Should you code as an Engineering Leader? And Course Updates! 💖

Hey friend,

Should you code if you are an Engineering Leader? The answer is it depends but yes, if you want to. You may have heard opinions that Engineering Leaders should not code as they are always in meetings.

This is true, although what got many of us into Tech is the love for coding and being a developer 💜. As we grew in our careers, we decided to get into leadership, but that shouldn't mean we need to stop coding.

It entirely depends on your team's priorities. The primary job of a leader is to show certainty and set expectations. If your team doesn't know what to expect, you fail them. If your team is on track, you are doing a reasonable job setting expectations, have a clear vision and can spend time coding for maybe 10-15% of your time in a week or a month, then you should.

Now, remember your primary job is still managing the team, so try not to pick up something that will slow the team down. Additionally, you will be a better Engineering Leader when you know a bit about the ins and outs of the system. You can ask better questions, challenge and encourage your team, and make good technology decisions for the organization. Otherwise, you may not know how everything works and would have to take their word for it.

Being technical as well as a leader has always been my unfair advantage. Now, what if you don't want to code or be technical? Can you continue to delegate and lean entirely on your team to make decisions? Absolutely!

As an Engineering Leader, you can plan ahead by having that architectural experience or a good understanding of how the system works, so irrespective of being technical or not, build a solid understanding there.

👀 Behind the scenes

As you may know, I've been working hard on creating a course on Becoming an Engineering Leader and teaching you everything you need to know to lead a successful team. The course is meant for early or newer engineering leaders.

Excited to share the course curriculum with you so you can see some behind-the-scenes on how I planned the course and what to expect from the course. (Please note the titles may change)

✨ Looking for Testimonials

I have a favour to ask. I'll be running a “Black Friday” promotion in the next couple of weeks. If you took the course 'The Leader's Playbook: The First 90 Days, I would love to hear from you. If the course impacted you and helped you in any way, it would mean a lot to me if you could share your feedback with me.

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🧰 The Engineering Leader's Toolbox

• ​Fellow.app - We spend a lot of time in meetings, and this app allows you to optimize how you can run effective meetings!
• ​Standbot - Run asynchronous meetings all via slack and keep your teams in sync.

Talk to you next week!