I hired a few excellent Engineering Managers who I’m very happy with last year. I obviously also had to interview a whole bunch more to find them. In this article, I’ll summarize how I would build the best hiring process with my current knowledge after this journey to fill future open positions quickly with excellent candidates. We will move from understanding the role in the first place to building a performant funnel and ultimately closing the candidates we really want.

Regular 1-on-1s are to this day my favorite management tool, and it has transitioned remarkably well from working with Software Engineers to now working with other Managers. It’s probably the one constant factor in a sea of learning over the last few years, but I believe I also got a little bit better at running them. I collected something close to a Field Guide to share my current state of knowledge - This can be useful for Managers and Engineers alike because you can also use this to improve the 1-on-1 you have with your own boss.

Introducing a new level in your existing leveling framework and organization is not trivial, but can be an effective way of scaling your engineering demands in a growing org. I outlined a cheat sheet of steps on how a new role can be introduced without creating havoc. The title of this article mentions the staff level since that is quite the hype nowadays to have, but the underlying principle works for almost all kinds of individual contributor and manager levels, especially after the senior stage.

Having your manager change is never easy - even in the best case, you will lose someone who was rooting for you and had your best interest in mind, only to start the whole journey anew with a stranger. Re-building a shared context and a trust relationship after a handover is significant work. I collected a few ideas from performing more than 20 handovers to make that process a bit smoother.

When I need to grow my engineering organization, I often prefer growing and splitting teams over bootstrapping completely new teams. Even though growing teams is slower than just bootstrapping on the green field, I still go for it as you can spread and transfer the most domain and tribal knowledge into both new teams, and keep your existing culture largely constant. During the hypergrowth of Personio, I was fortunate enough to participate in multiple teamsplit events, and I collected my learnings and what went well in this article.