On this week’s show, Lisa and Julia meet Emma Bruce, Software Engineering manager. The conversation explores the often-overlooked transition from individual contributor to engineering manager, examining why technical excellence doesn’t automatically translate to management success and what skills actually matter when leading teams.
Emma discusses the historical lack of training for engineering managers and how the role has evolved into a more scientific one, with greater emphasis on metrics such as cycle time, throughput, and flow state. The discussion covers the challenge of aligning diverse stakeholders—from business objectives to compliance requirements—and the importance of consciously deciding what to deprioritise when focusing on specific KPIs, such as time to market. The conversation also touches on whether non-technical people can succeed as engineering managers, provided they partner effectively with strong technical leads.
Show transcript automatically generated by Descript:
Lisa: Welcome to episode 342 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Julia Bellis, and Emma Bruce.
Julia: So it is great to be back here with you, Lisa. I think it’s been, well, this is certainly the first podcast that we have co-hosted in 2026. And to be honest. It was quite a way back, possibly in the summer 25 that we, um, did a double act. So it’s good to see you again. It’s been far too long.
Lisa: It’s been ages, hasn’t it?
It’s been, it feels like it’s been, last summer feels like a lifetime away and also feels like it wasn’t very long ago at all. But there’s been, I feel like there’s probably been quite a lot of things happening but. Bringing it back to slightly more recent times if we were gonna follow the format of the podcast, which also always is evolving.
What have you been up to over the last week or so? Last fortnight ish, maybe, or since last summer.
Julia: Wow. Um, let’s forget since last summer because I will just won’t stop talking. Possibly I have just come back from a really cool adventure. And, uh, I took Friday off work, got the train down to Pzi, and then spent three days walking from Pzi to Rye, which is, uh, a route called the 10 66 Country Walk.
Lisa: That’s really far, isn’t it? How, what’s the distance on that?
Julia: Yeah, it is really far. It’s very easy when you see it on a signpost and you go, oh, let’s do that. And then when you actually come to do it, it’s 60 kilometers. Day one we intended to walk 27 kilometers and we knew that was a big day because of various things happening and diversions and map reading fails.
It ended up being 35 kilometers, which was painful. We sort of, uh. Battle is very beautiful. Very beautiful. You know, the Abby and the Castle and the church, we staggered into battle after dark and I have never ever been so happy. To see the pub where we were staying and stagger up the stairs in my backpack on and collapse into bed, actually.
So yeah, it was a real adventure. Really good fun. So I’m glad I could come on the podcast and talk about it because I don’t often have such interesting weekends.
Lisa: I’m getting horrible flashbacks. When I was in Central Ambulance as a teenager and we did a 75 mile walk around Surrey over five days. But we had a similar thing.
The first day was the biggest day, but it ended up being a few miles longer than we were expecting. And it was just like, I mean, I was a, I was a teenager when it was hard enough, like I couldn’t imagine doing it now. So I’m in massive awe of you doing that.
Julia: I am quite proud of myself actually. Yes, I made it and then, then the next two days you were saying how time walks.
Distance warps when you’ve walked 30 K and you’ve still got five to go, that five feels incredibly long. But what about you Lisa? What have you been up to? I’ve
Lisa: been entirely sedentary, certainly in comparison. I’ve been, well actually no that’s not true. The last fortnight. So since the last podcast, ’cause I was on the first one this year with Matt.
Um, I had the color walk, although that’s not really a walk. It’s what? That, so the color walk is a thing that I do if I can make it work, allowing, it’s on the third Thursday of the month. And we go to old hospital fields market and meet up, and it’s on the flea market day and there’s between, normally between sort of 50 and 70 people wearing their most colorful outfits and all of your accessories.
It’s like the opposite of what Chanel would say. It’s like before you leave the house, put more things on.
Julia: Alright. Yeah, put everything on, but it is
Lisa: more of a pose than a walk like I did. It did mean I left the house. But we don’t go much further than around the market. If we do any walking at all, we sort of meet up and chat and there’s a big group photo.
But yeah, and I had a couple of events last week where I was at my desk, did a meet the author thing with my co-author and, um, the through, that’s
Julia: exciting
Lisa: talking about our book about accessible communications, which was nice. Um, it felt like the first joint thing me and Matisse have done for a while as well, so that was nice.
