Be the Tortoise
The lesson we were all too young for
Story Time 🌳
A quick story that will make you think.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the Tortoise and the Hare last weekend.
You’re probably familiar with the story. It’s a tale as old as time.
A hare and a tortoise are hanging out, eating some grass probably. The hare starts to feel a bit self-conscious. Things aren’t so good back at the burrow. Naturally, the hare begins to bully the tortoise.
The tortoise doesn’t retreat into his shell. Instead, he calmly proposes a race. The hare, like me, was amused, and of course agreed to the easy victory.
The hare, with his hot head, gets off to a hot start. The tortoise takes his time, as he does. The hare gets close to the finish line, and can’t help but stop to take a nap. That’ll really show the tortoise.
Sure enough, the hare sleeps through his iPhone siren alarms and the tortoise wins the race.
Did you catch that? The engineering management 101 lesson? I did, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about this.
The story took me back to early in my career, when I was an eager and passionate embedded software engineer. Confident in my coding, quick to jump to action to ship the next feature. I moved fast, and rarely took a second to think. In other words, I was a hare.
This did not serve me well as a manager.
Running frantically from one thing to another, saying yes to multiple things that were out of scope, thinking everything was an easy win… I burned out.
I had to learn, the hard way, to take my time and consider what I was saying yes to each and every single time. I had to hammer home this very important management lesson: you’re now making decisions which have effects beyond just you as an individual. You might have been committing code before, but now, you’re committing deadlines and timelines and resources.
What helped in this transition was realizing that it’s okay to say “no” sometimes. I used to always say “yes” to please my boss or my clients, but as you become a manager, you learn that you’re not there just to say yes. That’s not the value you add. The value you add is in carefully considering the team-wide, company-wide impacts of the day to day decisions that are being made.
You have to think outside of your own self, and think about your engineers as if you are wholly responsible for them. Because — guess what — you are.
When I was a kid, the moral was: Slow and steady wins the race.
Now? I realize the moral is:
Take calculated decisions.
Be the Tortoise.
Read the original story here (1 min).
Workshop 🧠
The power of imagination lies within you. Use it now.
You’re an engineering manager. Nice, you made it.
One sunny afternoon, a PM on the product team comes over to you and tells you about a new feature they’re dreaming up. It’s actually quite an exciting feature, and you start to get pumped about it.
You look out at the cloudless sky and think about talking to your lead engineer who can probably get this done in a day, tops. It would make for a nice flashy demo at the stakeholder meeting next week.
Hold that thought. Who’s trying to talk to you? Oh yeah, the PM.
[PM]: So what do you think? Can we get it done?
…
Now, close your eyes and immerse yourself. What do you say?
I’ll share my approach in the next edition.
Lateral Links 👀
Don’t be a one-trick engineering manager. Learn from these Lateral Links.
If your product is great, it doesn’t need to be good
A fascinating look into the success of the iPad, even among initial criticisms. My takeaway: define your three things and get them very, very, very right.
An interesting podcast episode exploring the two sides of the bellcurve on this pop meme and how it applies in leadership. Planning a future post about this.
Gamified Git Learning!
I’m a big fan of command line git even though many of my team members prefer the GUI. Also, I’ve been thinking recently about a game to get better at keyboard shortcuts (I recently moved from Windows to Mac).
And that’s the end. Remember to always add value.
—Vigs