineering organisations at scale.

Social links:

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-015-maria-gutierrez/

If you’re interested in what it means to be manager of managers in a fully remote environment, this episode is for you. As author of the book, “Remote Engineering Management”, Alexandra shares some tips of what to focus on in a manager of managers role. We explore how she naturally grew into her first managing managers role and she shares where she spends her time and what she focuses on in her role.

Guest Biography:

Alexandra Sunderland is an engineering leader with over a decade of experience working in both hybrid and remote roles, at companies ranging from 10-person startups to public corporations. She is currently a Director of Engineering at Fellow.app, where she is helping to build the future of work. She prides herself on building emotionally-intelligent processes for teams, and sharing her knowledge of management through conference talks and written works. Alexandra is the author of the book “Remote Engineering Management”, the guide for empathetic and people-first management in a remote world.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-014-alexandra-sunderland/

Anjuan taught me a few new concepts in this chat such as the saying of digging your well and what that means, what the unusual title of Staff Engineering Manager is and also some practical tips on managing burnout, especially important for manager of managers. Listen to this episode to find out more.

Guest Biography:

Anjuan Simmons has led software development teams for over two decades, and he excels at shipping features that customers love while also managing healthy teams. Anjuan’s goal is to help everyone he meets become the best possible version of who they are meant to be.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠⁠⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-013-anjuan-simmons/

When managers leave and you inherit their team, you can suddenly find yourself managing multiple teams and shortly after, a manager of manager. Find out how Vitor Reis navigated this quick transition and learned to be an effective manager of managers on the job.

Guest biography:

Vitor Reis is a hands-on engineering lead with 14 years of experience in multiple industries. For the past 7 years he has been developing a platform for logistics at Delivery Hero, creating teams that work well together and deliver impactful things on time, developing products & tech running on over thousands of hosts in 5 data centers serving 50+ countries.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠⁠⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-012-vitor-reis

Senior Director of Engineering, Katie Wilde and I chat about her unusual path into tech, "falling" into her first managing managers role and the signals that you can look out for to determine the performance of managers and their teams. She also offers a few reasons why managing managers is not for everyone. Listen to this episode to find out more.

Guest Biography:

Katie Wilde is currently Senior Director of Engineering at Snyk Cloud and has played other roles like VP of Engineering at Ambassador Labs and Buffer. She co-authored the O’Reilly books “97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know” and “Atomic Migration Strategy for Web Teams” and is also co-author for the Holloway Guide to Remote Work.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-011-katie-wilde/

Nickolas Means is a very thoughtful and calm engineering leader who I was lucky enough to meet through a number of conferences. He's a wonderful story teller and in our chat, we talk about his growth story, the power of peer mentoring, building your own mentoring support group, long feedback loops, metrics for engineering teams, managing up and much more.

Guest Biography:

Nickolas Means is an engineer turned engineering leader who’s been leading teams at companies large and small for the last decade. He’s a student of disasters like airplane crashes and a fantastic storyteller, who I’ve been able to see and hear firsthand at several LeadDev conferences. He’s currently VP of Engineering at Sym, which builds the most developer-friendly way to secure your production infrastructure and has his own podcast called Managing Up.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-010-nickolas-means/

Theresa Neate and I have a common passion for systems thinking, so join us in this conversation where we talk about the serendipity of leadership roles, how managers of managers look for future talent and understand what the "do no harm" principle looks like for engineering leaders.

Guest Biography:

Theresa Neate is an award winning senior leader with a background in service desk, software delivery, quality engineering and platform developer experience, who loves lean and agility and advocates for holistic system quality and systems thinking. She has an additional side interest in cloud, infrastructure and networking. She has also written on the subjects, including contributing 2 chapters to a published O'Reilly book.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-009-theresa-neate/

Tramale Turner has a lot of leadership and management experience to share, across a broad range of fascinating companies. In this episode we cover topics like the importance of introspective, the skill in spotting strengths in others and what it means to build not just good teams, but great ones.