I was sitting here at my desk, and then I also did a, it was a session called the Intranet Hot Seat, where I was interviewing Suzie Robinson from Clear Box, talking about the latest report that’s coming out. Oh, I think this Thursday now. It is Thursday. The T, no, Wednesday the 28th, I think. No. Yes. Anyway, at some point this week it’s coming out and it’s this massive tome comparing intranet products that sit on top of SharePoint or independent to SharePoint and communications platforms.
And it’s something that I’ve been involved in over the last few years as an independent consultant. And we got to basically geek out about intranets. So that was also lovely in am midst actually doing some SharePoint stuff for a client. But
Julia: yeah, I’m quite impressed at your ability to geek out over intranets actually.
It’s quite
Lisa: niche. There’s not that many of us do.
Julia: We should find out more about that in future. How, how about you Emma? What have you been up to?
Emma: Um. A couple of, couple of trips to the home counties over the last couple of weekends. One to Bahe to see my, my mom and sister. Another one to Redding this weekend just gone.
And then, yeah, apart from that normal things during the week, but also I’ve been I sort of made the decision beginning of the year to, to look for another job. So I’ve been doing quite a bit of sort of research, trying to read up on, on various things and spending quite a lot of time kind of actually geeking out a geeking out a little bit more than normal even.
Just just trying to get my, uh, get myself sort of back up to speed with some of the things I haven’t used for a little while. You know, in advance hopefully for finding a, finding another job.
Julia: So this is really interesting actually. I think we could do a podcast on how to look for a job.
After a number of years, or even dare I say, decades in your career, you know, it changes, doesn’t it? And then. You’re doing it in a new way that you’ve never done before.
Emma: Yeah. And even the mechanism of actually looking so, going, I, I’m not a huge user of LinkedIn and every time I sort of log in, things have changed.
First time coming across any kind of AI agent, doing a, you know, having a conversation with an AI agent not actually an interview. This was, um, a recruiter that uses AI to sort of screen people. Yeah. And things change every time. I, um, I, I look and as you say, yeah, it’s, I think there’s an art to becoming used to, you know, getting back into the job market again after a while.
Julia: I had a slight anxiety pang actually when you were talking about AI agents. Crikey.
Emma: Yeah. It’s, and, and so, um. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. And actually it was quite interesting ’cause I found myself having a fairly normal conversation with this, uh, with this ai. And yeah, what it produced at the end was a pretty decent summary of my career, what I’m looking for.
All of those kind of things. What I would say is that in, in that case, and there’s a few different companies doing it, in that case they’ve then kind of not done a very good job of finding any roles for me. So it was a bit, it was, uh, maybe not quite as effective as I’d hoped, but yeah, I think, you know, there’s a, there’s a direction of travel and then some people seem to be even using AI for interview rounds.
And I’m not, I’m not so sure about whether that’s. Something I would sign up for.
Julia: It doesn’t say much for cultural fit or anything like that, does it, skill screening you can kind of understand, but then the interview’s a chance to get to know somebody and if you’re gonna delegate that to a machine.
Yeah.
Emma: Yeah, I, I would agree. And actually, you know, my role, I do an awful lot of interviewing from the other side of the table effectively. And I think. Every minute that you spend in an interview with somebody has a chance to learn more about them. And if, if you are gonna try and delegate that off to a, to an ai, they’re gonna miss the nuance.
They’re gonna miss some of the detail of and, and maybe not. E you know, sometimes asking the right question opens the interview up entirely and you. You find out a whole load more about somebody you wouldn’t have heard. And I don’t think I would trust an AI to do all of that. And also, you know, as a candidate it sort of says the company can’t be bothered to you, you know, spend somebody’s time for an hour to interview you.
And, and that’s not a great experience either.
Julia: No, I can imagine. That’s not a great first impression. Is it? Anyway, this is fascinating. We should certainly do a, uh, podcast on recruitment techniques, I think. But that is not what we’re here to talk about today, I believe.
Lisa: It might touch on that, but I think we’ll be looking at how roles evolve, how the, the differences between working as Matt’s favorite term, an individual contributor.
Or a team member, I think, as he prefers it, versus becoming a more senior leader, particularly in the tech industry. Just before we do jump into it on first impressions, I know this is audio only, but I need to describe for listeners. So. Julia’s cat has been joining us and looking very interested in the conversation and in the background.
We can see Emma’s office and I can only see three monitors from here, and I think that’s what, less than half of what’s actually in there. Um.
Emma: Yeah, there’s nine.
