What's Next?

One of the most important things to do as an engineering manager is to know what each of your team members is working on and what their next thing to work on will be. This is not sufficient to be a good or great manager, but it’s a critical minimum. By doing this, your team trusts that you’re on top of things, organized, and are holding the big picture for them so that they can focus on what they do best: writing code that creates value.

Knowing what each person is working on and why not only makes sure that your team is working on the right things but it also helps you build a flexible, capable team. This is because by staying on top of work in progress, you understand what team members are strong on, what skills they need to develop and how open they are to new things. Daily stand ups help a lot with this but you need to be looking ahead for each team member for their sake and the sake of the projects you're working on.

Being aware of who is interested and capable of taking on new tasks allows you to build team capability and depth. It also avoids having a single point of failure on the software you work on - that is, only having one person on the team that knows how to work in a particular area of the code. This has multiple benefits: helping team members grow; making your team more resilient; and shifting pressure off of other team members who have become siloed.

As part of knowing what each person is working on, you’ll get a good feel for how long it’s going to take them to finish. This is so that you know when you need to figure out what’s next but also it contributes to the “trust, but verify” philosophy. By keeping these things in mind, you’ll very soon learn which team members are accurate estimators, who needs help, who’s slacking, who’s driving hard, who’s reckless, etc. It tells you a LOT.

Another benefit I've noticed from this practice is that as team members mature, they become adept at keeping an eye on the backlog and knowing what the next thing is. They have a good view of the team's goals and can see where they can add value. Now, you don't want this to become a backlog free-for-all, but again, daily stand-ups are the place to keep en eye on this since team members will talk about when they're wrapping something up and have thought about what's next.

This simple sounding goal has so many benefits; from more productivity to building resilience & depth to building trust in you for your team. It's really paid off for me and I highly recommend it.