You might be the first engineering leader at a startup, you might inherit a mess from a predecessor, or you might just experience catastrophic organizational change and now you have too many fires to put out at once. As an engineering leader you must balance day to day process, people and performance management, organizational growth, strategic product planning, technical debt, and your own mental health. If everything is a priority and everything is on fire it is a huge challenge to keep your work inside work hours while delivering results.
How do you decide what to focus on? How much time do you dedicate to that problem? We’ll discuss the deliberate steps you can take to help you and your team put out the fires, rebuild morale, and plan for a better future. This talk offers some practical advice for triaging, prioritizing, and taking effective action to pay down your management debt while honoring your work/life balance, even if it feels like the sky is falling.