Julia: That’s impressive. This could be a record actually. Yeah, I think that’s more than Nick Jones. I get
Emma: told off those are the ones that are plugged in.
There’s about four or five more on the floor.
Lisa: Yeah, I think that is more than Nick and I think I would love you and Nick to meet Emma because I think just looking at each other’s offices, there could be a whole, not necessarily an episode, but you’d certainly have an interesting conversation.
Julia: That is one of the things that appealed to me about a career in tech about 25 years ago, was the idea of having loads of screens with stuff on it, and no one knew what it meant except for me.
Emma: Yeah. A little bit like the matrix with all the sort of gibberish on the screen. I love that aesthetic. Yeah.
Julia: It’s very appealing, isn’t it? Yeah. To a, if you’re in the right frame of mind.
Lisa: Yeah. Alright, well, shall we get on with it then?
So. I’m very excited about this conversation today. I’ve known Emma for a few years now, and. I’ve mentioned before my pub meetup that I set up a few years ago. ’cause I was sick of sitting on my own at home after working from home all day, not leaving the house and thinking I’d just like to go to the pub with some people.
And so we are four years into that meetup now and one of the many spinoff conversations that we’ve had from that, and as my friend Emma is here as testament to that. We end up talking about life, the universe and everything, but particularly recently we’ve been talking about the challenges and the differences between working within a team, working as part of a senior leadership team.
What those challenges are, what the different skills are, how you end up sometimes with the wrong people ending up in post, and how do people learn about it. You know, some people, my preference as a freelancer is I’m very pleased not to have line management responsibility, and I’m very pleased not to have several lines of line manager, although managing myself, I’m a terrible boss.
So thinking about, I know Emma’s got this incredible background in some massive tech firms and medium sized tech firms and financial services, and you’ve seen all sorts of the industry and you’ve kind of probably techier than the average woman, would you say?
Emma: Yeah, I guess so, but it, it varies. There’s some, there’s some others that you know are absolutely in awe of their skills.
Lisa: Oh yes, but um, I’m always fascinated. So also I can’t, did we mention it in the preamble in the recording or not? But Emma also has her own GE counter, which sometimes comes out on the table in the pub, which is incredible ’cause we’ve found that some things are slightly more radioactive than others as well.
Julia: So that must be so fun in the pub. Like
Emma: it’s, I think people don’t expect that for good reason ’cause it’s a bit unusual. But then, you know, suddenly everyone wants to become a radiation safety officer and goes around the pub checking for hotspots and things. Yeah.
Julia: What did what? Brazil nuts are highly radioactive, aren’t they?
I have been led to believe.
Emma: Yeah. There’s, um, various things have more or less than others. Uh, bananas are radioactive. It’s not like, it doesn’t set the counter off immediately, but if you sit the counter next to a banana for an hour or so, you’ll detect Yeah. Some this potassium in there that’s radioactive.
Julia: So cool. Have you had anything surprising in a pub?
Emma: The one thing I’m a bit n nervous of is that sometimes people are radioactive. And actually that’s something I, I don’t want to sort of, because, because if they’ve had some kind of a medical intervention, there’s a few treatments that doctors use that actually make you radioactive for a day or so.
And the last thing I want is to actually sort of. You know, have the thing go off crazy because somebody’s been, uh, had a medical procedure that they don’t want to talk about. So I’m quite careful not to, unless I’m sure that the, the, that there’s no one in that situation. I try not to, get it out.
But sometimes walking down the street, yes, it will go off and it’s because I’ve just walked past somebody.
Lisa: And I’ve had some, one of those procedures in the past, I had, um, radioactive iodine, and I was told in my, you know, I had to avoid small children and pregnant women. I was like, what would happen if I chained myself to a school?
I was trained to be a teacher at the time and the doctor looked at me a bit bit. Bit bemused. Um, and he is like, oh, just get a slightly unnecessary x-ray. There’s nothing more than that. So, um, I was hoping that it’d be much more interesting than that was, but yeah.
Emma: Yeah, it’s like, it’s like getting a dentist x-ray.
It’s not dangerous, it’s just, it’s best to avoid radiation if you can. But it’s not a dangerous amount.
Julia: Do you know when I was very young, maybe, well, 12 or so, my grandma had all these old STR magazines from the early 19 hundreds and in one of those was an interview with Mary Curie. I hope I’ve got my dates right.
