Scaling Up Engineering Management

At Ferocia, makers of Up, we are attempting to go beyond being good at just one thing by taking ownership of the suite of the Bendigo & Adelaide Bank Group’s customer facing software. Leading a growing business, while the problem we probably all want to have, comes with its own challenges both predictable and completely unknown. Technology, teams, processes, people, products and strategies that worked a treat at 50 people suddenly start to show the strain at 200. Some of them will flat out break at greater scale while others will start to perform the opposite function previously excelled at. E.g. The CI setup that enabled multiple deploys a day with a team of a dozen developers will cause all kinds of headaches and start actively preventing deploys. Continuing to evolve while staying good at the thing that allowed the growth is a constant journey of creative problem solving, thinking in new ways, and from new perspectives.

We are facing this challenge by growing a team of capable, empathetic and engaged Engineering Managers to create a dynamic superstructure of decision makers and technologists that will allow the company to mutate into something bigger, different and hopefully even better. In this talk I will describe the specific methods and mechanisms we have used to create a strong and effective team of managers. I’ll go through the levels of growth you can unlock with such a team. And also touch on the environmental elements (like persistent funding for teams) that enable those managers to be effective. Middle management has gotten a bit of a bad rap in the tech industry recently, but I think that’s wrong and will tell you why.