Every manager's ultimate task is to build successful teams. In my career, it has become apparent to me that as a manager, you have to monitor your teams closely in order to reach that goal. This will enable you as a manager to discover when a team is overwhelmed with their work.
Speaking with software engineers in my team and through my mentoring with The Mentoring Club one question keeps coming up: “What is the next step in my career?” For everyone that is working in the industry and eager to grow personally, this question is a constant companion.
I want to give you my perspective on how you can advance in your career after you've made the step to a senior engineer. I want to talk about how it's possible to grow further.
In the last years my career took a turn into the direcation of technical management. While I listen to a lot of podcasts on a daily basis I started to collect a list of podcasts that help me stear through my work. Here is a list of podcasts for engineering managers, tech leaders and software architects.
When I was working in a small agency, years ago, in Germany's warmest city, Freiburg, my boss introduced the team to agile working methods that he had read a book about. We had a whiteboard with some columns on them named To Do, Doing, Done. Some stickies were on these columns. We had a fast-lane which was filled with tasks all the time. I felt I was doing quite some work when fulfilling the tasks and moving a pile of them from one column to the next. Anyway, projects didn't finish on time. The feeling of being productive vanished as soon as we felt we were delivering late. Was there a problem in productivity?