And it was of an era when, you know, they knew absolutely nothing about radio activity. And I, as a 12-year-old read it and was ho horrified that they were, carrying this highly radioactive stuff around someone in his breast pocket took it home as a souvenir and, um, yeah it, it was a really eye-opening read about how much we had advanced in the.
80 or 90 years that it elapsed. I, I’ve forgotten my Mary Curie timelines, I must admit.
Emma: It’s very interesting. She’s a hero of mine apart from anything else because, you know, absolutely brilliant women in science and there wasn’t a lot of them that got fame back in those days. Um, but yeah, you’re right. I mean, and a lot of what we know about radioactivity is because of.
Things that she did. And, but certainly we didn’t realize quite how dangerous it can be until, after she died. And unfortunately part of the reason she died early and her husband, if I remember correctly, also did, uh, was because of the exposure they had. And apparently Thomas Edison convinced himself that x-rays would improve his eyesight.
And so he would actually sit in front of a high power x-ray machine with the thing switched on. For way too long and it had the opposite effect of what he wanted, but you know, at the time they just didn’t know.
I feel like, oh
Lisa: my gosh.
Emma: We, we, we are going off on a tangent, and this is my fault.
Lisa: I’m very sorry. It’s not your fault at all. I took us entirely down this route. But, um, thinking back then to learnings in the modern workplace, modern being, whatever your definition of that is, but thinking about, so what’s your background, Emma?
What kind of work do you do?
Emma: Shall I talk about where I started or what I’m doing now or maybe a bit of both? Yeah, a bit of both. Okay. Um, so, um, I, I guess I, I didn’t train, I didn’t actually study computer science, but I was always really interested in, in computer science when I was a kid and any option, any opportunity I got, I studied physics.
Any opportunity I got to do some software engineering, I would, I would take, my first job out of university, I joined IBM as a as part of their graduate scheme. Absolutely amazing scheme with lots of incredible training. Also them pushing you towards some slightly obsolete technology. So I learned COBOL and even used for a while.
And then so, I worked as an engineer in a few different places. Then I think we’ll talk in a second about this sort of moving to management winding forward a little bit. My current role, um. Um, head of engineering, and I’ve been doing that for the last, uh, three roles that I’ve had. Generally now I’m managing managers as opposed to sort of directly managing engineers.
So, of course my role is, you know, I’m, I’m interacting with engineers all the time. I’m involved in decision making and, and things that they do. But for me now, it’s on a slightly sort of bigger scale. Current place I’m working nine teams that I manage with a variety of engineers from a variety different backgrounds.
So actually not just one type of technology, a quite a few different things all in the same area.
Lisa: I. Nine teams. I cannot, I cannot imagine managing nine people, let alone nine teams of people. And that’s quite, that must be quite a challenge in terms of. I dunno how much, how much of your day job is now technical Have you been, when was the last time you, I’m also not a co or an engineer, so I use, I tend to use words in a way that infuriates people to actually do it.
’cause I, I play fast and loose with the definitions, but yeah. When was the last time you got your hands on sort of techy stuff in your job?
Emma: In terms of actual coding, not in this job. My previous job, I, yes, I did do, I did do a bit partly because something came up that I. Used to you be an expert on technology, though, it’s, it’s interesting ’cause at the level that I’m at it’s usually now it’s more about we want to use a different technology or we want to standardize on something and being able to sort of evaluate like, I don’t know, maybe AWS versus Azure as a cloud provider.
There’s, you need to understand a little bit about the. Quite a lot about technical things to make those decisions. So, so my kind of involvement is more on that level now rather than actually coding by myself. But at home, yeah, I, I still do quite a bit.
Lisa: And did you say the other day that you’ve also been working on building your own LLM as part of that tinkering?
Emma: Yes. That’s one of the things I’ve been doing since Christmas, actually. Yeah. Uh, it’s. But I feel like I’ve been, I use AI in my role. I’ve been using it quite a bit in, in a variety of different ways, but I looked into it many years ago and haven’t really gone on, looked under the covers for a while, so I felt that, yeah, I, I need to understand more about this.
Uh, so yeah, I’m, I’m building something. It’s. Based on an early version of chat, GBT. And it run it’s, I’ve not finished it yet, but it will run locally on a laptop so you can actually kind of play around with it, see how it works, do different things, see what changes, that kind of stuff.
Julia: So does that mean you get to curate the sources that go into.