Guest Biography:

Tramale is a highly experienced and motivated technical professional and is currently SVP of Engineering at ActionIQ. He has previously worked as CTO at Taxbit and Head of Engineering at Stripe. Prior to Stripe Tramale has held engineering leadership roles at companies such as F5 Networks and Nintendo, and technical and marketing leadership roles at Critical Mass and Volkswagen.

He has a passion for developing technology leaders at all levels, and is determined to hear underrepresented voices amplified in our industry.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-008-tramale-turner/

Danielle Leong, a tremendous VP of Engineering and impressive portrait photographer, chats with me about what the importance of role modelling, the impact of restructuring and how managers of managers need to live further into the future.

Guest Biography:

Danielle is a seasoned engineering leader who is passionate about creating healthy, inclusive, productive engineering teams and helping them do their best work. She has a wealth of experience ranging from building teams at pre-seed startups to Director of Identity at GitHub to being an early engineer at Twilio. Danielle is also the creator and founder of Feerless, an app that provided crowd-sourced, preemptive notifications for Netflix users with PTSD. In her spare time, she runs a photography studio that specialises in colourful, fun, and inclusive headshots. 

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-007-danielle-leong/

In this episode I chat to the Director of Engineering at Choco, Gabriel Michels, where he discusses the evolution of the EM role, where to get support as a managing of managers and setting appropriate goals.

Guest Biography:

Gab has been in the industry since 15 years. He started his adventure at RTL, rode the wave of browser games at Bigpoint and Gamesys, and started and failed a startup. Today Gab is on the journey to transition the food industry to more sustainable food systems with Choco. He has seen the company's birth as a software engineer from day 1 and today is a Director of Engineering.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-006-gabriel-michels/

In this episode, I chat with Anita Singh, who stepped into a managing manager role at the rapidly growing ultrafast grocery delivery company Gorillas and shared her experience of this in a talk at LeadDev Berlin 2022. We talk about the feeling of more responsibility but with less control and how the perspective of the first team changes.

Guest biography:

Anita is an engineering leader who is passionate about building mobile apps and empowering teams to build quality software that delights users. After spending a couple of years working for bigger public tech companies, Anita has since worked at startups in both Silicon Valley and Berlin, where she has scaled teams, culture, processes and software from the ground up. She enjoys coaching engineering managers and staff engineers in her current role and hopes to continue on this path.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-005-anita-singh/

Episode description

In this episode, I chat to an engineer director who has done the pendulum swing (from manager to individual contributor to back to being a manager), working in hypergrowth environments and one of the earliest microservices architectures where he first wrong about the Backend For Front-Ends (BFF) pattern and what he's doing now to help engineering managers.

Guest Biography

Phil has been leading software teams in their hyper-growth stages since the early 2000s. He headed product engineering at SoundCloud and DigitalOcean, and platform engineering at Meetup and SeatGeek. He is currently a co-founder of Outropy.ai, the Copilot for Leaders.

Transcript and show notes available here: ⁠https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-004-phil-calcado/

Episode description

In this episode, I chat to an experienced engineering leader who has worked in a global, remote context managing other managers, has done formal co-active coaching training and discusses its relevance to managing other managers.

Guest Biography

Cate Huston is an engineering director at DuckDuckGo and an advisor at Glowforge. She previously worked at Automattic where she led the mobile Jetpack and Developer Experience teams and Cate administers the new-ish manager slack and writes regularly. She is currently writing the O'Reilly book, "The Engineering Leader", coming out in early 2024.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-003-cate-huston/

Episode description

In this episode, I chat to the person who literally wrote a book on Engineering Management, about his journey into managing other managers in a high-growth startup, and the experience of moving to a massive fast-moving company at Shopify.

Guest Biography

James Stanier is a Director of Engineering at Shopify. He is also the author of Become an Effective Software Manager and Effective Remote Work. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science and runs theengineeringmanager.com

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-002-james-stanier/

Welcome to the Managing Managers podcast. This short episode is an introduction to your host, Patrick Kua, for the podcast and the intention behind it.

Transcript and show notes available here: https://managingmanagers.tech/episodes/episode-001-welcome/