Recently an old friend, with great experience as an IC, PM and EM, called me to ask for some advice. He had been running his business for a while and took up a new role as an engineering manager after some time. "What areas do you focus on as an EM?, particularly when joining a new team".

I divided the conversation into three pillars: strategy & inventory, technical (aka going deep) and career / personal

Any given day, week or month will include some of these. Some periods will emphasize one or the other more heavily.

Strategy

Strategy is about helping the …

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Signal Vs Noise

One responsibility of engineers & especially leads is managing many channels of signals : emails, blog posts (internal and external), tags , push notifications, group chats, alerts from dashboards and more.

These signals tend to scale exponentially to the number of projects & people that you are responsible for.

Quickly you'll need to set up a system to make sure that you are receiving high-signal information and filtering out low-signal noise. How do you do that?

For each channel, it's important to set up and continuously refine filters that matter to you.

Each system typically has filtering that can be configured …

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