Emma: Yeah. Yeah. So you can, so you can kind of feed it any source material you want. The limitation is that there’s a lot of compute, and I think we all know that that’s one of the things about AI that is somewhat controversial because there’s a lot of energy, a lot of water used. But if you’re running it locally, yes you can.
I think one of the things that, you know, for example, if you. Wanted to make something that is an expert in a particular area for your business. If you’ve got a lot of documentation about how things work, you can use that as a training material and it will start giving you half sensible answers, hopefully.
Julia: Have you seen, have you, have you got that? Feedback loop going yet, or
Emma: I’m not all the way to the end of it, so I haven’t, and, and I think it’s a great question because one of the things I was wanting to do was actually try and run it with some different source material, just see how good or how bad it actually works out to be.
As with all of these technologies, you need to do a huge amount of training to, to get good results. And I suspect that when I get to that point, probably. There, I won’t have enough material about the topic to be able to really train it properly. So it, you know, it may end up not doing all that well, but yeah, I’m fascinated.
I, I really want to get to the, to, to that point and figure out what, what happens.
Lisa: I would happily test with that, test that with you, because I did some work. Wibbly wobbly time. I mean, beginning of last year, I think for a company who had done pretty much that they’re a little bit ahead of you, they’d built on an old version of Chatt PT, they’d built an internal, lLM, forget the word they wanted to use for it. They were, they kept putting me up on my use of terminology, but actually I think, I think I was more accurate than they were at the time. So that was quite interesting. There was a, there was a real, I really appreciated that they were experimenting and trying stuff out, but.
Somebody at some point had put in, and I’m assuming it was part of some demo training stuff. Some like fake org charts. ’cause when I asked, I I, I wanted to understand what a good prompt would look like because they wanted to encourage employees to use it and test it out. And so I tried a few prompts that.
Seemed to be a, a good prompt. And one of them, when I asked, when I asked who the CEO of the company was, it said it was the deputy product manager. And doubled down when I asked and gave me a, a completely fabricated history, how long they’d been working in that role for what their previous job was there.
And it was fascinating how. Despite it having been trained on, and they’d gone through the whole rag process and upload and made all of these different profiles so that it would only look at certain information. I don’t know where it got poisoned, whether it was, but it was fascinating that it nev They never quite got it working while I was there.
They, it did some things. Pretty well. But if you asked it to do any kind of fact-based recall, it just made stuff up. It filled in the gaps and completely fabricated it.
Emma: It’s interesting because the way this works is the way you train language models is you give it an incomplete sentence and say there’s a missing word.
What do you think it is? And then you, you know, it will have a guess at what the word should have been. And then you run through that. Millions of times, and eventually it gets to the point where it can accurately guess. It uses the previous results to sort of figure out was I right, was I wrong? But actually part of the way they work is guessing things that’s built in.
So if you ask it something, it doesn’t know it, it will have a guess, and quite often it won’t get the right answer.
Lisa: I’m enjoying this and I realize that we’re sort of tangenting again. So thanks listeners. This is one of our conversations in the pub. Yeah. But yeah, so going back then to the kind of different skill sets that’s needed for managers in engineering teams or sit managers of engineering teams, if not in them, what observations have you got from.
By seeing yourself going through that process, but also seeing others around you. Yeah. Um, and I
Emma: think it’s before I even considered management and in fact I, I would class myself as a reluctant manager when I first started to do it. I really I wasn’t, it wasn’t something I volunteered for and part of the reason was because.
Back in those days being a, a, a, this dual track of careers for technologists where you can keep going as an ic, you can become more and more senior. The idea of having, you know, a principal or a distinguished engineer didn’t really exist. And so the way things worked in a lot of companies was you would get to a certain level.
Probably around senior engineer, maybe lead engineer today. And then if you wanted to go any further, you would have to convert to being a manager. And so there was almost this sort of roadblock in your career. And so before I even went through the process, I knew a lot of managers who had.
Done that previously and started managing, and they were great engineers, but they were pretty awful as managers. And so my experience of, of people being managers in engineering was there’s a load of people who are not very good at this, and I just kind of, assumed that’s what would happen to me if I ever considered it.
Um, so that actually put me off for a while. Then, as my career developed, I was given the opportunity and, and I, I only really wanted to try to do this if I was able to continue, with the engineering side of my job. So I, I kind of dual hatted for a while. I was managing a small team, but I was also an engineer.
