Talks on Engineering Management
Videos and slide decks from talks given at meetups and conferences on the craft of engineering management. Each deck below is embedded in full, so you can read it here or open it in Google Slides.
Tough Interview Questions & How to Prep
Presented at SVELC Academy
A walk through the questions engineering managers are most often caught out by — the ones about conflict, underperformance, disagreement with a peer, and the projects that went badly — and how to prepare answers that hold up under follow-up questions. The deck covers how a manager loop is usually structured, what each interviewer is really assessing, and how to build a small library of stories you can draw on rather than improvising.
Time Management for Engineering Managers
Presented at Silicon Valley Code Camp
Management fills a calendar faster than it fills a to-do list. This talk looks at where a manager’s week actually goes, how to protect the blocks of time that only you can do anything with, and how to run a system for capturing commitments so that nothing depends on remembering it. It also covers meeting hygiene, delegation, and saying no without damaging a relationship.
Video
Slides
Time Management for Engineering Managers
Presented at the Lead Dev Meetup, Mountain View
A shorter version of the same material, given to a meetup audience of engineering leads. The emphasis here is on the first changes worth making: auditing a week, cutting or shortening recurring meetings, and building a weekly review habit.
What I Learned from Interviewing 50+ Engineering Managers
Presented at Silicon Valley Code Camp
The patterns that show up again and again across the Managers Club interviews: how people describe the move from engineer to manager, what they wish they had been told earlier, the habits they keep, and the advice that turns out to be contradictory once you hear enough of it. Drawn from the same conversations collected in the interview archive.
Speaking and related reading
These talks were given to engineering leadership meetups and developer conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you organise an event and would like one of them, or a new talk on a related topic, get in touch through the contact form.
The interview-preparation material is covered at greater length in The Software Engineering Manager Interview Guide, and the audio conversations behind the last talk are on the podcast.