Building a No-Fear Learning Culture: The Key to High Standards in SDE Management

As an engineering leader, right? I mean, certainly as an IC, but, but as a leader. It is not unrealistic to expect for you to define. Performance metrics or operational metrics, uh, to ensure that you have a, a highly performing either product or or team, right? Take your pick, doesn't matter. Um, so, help me understand at first at a high level. Um, how you determine. The appropriate targets to set, whether, you know, whether you want to talk about a product or, or a team, just pick one and, and go from there. But, but how you determine the appropriate targets to initially set or product or team.

So,

Well, I'll just come out and say it. So at, at a high level, I mean, that that's a finance at a high level, but it presents as a manager who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing, if I'm being honest, right? It presents as a manager is like just talk like management speak. But the, the, the, the, the next question, right, is, OK, but how do you work through that with your manager, right? Take what you just said and explain to me how you're gonna set goals for your team or for yourself. Would walk me through your process and I'm, I'm not even gonna let you try to answer that question because based on what you just said, there, there is no bridge from what you just said to actually having a process for setting goals for yourself right now on what you're working on, right? To say that I have no fear, it's a philosophical answer, but it's not. It lacks any directional specificity, right? So, I'm, I'm gonna ask the question, which I wanna ask, which is, all right, what's your process for walking through this with managers, but I'm gonna give you a little helper, which is, OK, cool with the philosophy answer, but help me understand. You know, I'm your manager. I just said, OK, that all sounds great, no fear, but now tell me what you're gonna go focus on from a metrics perspective. How, what is your framework for determining what's, what are the important things to pay attention to, as opposed to getting caught up in the shiny object over there that everyone thinks is cool and we're just like, oh, let's look at that, and it turns out not to be important. So how do you actually suss out what's important?

OK, but I guess what I would say to you is, but you're in an interview now with someone who's determining whether or not they wanna hire you for an engineering manager role. Uh, so yes, you can go think about it, but I would, I would submit, you know, if I take off the interview hat and I put on the feedback hat, right, the feedback hat is, hey, this is why we do mock interviews, right? So, so fight through it. I get it, fight through it. It's hard. I can tell you're getting asked questions you've probably never been asked before, um, and there's a reason for that. We can talk about that at the end, but. Um, you know, I dial the, I, I turn the dials up and down based on what I'm seeing and hearing, based on just, you know, decades of experience. Um, and, and, you know, you were clear that you're targeting an engineering manager role, which Right now, you're on the struggle bus, and the struggle bus is driving slowly, right? Um, and you're on the struggle bus, I think, because you, you haven't been asked these questions and these some of these questions are normal. coarse and fair for a manager of managers, right? Someone you'd be working for. Um, So I would say, you know, continue, let's continue to work through this, but we can have a discussion at the end, uh, about things that you can think about and then certainly during our follow up when I've had the opportunity to go through the notes and I can say, OK, here's, here's the kind of things you should keep doing, things you should stop doing, things you might wanna consider doing, and you know, things you should never do again, uh, that's kind of how the feedback is delivered, but um. Continue to work through this, but we do the mock interviews so that you can have a good or bad experience first when it doesn't count, right? When it doesn't count, because if you give, you know, if you get past the screener, let's say the company that you interviewed with yesterday or this morning, I don't remember which one, but you know, and you're gonna do a full slate next week, the slate is gonna be with engineering leaders or at least some engineering leaders versus the screener who probably doesn't have an engineering background. Right, so the questions you got asked to get to the next stage is like, oh, you know, as a solid person, good background, good experience, yeah, let's interview them, and then you get to the engineering leaders and they're like, oh, well, help me understand how you ran the team, help me understand how you hire, help me understand all the things that I'm gonna need you to do, right? Uh, and so if you're fighting through the, the answers right now and it feels like you don't, you're struggling, grasping, that's OK, that's why we do these mock interviews. Makes sense? Yes. OK. Yes. Yes. Um, so let's, I, I would say let's put a pin in this one. We'll skip kind of the, the, the balance of this. I, I, you know, my feedback to you would be, uh, on that one, it's, it's, You know what's important to you, you sort of got there once I gave you the, the, the helper direction, but it's, you know, what's important to the business, what do our customers need, what's gonna impact them, you know, what's gonna help my guys work faster, what's gonna help us drive more revenues, what's gonna help us reduce churn, like all the things that are functionally important to the business, but more specifically, what are the, uh, you know, if we have OKRs as a business. What are, what, what are our objectives at a high level, and can I map my team's objectives and key results to the objectives of the business and knowing and understanding what those are and being able to distill them down, you have to, you know, if my team is being led from the top with OKRs, that's great. If it's up to me and I'm setting the goals, well then it's, you know, what's important to the business. We're trying to drive revenue, we're trying to reduce costs, we're trying to increase customers like what are we trying to drive in the next 3, 1224 months? And how do I structure and organize my team and incentivize them in a way. It allows them to understand that regardless of whether or not I'm in the room, the right decision gets made because we were very clear about our principles, which is, hey, we're focused on reducing costs. Just because it increases revenue doesn't actually help us much. We need to reduce costs because we're we're, you know, we're putting a $1 bill on the outside of every box we ship. That's bad. So we need to get that $1 bill back. So I don't care if you can reduce revenue. Every time you reduce revenue, you're actually increasing our costs and increasing our cost, you know, get one of us fired faster. So we need to, you know, that's what, that's when you've got clear principles about the things you're gonna go work on because you're clear about what's important to the business. That's how you can do that. Makes sense? Absolutely. Alright, next question. This is, I know you're gonna feel a little bit beat up today, but that's again, that's why we do the mock interview. I love mock interview is important, uh, because it helps you kind of work through the kinks and, and kind of realize, oh well, OK, I hadn't really thought about things in that way, and that gives me time to go think about those things.