And that went better than I thought it was going to. Uh, so. Uh, you know, I, I kind of developed onwards from there, but at the time there wasn’t really any any training on how to be a good manager. And that showed because there was a lots of people who weren’t good managers, as I say. So it did feel like it was kind of, I, I was about a bit in the dark about how to do things and I was having to sort of listen to people that I worked with, uh, and, and also people that had gone through the process before.
Lisa: And thinking about, you mentioned there wasn’t much training then. Is that something that you think’s developed more now? I know we had, we’ve certainly had people on the podcast and I know Michelle, it’s something that Michelle does to an extent as well as one of our co-hosts. So have you seen that change in the last several years?
Emma: The, it has changed. There is definitely more training available and there’s also more more introspection in management, in managers that people looking at what, what defines a good manager what do you look for? Um, so that happens more. I don’t think it’s done universally. I think there’s still pockets out there where people are they’re managers, but they’re not all that good at it.
So I, I, yeah, I don’t think it’s universal.
Julia: Well, it is such a different skill set, isn’t it? You know, to be a brilliant engineer, you are almost, um, relentlessly focused on elegant code. And to be a manager, you need a much wider lens, and you know that, or what am I trying to say? That sort of single focus.
Detracts from your ability to keep on top of everything that’s going on.
Emma: Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to be somewhat of a generalist as a manager. And yeah, as you say, a lot of engineers that they, they do like to focus on a single, single thing people skills. Um, as an engineer you can, you can get away without great people skills, though.
It’s the sort of thing that. It will trip you up eventually. But people skills, you know, there’s a lot more emphasis on people skills, of course, as a manager. And yeah, as you say, it’s a totally different type of role. And I think it, it’s always surprised me that there was this assumption that a good engineer would turn into a good engineering manager.
And I don’t think there’s any reason to think that’s true. But we still, back in those days, that’s what everybody did.
Lisa: Do you think there’s an opportunity career pathwise for non-technical folks to come in to be engineering managers then? Is that something you’ve seen? Does that work? Yes,
Emma: I have seen it.
And it does work. There is so just thinking about the sort of things that, that that an engineering manager does. So certainly the sort of the more pastoral care helping people with their career progression. That side of things, people can be amazing. If they even, without the technical background.
The area where people doing that can find it a little bit more difficult is where you as an engineering manager have to be able to look at what your team is doing from a technical perspective and say, does this. Does this make sense? Are we going off in the wrong direction? Some of it is somewhat formulaic.
So if there’s, for example, if you’ve got a strong technical strategy in your company are we following the tech strategy? Is, is kind of a yes no question and you can, you can sort of answer that, but other times there’s things come up which you need a certain amount of. Engineering knowledge to be able to have a good opinion on it.
But when I’ve seen people do this, they can be very successful if they are partnered up with maybe a strong lead engineer who, can bring that side of, uh, you know, bring that expertise to the table from their side.
Julia: Yeah. They need to be able to acknowledge what they don’t know and trust that somebody else does know it, don’t they?
Lisa: Gosh, you’ve just given me we, it is not quite the same, but thinking about when you get to, if you’ve ever worked or done a contract in the civil service, when different ministers come in and they’ve got ideas on how that department should be run and when you. If someone’s got quite a strong agenda, making sure that they’re able to actually listen to the civil servants who are advising them and trying to get that relationship.
I feel like that managing upwards thing is quite an important, I mean, it’s quite an important skill to have at any level, but when you get more senior, that managing the other way as well must be quite a. Challenge, I suppose.
Emma: Yeah, it, it, it is and I think it, and it depends on the people around you.
But yes, um, having, being able to influence in, in, all sorts of different directions influencing peers is also important because. Quite often, bigger pieces of work, you end up having to work with people from different areas, they may not, may not want to help you all that much.
So influencing them, influencing upwards in terms of direction of company direction, engineering direction. Are they. Paired up or are we kind of diverging? So yeah, the there’s quite a lot of different things you, you need to be able to do. And, and again, these aren’t necessarily the sorts of things that you would learn being an engineer,
Lisa: something that
we were. Considering the other day, and I know I did a brief stint as a product manager in the past, and I think that’s also your background, isn’t it, Julia?
Julia: Well, yeah. I switched from being a programmer. To a product manager. Were
Lisa: you a programmer as
Julia: well? Yeah. Yeah, I did vb, C plus Java, all that old school stuff.
No. COBOL though.
