Using right words in the right context can solve a lot of misalignments. This is my attempt to document my opinionated understanding of some of the engineering management terminologies, and use them as a reference in my other documents. Effort, Output, Outcome, Impact Effort: This is the input and investment in an initiative or a job that needs to be completed. In a software project, this may be the number of engineers working for a specific period with a particular capability, the computing resources allocated to it, and all the supporting roles, such as product or project teams. ...

In the life of a tech worker, such as an engineer, product manager, or designer, there is a time and opportunity to step into a leadership role. There are many good (and not-so-good) reasons to step into these roles. In the case of so many people around me, It was mainly because they believed they could do a better job than others. This was not necessarily because they were superbly good at leadership from day one but primarily because the leadership approach others had in mind differed from how they felt we should run a tech team and organisation. ...

Context January 2023 was a six-month mark into my new role in the same company. This was a lateral move, Head of Engineering in the Platform team. While the team was smaller in scale, it was more specialised, with higher expertise tech leaders and a more comprehensive range of scope. One of the key takeaways for me was to stay lean and keep our leadership team leaner. In our team, we managed to keep 80% of our people (including our tech leads) hands-on who publish some sort of artefact to the production environment on regular (but varying) frequencies (aka doing what they love and delivering value to their customers). ...