Defining levels and expectations for individual contributors is very important and should be prioritized. Well-defined engineering levels and expectations will help engineers in your organization better understand their strengths and weaknesses as well as the expectations of their managers.

Engineering managers will rely on a career level map to make good and consistent decisions when it comes to:

• Hiring new engineers
• Evaluating the performance of their team members and deciding on promotions
• Coaching individuals in areas where they need to grow in order increase their impact and advance their careers

Defining levels and expectations for those on the management track is important and should be prioritized. Well-defined levels and expectations will help managers in your organization better understand their strengths, and weaknesses as well as the expectations of their managers. All of this in turn helps the team they are managing.

Your managers will rely on this information to make good and consistent decisions when it comes to:

• Hiring new engineering managers and team leads
• Evaluating the performance of managers and team leads, and deciding on promotions
• Coaching managers and helping them grow their impacts and careers

I can create a hiring process which will provide consistency, clarity and focus, helping you hire talented engineers and managers who are great at what they do and compatible with your company’s values.

Investing in the hiring process not only drastically decreases the chance of hiring someone who is not a good fit but also ensures that people are hired at the right level with consistency across different teams in your organization.

In collaboration with your team I can:

• Identify signals we want to collect during interviews
• Create interview loops that will help us collect these signals
• Create a process for interviewer training
• Normalize ratings and interview summaries to help with good and consistent decision making

I can establish a performance management process to make sure your team member’s growth translates into growth in their ability to deliver more impactful results for your customers.

Achieving this direct correlation between employee growth and impact growth requires us to consistently execute a continuous performance management process that is helpful to everyone involved.

There are a few different ways that I can provide help with planning and execution. One way is to get engaged as an engineering manager or technical project manager and help drive the project to closure. Another way is to work closely with your teams to establish a cadence for planning, executing and grading results. As a result of this effort your teams would create their roadmap, OKR and sprint plans, sharing their results and retros more consistently.

I can work with your teams to establish a common language for defining and tracking reliability. Similar to business north star metrics, we would establish SLAs as well as guardrail metrics to help ensure your teams are taking ownership and driving reliability in the right direction.