Reflections after the 30 days mark
Or how to create a strong foundation when you start a new job 🍌
As I’m just past the 30 days mark of the latest chapter in my professional career as an Engineering Manager at Monzo, I feel this is a good time for me to reflect and write down about the techniques I’ve used to make the most of my first steps.
And if I was to pick a fruit for a cheeky comparison, I would have to pick a banana! Bananas are usually one of the first fruits babies are exposed to, because they are mild and easy to chew. They provide tons of vitamins and other essentials elements vitals for growth, which I believe the below techniques just are: a great foundation for a new life.
1) Setup an operating model
If you know me personally, you would know I’m somewhat of an organized person. I like lists, I like to take notes, I like to have routines in my life.
This is something I never formalized at work but got inspired from Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building to implement.
By quickly setting up my operating model of how I go through the days, it helped me feel more comfortable really quickly so I can make good decisions in an instant.
I think how you operate is less important than having a mental model of you operating model, but I’ll just mention some of the things I personally have put in place by the end of my first week:
A Notion space to take notes about each area and everyone I’ve had chats with
A to do list with impact radius, due date and priority as attributes
A daily time (towards the end of the day) to re-read the key elements I want to learn
A personal log that I update weekly
Weekly goals
Reminders for recurring tasks
2) Double down on your strengths
As an engineering manager, the key concept that I always keep in my mind is trust. It is one the top ingredients for top performing teams and I believe that one way to gain the trust of those around you is by proving to the people who chose to hire you that they were right! This is why I doubled down on my strengths, using them as leverage to bring small but meaningful changes around me.
For example, I did a presentation during an internal all hands by the end of my third week: I am comfortable speaking publicly, and gained enough confidence about the product we’re building that I had a convincing story to tell.
3) First impressions matter
I believe that we’re all somewhat biased by first impressions, whether we’re conscious of it or not. This is why I focused a lot of energy on relationships and preparing in advance before I meet anyone new.
I prepared during my first few weeks to meet roughly two new people each day, with questions written down beforehand.
4) Set yourself clear goals, and be ready to change them
You may or may not have goals set by your manager when you start a new job: in my case I feel lucky that I have fairly clear goals for my probationary period. I spent a long time reading these goals over and over, making sure I was using them as signposts to direct all of the work I did during my first few weeks.
The clarity I gained by thinking hard about these goals made a lot of decisions on what I should do very easy. In a way, they are now part of my operating model as I review them weekly to define the areas I will focus on.
But very importantly, it’s also important to pivot when necessary: new priorities might arise, and when you learn more about a subject you might come up with a different outcome you think can be more impactful.
5) Find where to have impact
Finally, I want to highlight an area that I am very conscious of and that I personally feel I haven’t managed to master (yet).
I can very clearly understand the need for impact, and this is something I am keenly aware as someone who has been working in Platform Engineering for years.
But there are always trade-offs to be made between short-term and long-term impact. For example: should you spend your energy helping your team deliver a clearly define feature by deprioritizing other items on the roadmap, or should you take a step back and work on the basics of a healthy team such as having a clearly defined mission, strategy and operating model?
I haven’t got a good answer to that yet but I tend to think along the lines of: find the areas where you can maximize your impact. This would probably be at the intersection of the gaps you’ve observed and your strengths.
Side observation: Performance review is actually a good time to start
I joined Monzo just after the end of the performance callibration cycle, when performance reviews where communicated to ICs. It was a great time to join as a manager because it gave me the following straight away:
A snapshot of recent performance
An understanding of ICs aspirations for growth
A clear reset for engineers in need of a change or underperforming
The confidence that I will have a full year worth of observations before the next performance cycle
Next steps
I haven’t been really good at publishing here: I can’t clearly explain it but writing down on a public blog still feels very energy draining for me, and that might have been too much on top of my previous job.
I hope to become better at articulating what I am doing as an Engineering Manager, so think of this blog as a way for me to grow!