Lisa: You didn’t miss out, you. Something that I found quite interesting. So I went into product from being a non-tech. Like I’ve always been interested as a sideline as well in tinkering, but I’ve never really done code. I remember having one job where it said I had to write HTML and CSS for a web manager job, and I did a tiny bit of jenning up and the night before my interview.
And it’s clear that they just put it on the job description as a ’cause They didn’t know what they needed either. So that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to tech. But I, what I found when I worked as a product owner is that I ended up basically managing Jira. Base, like all of the work I did was trying to push work through an approval process, prioritizing a Jira backlog, and then convince it, like listening to various stakeholders and making sure that what we were, what our team were doing.
Was the right thing and I found it internally du as someone who likes to do a bit of everything. It was in a massive organization and my role was very specific and precise. I had very clear boundaries of what I could and couldn’t do as part of my role because I was a tiny cog as part of a massive machine, and I feel like it’s a challenge.
In that organization, there was a bit of a challenge between what the product team were doing versus what the business needed versus what customers needed versus what financial compliance needed. How do you marry up those different challenges with stakeholders and get that balance? Yeah,
Emma: it’s so I think.
They used to be a sort of a non pretty unscientific. It was something that we didn’t, you know, it, it would, people would knew what we wanted to deliver, but actually it was a, a bit fuzzy the process to actually to actually deliver it. I think being an engineering manager has become a lot more scientific recently in that we kind of try to measure things more than we ever did before.
And so, you know, in terms of keeping, making sure that the engineers are doing what makes sense for the other stakeholders agreeing what kind of KPIs you want to, you want to go after. Making sure that, okay, if we, and a conversation I’ve had recently is around, maybe time to market is something you want to, you want to go after because from a business perspective, you can, there’s value that you can have if you are first to the market with a, a new product, for example. And then how, as an engineering manager, one of the things you need to do is say, well, okay, now I know that time to market is what we’re going to do, what we’re going after, and it’s the biggest value and biggest impact.
Um, how do I pivot the team? To do something that translates into a, an improvement in time to market. And but that process of agreeing, first of all, what is it we want to go after? And, and having everyone, all the stakeholders in the room, non-technical as, as much, a very important in this uh, and, and then, then the engineering team can kind of take some of that and, and run with it once, once you’ve got that agreement.
So I think. And then within engineering you would probably have other things that you watched because some of these things like time to market, it’s a lagging indicator. It takes a while to filter through. So you may say, well, I won’t know if I’m successful for three months. So perhaps, um, I would have other things that I look at in terms of measuring, measuring how much you know, the flow state of the engineers. There’s a few, a few things like cycle time throughput, how quickly people can get things into production or, or staging. So you might look at those and say, okay, if. If engineers are actually able to push changes through quickly and they’re not being blocked, then that will translate into a better better KPI outcome.
So I think another thing, yeah, that, that has changed since I started doing this as a manager is that we, we try to be more scientific than we were before, though there, there is still sometimes where it’s not as, maybe not as scientific and an analytical as it as it should be.
Lisa: Does that, I want to ask that question back to Julia as well. Does that echo your experience?
Julia: Yes, massively actually. I was thinking the joy of being a product manager with an engineering background is that you can work with developers to, build in where appropriate, depending on what the organization’s going for.
But just things like sustainability and not doing something crazy just because somebody powerful has asked for it, you know, you can form a useful coalition. And then the other interesting thing is. Knowing what your trade offs are, you know, if you’re going forward, time to market, to use them as example, you can consciously deprioritize other stuff and say, we are gonna do this as fast as possible and knowingly create a number of problems for ourselves, which we will fix once we’ve beaten all of the competition to get this to production.
And you can just, yeah, be a bit more strategic, but creating that alignment. Is not easy, especially in large organizations.
Emma: Yeah. Yeah it’s such an interesting conversation. When you try and create that alignment and having done it a few times, quite often people you’ll have maybe four or five people in the room and they’ll, there’ll be four or five different opinions.
But that says something in itself. It means that you are not aligned today, by the end of the process you need to be. So even just having that conversation does some good. You can see it might be that people from different parts of the business have different things that they think you should go after.
And I, I’m sure there’s good reasons for each. And actually sometimes it, it can be a very, it goes up to quite a senior level within a company to, to make the decision because it’s like, we are investing money here. What do we actually want to achieve as a company? But it’s an important conversation to have.
