LeadTime#01 - The First Challenge

Hi, this is a mini newsletter for engineers thinking about management.

I’m Péter Szász, writing from decades of engineering leadership experience on my blog; and coaching aspiring and first-time Engineering Managers on this path. See more about what I can offer to you at LeadTime.tech.

In this newsletter experiment, I plan to share a weekly EM challenge and leave it as a puzzle for you to think about before the next issue, where I explain my approach, one possible solution amongst many.

Let’s go!

This Week’s Challenge

Alice, a Software Engineering Manager in a distributed tech startup, leads a cross-functional team of 5 responsible for the company's website. Before her 1-week vacation, she aligned with the team that they would focus on completing the newsletter feature - a key Q1 deliverable already delayed from December. On Monday morning after her return, Alice sees no changes on the newsletter ticket. However, checking the code repo, she finds significant development activity around a new seasonal promotion page, with no corresponding ticket in the project management system. In one hour, the team's regular Monday week starter call begins.

You are Alice.

How do you prepare for this meeting? What is it that you want to achieve?

I’ll share my thoughts on this situation in the next issue. Subscribe if you don’t want to miss it:

Until then, a small piece of inspiration:

See you next week,

Péter