Lisa: Ooh. I feel like alignment might end up being the title for this episode. I feel like that’s one of the themes that’s sort of come out as we’ve been talking because actually getting everybody lined up, you know, it’s, there’s so many processes and different ways you can do it and different formulas that you could follow.
But yeah, ultimately it’s about getting everyone to agree. In the time you’ve got,
Julia: well, there is something about knowing what you’re going after and then you can stop trying to be all things to all people because you’ll never do anything. Well if you try to do everything and focus on what you really want to be the best at.
Emma: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, what you said a second ago, Julia, is, is so true that once you’ve got, once you’ve got the agreement of like, we, this is what we’re going after, some things will fall by the wayside because we don’t have an infinite amount of people and, and resources to to do everything.
And actually doing that consciously is so much better. So saying like, okay, we are not going to do projects X, Y, and Z or, or, or deliveries X, Y, and Z. And yeah, just be very transparent about that. It’s like that doesn’t get us to where we want to be by the end of the time period, so we’re not going to be doing them.
Julia: So the irony is a massive part of this job is communication and to resort to cliches. You know, the sort of people who, uh, start their career wanting to write code. It’s a great excuse to not have to communicate, isn’t it? You know, you, you communicate with a machine that does exactly what you tell it to do, um, and then suddenly people don’t do exactly what you tell ’em to do in the same way.
Emma: Yeah. Most of the time.
Julia: Yeah. And that’s a bit of a shock. Yeah.
Lisa: I feel like on that bombshell,
I always, always love these conversations, and I feel like it’s. If you’re still listening to us, thank you so much. You’ve basically been eavesdropping as if we’re in the rusty bucket in Elton. I’ve been very much enjoying this session. Speaking of pub meetups this week I have, we have a meetup on Thursday at the Green Goddess, uh, which is our first power o’clock of the year at the Green Goddess in SC three.
I’ve also got, an early morning workshop with pod friend Mark Earls on Wednesday. Talking about, actually, I’m not quite sure what it is about. It sounds really intriguing and getting together with some really interesting people. ’cause Mark knows some really interesting people. So I’ll be up early in, in East London for that on Wednesday.
I’ve got a couple of other things going on this week, wrapping up some more SharePoint stuff, talking to Matisse about some book things. But what are you up to this week, Julia?
Julia: In fact, I am now working more closely than ever with fellow WB 40 host Matt Ballantine. Ooh. So he is running a workshop on Thursday that I am attending where we are attempting to get some sort of alignment, some sort of strategy fits in quite nicely with what we’ve been talking about actually in the work that we are both doing as our day jobs.
So, um, I’m quite looking forward to that. Okay. That should be good fun.
Lisa: Recovering this weekend, not got another 50 kilometer walk planned.
Julia: No. I might attempt park run and my, I do like park run. I do park run quite often in the summer I speed up ’cause I go running in the evenings and then in the winter I never go running apart from on a Saturday morning park run.
So you can just see my times getting slower and slower and slow. So I’ll do a. Slow park run instead. And actually I do it with my friend Karen, who’s the one who provides the impetus and we sort of chat and jog as we go around. So that’s quite nice.
Lisa: Emma, what have you got coming up in the next week or so?
Emma: I’m looking forward to joining you at, uh, the pub o’clock meet on Thursday. That will be fun. Yay. I’ve got some holiday actually, I carried over from the end of last year. So I’ve got a few days and I think, um, I’m. Thinking I might take a, a last minute break and go somewhere. I haven’t decided where, probably not very far, but and
Julia: oh, good skills.
That’s exciting.
Emma: Yeah. A mystery holiday. Yes. I say probably not very far at all. Maybe somewhere in Kent. There’s some nice places to go out there. And yeah, hopefully make some more progress on this LLM that I’ve been writing that we were talking about earlier. And hopefully next time I.
I, uh, talk to you. I can tell you a bit more about how you train them and whether or not they hallucinate when you do.
Lisa: Oh, lovely. And if you’re gonna, if when you get there, write it up, we’ll happily share it as well. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. I look forward to it. Yeah. Wonderful.
Great.
Emma: Thank you for listening To WB 40. You can find us on the internet@wbfortypodcast.com and an all good podcasting platforms.
Julia: So normally this would be the point where we, uh, give you a great hook to come back and listen to our next episode. However, we are not entirely clear who our next guests are gonna be. There you go. It’s a surprise. We’re just gonna invite you to come back to listen to episode 343 of WB 40.